All News

U.S. District Court Judge Susan Dlott found the portion of Ohio law that allows challengers to be placed in polling places to be unconstitutional. Hamilton College government professor and nationally recognized voter statistician Philip Klinkner contributed research that led to the issuance of Dlott’s decision. Klinkner found that 14% of new voters in a majority white location would face a challenger, but 97% of new voters in a majority African-American voting location would see such a challenger. Klinkner is available for comment on voting patterns, irregularities, projections, and related issues.

Professor of History Maurice Isserman was keynote speaker at the University of Maine History Department's 2004 conference for Maine middle and high school teachers held in Orono in October. The day-long event, titled "The 1960's: A Decade of Hope, Rage, & Change," featured talks and panel discussions on many aspects of one of the most influential periods in the lives of today's baby-boomers and the generations that followed. Isserman's talk was titled "Old Glory on Mt. Everest and Other Ironic Tales from the Sixties." The event, now in its 10th year, draws approximately 100 teachers to the Orono campus each year and serves as a forum for discussing and disseminating recent scholarship and ways of incorporating aspects of the new material into Maine's middle and high school curricula.

The Hamilton science department held a poster session expo on Friday, October 29 in the Events Barn to help kick off Family Weekend. The poster session allowed students who participated in Hamilton’s summer science research program to show off their findings and posters to family, friends, and community members in an interactive forum. Although not all students were able to present, as many juniors who participated in the research program are abroad, the majority of students were there, eager to explain their conclusions.

James Townsend, a current commissioner of the New York State Adirondack Park Agency, will give a lecture, "Six Million Acres, Six Million Stories," on recent political and environmental conflict within the Park at Hamilton on Monday, Nov. 8, at 7 p.m., in Saunders Auditorium. The lecture is sponsored by Hamilton’s sophomore seminar, Forever Wild: The Cultural and Natural Histories of the Adirondack Park. It is free and open to the public.  

Assistant Professor of Mathematics Debra Boutin presented her work, "The Structure of Locally Outerplanar Graphs," at The Eighteenth Midwest Conference on Combinatorics, Cryptography and Computing, held at the Rochester Institute of Technology in October. Boutin's results show that locally outerplanar graphs can be built from outerplanar subgraphs with just a few constraints. As an interesting corollary she proves that the more crossing a locally outerplanar graph has, the fewer edges it can have.  

Over the summer the Burke Library and Information Technology Services established the Information Commons (IC) on the first floor of library. The new initiative brings together high-capacity computing tools, the print and electronic resources of the library, and the professional assistance of both reference librarians and information technology staff to provide a single point of service for the campus.

Dave Tewksbury, a photographer and technician in the geology department, created this stunning photocomposite of four images he took during the lunar eclipse on Oct. 27. The photo shows the gradual covering of the moon by the Earth's shadow. Dave took the images with a digital camera with a 500 mm F8 mirror lens.

Professor of Classics Barbara Gold presented papers and responded to two panels, "Teaching Juvenal to a "Politically Correct" Generation" and "Integrating Feminist Perspectives into Latin Literary Studies" at the Classical Association of the Atlantic States, in Philadelphia, Oct. 7-9.   She also gave an invited lecture "Which Juvenal?  Rewriting Rome in the Early Empire" at Cornell University on October 22.  Gold is the author of a book review of Kirk Freudenburg, Satires of Rome: Threatening Poses from Lucilius to Juvenal," in the International Journal of the Classical Tradition 10 (2003/04) 139-41. She also reprinted a review of Ann Carson, Eros the Bittersweet (originally published in American Journal of Philology) in Contemporary Literary Criticism 185 (2004).

Philip Klinkner, the James S. Sherman Associate Professor of Government, was interviewed by the Boston Globe about the party that loses the presidential election.  According to the article, "There are, the thinking goes, a few ways that a party can end up grateful for a loss. The first is simply by getting out of the way of unpleasant events." Klinkner, who is the author of The Losing Parties, a look at how party national committees react to electoral losses, said "The Democrats are probably glad that Al Smith lost in 1928 because otherwise they would have been saddled with the Great Depression. The Democrats, by this logic, were ill-served by Jimmy Carter's being in office for the Iran hostage crisis and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and a President Kerry might have reason to regret being left holding the bag on Iraq."

Associate Professor of Music Lydia Hamessley presented her paper "A Resisting Reading of an Appalachian Murder Ballad: Giving Voice to 'Pretty Polly'" at the International Association for the Study of Popular Music conference held at the University of Virginia/Charlottesville, October 14-17. She gave this paper on campus earlier this month at a Kirkland Project Brown Bag Talk.