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Hamilton student Katherine Murray admits that American history has intrigued her for a long time, and expresses particular interest in life during the era of the antebellum south and the idea of southern honor. As an aspiring college professor, Murray hopes to someday teach southern history at a university in a course highlighting the culture, morals and values, and the traditions of the South. As an Emerson scholar for the 2003 academic year, Murray will complete a project titled “Concept of Honor: Defining Relations in the Old South.” She hopes to uncover how historians and other scholars explained the initial conception of the southern code of honor, and how distinctive southern honor was compared to other honor cultures.

Assistant Professor of Computer Science Alistair Campbell is currently participating in the Air Force Research Laboratory Visiting Faculty Research Program. It began May 27 and will continue through August 18. Campbell and his colleagues will be conducting research on the automatic generation of formal ontologies in knowledge representation systems.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Physics David Craig presented a talk titled "Quantum Theory of Closed Homogenous Cosmologies" at the April meeting of the American Physical Society in Philadelphia, participated in the fourth Canadian Black Holes meeting in Honey Harbour, Ontario, and talked on the "Generalized Quantum Theory of Cosmology" at the 10th Canadian Conference on General Relativity and Relativistic Astrophysics at the University of Guelph in May. Craig will also be presenting "Quantum Theory of Bianchi IX Cosmologies" at the Decennial celebration of the Center for Gravitational Physics and Geometry at Penn State later this June.

Susan Mason, director of the Oral Communications Program and director of Education Studies, recently published three courses in conjunction with the American Management Association (AMA). The three courses are: "Building Better Work Relationships: New Techniques for Results-Oriented Communication "(2003), "Communicating Up, Down, and Across the Organization" (2003) and "Leading Virtual and Remote Teams" (2003). All three courses were published by the AMA and are offered nationally and internationally as public seminars and organization-specific on-site trainings. Mason was responsible for the content, instructional design and development of participant and leader materials for these courses.

Assistant Professor of Biology Stephen Festin was recently invited to participate in a workshop to discuss the role of Bioinformatics in Undergraduate Curricula. The workshop was organized by Kirsten Guss and Mike Roberts at Dickinson College. The conference was funded by the Center for Educational Technology and targeted NITLE-affiliated colleges in the Mid-Atlantic and New England region. NITLE is funded by Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Maxim, a men's magazine, quoted "Doctuh" Associate Professor of Music Michael Woods in a recent article. He commented on the swing of jazz music. He said swing is "a rhythmic phenomenon with a flexible feel and lots of syncopation."

Jennifer Sturm, system administrator and research support specialist, and Dana Luciano, assistant professor of English, both spoke on behalf of the Kirkland Project at the National Council for Research on Women conference, "Borders, Babies, and Bombs: A Gendered Reframing of Security," on May 31, at Mills College in Oakland, Ca. Sturm's talk, "Technology and Innovations in Feminist Studies," outlined the Kirkland Project's series for 2003-04, "Technology and Democracy." She also proposed new models for the integration of technology in feminist studies, adapting the framework of MERCURY, the chemistry supercomputing consortium based at Hamilton. Luciano's talk, "From 'Tolerance' to Transformation" was on the history of the Kirkland Project and its accomplishments.

Assistant Professor of Chemistry John LaGraff received the Research Corporation Cottrell College Science Award. The award will go toward funding his research in "Structure-Function relationships of microcontact printed protein patterns by in situ scanning force microscopy."

Assistant Professor of Government Sharon Rivera published an article, "Interviewing Political Elites: Lessons from Russia," in PS: Political Science and Politics (December 2002). Her co-authors were Polina Kozyreva and Eduard Sarovskii of the Russian Academy of Sciences' Institute of Sociology. Rivera also gave a presentation, "Elites and the Diffusion of Foreign Models in Russia," at Cornell University's Institute for European Studies on March 31.

Reunions 2003 will reverberate with echoes of the past, ring out with celebrations of the present and provide a sense of what the future holds for the people who comprise Hamilton College. Opportunities to strengthen your ties with your alma mater are at their best during Reunions 2003. Join us and renew old friendships, enhance existing relationships nurtured since graduation and develop new relationships that will last a lifetime. Hamilton College will welcome back more than 500 alumni, as well as their guests, when we host our annual Reunion Weekend Thursday through Sunday, June 5-8. Highlights of this year's reunion will include a fourteen Alumni Colleges, the Alumni All-Star Jazz Band, various affinity group receptions, the Annual Alumni Association Meeting and the Sunday Service of Remembrance.