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George Orwell’s iconic dystopian novel 1984 famously featured cameras capable of discerning a person’s state of mind – their contentedness, truthfulness or trustfulness – simply by looking at their face. The year 1984 came and went without such a technology emerging, but as demonstrated by Diane Paverman ’13 and Eric Murray’s ’13 summer research on the functional near-infrared spectrometer (fNIRS), scientists are getting closer to achieving Orwellian-like surveillance capabilities.

Professor of English and Creative Writing Doran Larson delivered a paper titled Ethnic American Civil Death: Constructing the Alien in Asian & Pacific Islander Prison Writing at the International Law & Society Association Conference in Honolulu in June.

Professor of English Vincent Odamtten recently participated in two conferences. In May he presented “Story-Telling as Performance: From No Sweetness Here to Diplomatic Pounds” at the “Gender, Creative Dissidence and Discourses of African Diaspora Colloquium in Honor of Ama Ata Aidoo” at the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, University of California at Santa Barbara.

Edward “Ned” Walker ’62, the Christian A. Johnson Distinguished Professor of Global Political Theory and former ambassador to Egypt and Israel, discussed the election of the Muslim Brotherhood candidate Mohamed Morsi as Egypt’s next president with host Candy Crowley on the June 24 broadcast of CNN’s State of the Union. The New York Times in a June 25 article titled “Egypt Results Leave White House Relieved but Watchful” included one of Walker’s comments from the CNN interview.

The New York Times “The Choice” blog featured a column by Dan Chambliss, the Eugene M. Tobin Distinguished Professor of Sociology, titled “College Basics for High School Juniors” on June 25.  He recommended that students look for  “small classes, good teachers, exciting lectures, fellow students who really want to learn ... .”

Pharmaceutical research is usually dominated by corporations and large research universities, but student researchers Hallie Brown ’13, Summer Bottini ’14, Scott Pillette ’14 and Liza Gergenti ’14 are conducting preliminary animal trials on the psychoactive drug Quinpirole as Hamilton undergraduates. They’re studying Quinpirole’s effect on contrafreeloading under the direction of Visiting Assistant Professor of Psychology Michael Frederick.

The volume, Ezra Pound and Education, co-edited by Professor of English Steve Yao, was recently published by the National Poetry Foundation. The idea for this collection originated at a conference co-hosted by Hamilton College and Colgate University in 2005 observing the centenary of Pound's graduation from the College. 

Jason Mariasis looked at 25 liberal arts schools before he found Hamilton. It was a perfect fit right away—he applied Early Decision. Four years later as a new Hamilton graduate, he has found another perfect fit at Capital One Financial’s Digital Strategies group, where he will be employed beginning this summer.

Professor of Chinese De Bao Xu organized the Seventh International Conference and Workshops on Technology and Chinese Language Teaching in the 21st Century (TCLT7) held May 25-27 at the University of Hawaii at Manoa (UHM). Co-sponsored by Hamilton College and UHM, the main themes of the conference were cloud computing and mobile technology and their application to technology-based language instruction.

Professor of Mathematics Debra Boutin organized a mini-symposium at the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics Conference on Discrete Mathematics in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Her mini-symposium brought together 10 mathematicians to speak about their work on graph networks and their symmetries.