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Associate Professor of Religious Studies Steve Humphries-Brooks will be a guest on the Washington, D.C., news/talk radio station WMET-1160 AM on Sunday, Feb. 29. Humphries-Brooks will be part of a discussion on Mel Gibson's movie, The Passion of the Christ, which opened on Feb. 25. Humphries-Brooks' segment, on the program "Clear Voice," will begin at approximately 9:40 a.m.

George Shields, the Winslow Professor of Chemistry, is quoted in a Feb. 25 ScienceDaily (www.sciencedaily.com) story about his recently published work in the Journal of American Chemistry on atmospheric water clusters and global warming. Of his work, Shields said, "Our research supports the suggestion that in a global warming scenario higher temperatures will lead to increased absorption of solar radiation by water clusters...The prediction that higher order water clusters (trimers, tetramers, and pentamers) are present in the atmosphere is significant because it shows that these entities must be considered as key players in atmospheric processes." The research was done with two undergraduate students, Meghan Dunn and Emma Pokon.

This weekend, four students will accompany George Shields, Winslow Professor of Chemistry, to present their research at the 44th annual Sanibel Symposium held by the University of Florida’s Quantum Theory Project. The symposium, which annually attracts over 250 chemists and physicists from over 30 nations, is being held this year in St. Augustine, Fl., from Feb. 28 – March 5. The students, Gabrielle Markeson ’04, Frank Pickard ’05, Becky Shepherd ’06, and Meghan Dunn (a George Washington University student who does summer research at Hamilton) will present posters on their research with Professor Shields at the conference.

Professor of Sociology Daniel Chambliss lead a discussion titled “George W. Bush: Not At ALL A Conservative” as part of the Think Tank Brown Bag Lunch series on Feb. 27. Chambliss outlined the ways in which President Bush and his administration have strayed from the traditional conservative ideology of preserving the status quo, conserving resources, and restricting the power and reach of the federal government.

Bruce Walczyk, associate professor of dance, will be the next guest in the faculty lecture series.  Walczyk will present the lecture "Function as Art and Art as Function: The Transformation of Martial Art and Pedestrian Movement into Traditional and Contemporary Choreography and the other way around," on Friday, Feb. 27, at 4:10 in K-J Red Pit.  The lecture is sponsored by the Dean of Faculty's Office.

Though this year's Levitt Center lecture theme is about the natural environment, Associate Director for Community Research Judy Owens-Manley said that speaker Alex Kotlowitz fit into the theme in that he speaks to the state of our nation's community environments. Alex Kotlowitz, journalist and writer-in-residence at Northwestern University, spoke on Feb. 25 about his experience writing the award-winning book There Are No Children Here in a lecture titled "The Things They Carry: Growing Up Poor in the World's Richest Nation."

Professor Charles Driscoll, director of the Syracuse University Environmental Systems Engineering Program, and international expert on the science of acid precipitation, gave a lecture titled "Acid Rain and the Adirondacks: Diagnosis and Prognosis" on Feb. 24. Driscoll discussed the impact of acid precipitation on the Adirondack Park, a subject he has been studying for nearly 30 years, as well as the outlook for the park's recovery. The lecture was sponsored by Sophomore Seminar 220: "Forever Wild: The Cultural and Natural Histories of the Adirondack Park," which looks at the Adirondack Park from perspectives including its science, its history, and the public policy surrounding it.

Monk Rowe, Joe Williams Director of the Jazz Archive, was interviewed for a story in Long Island's Newsday (2/26/04) about an auction of jazz legend Duke Ellington's original musical scores. The arrangements for brass and reeds were handwritten by Ellington in pencil.  In the article Rowe said: "You can put him up there...If you're going to name American composers, you can name Aaron Copland, and you can name [Leonard] Bernstein, and you can name Duke Ellington and [George] Gershwin... Such scores let us 'see his thinking process,' Rowe said. 'Ellington was famous for writing for individuals, not just instruments.'"

Associate Professor of English Catherine Gunther Kodat has been awarded a Fulbright lecturing post in the Department of American Studies at Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest, Hungary, for the spring 2005 term. For more than 50 years, the Council for International Exchange of Scholars (CIES) has helped administer the Fulbright Scholar Program, the U.S. government's flagship academic exchange effort, on behalf of the United States Department of State, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. Founded in 1947, CIES is a private organization. It is a division of the Institute of International Education (IIE). CIES annually recruits and sends nearly 800 U.S. faculty and professionals to 140 countries on its traditional program and brings 800 foreign faculty and professionals to the U.S.

Associate Professor of Religious Studies Steve Humphries-Brooks, who has been studying depictions of Jesus in film for more than 20 years, was interviewed for an article in The Dallas Morning News, "Jesus Christ, Movie Star, Films don't tell the gospel truth on life of Christian savior" (2/22/04).