News

Students from Hamilton’s Program in New York City recently visited Arthur Levitt Jr. at Bloomberg L.P. Bloomberg is a financial software, data and media company headquartered in Manhattan. Arthur Levitt is an active member of the board as well as the host of Bloomberg Radio’s “A Closer Look With Arthur Levitt.”

Hunger is a problem in many areas of the country including in the Mohawk Valley. Assisting in addressing this community challenge are two Hamilton student organizations, The Harvest and Hamilton vs Hunger.

Cyrus Boga ’90, an expert in social entrepreneurship, recently returned to the Hill as a Levitt Center Innovator-in-Residence to hold workshops and meet with students. Boga is the CEO and founder of Novamaya, an education startup serving college students, and the CEO of Campus Properties LLC, a venture offering student housing solutions. He also has experience in investment banking, corporate finance and running a successful social enterprise.

Narrative 4 (N4), an organization that aims to foster empathy through the power of storytelling, built emotional bonds in a powerful workshop on Nov. 5. The workshop, led by author and founder Colum McCann and executive director Lisa Consiglio, centered around empathy-driven social change. The crux of the workshop, and of N4’s mission, was “story exchange,” wherein two people share personal stories and then retell each other’s stories to the larger group. Consiglio defined N4 as being “founded for authors by authors, for writers by writers, and for educators by educators.”

“We aren’t all producers, but we’re all eaters,” Danielle Nierenberg pointed out last night. Nierenberg is the president and founder of Food Tank, a nonprofit organization begun in 2013 that is “dedicated to building a global community for safe, healthy, nourished eaters.” The event was part of the Levitt Center Speaker Series, and was additionally supported by the Arthur Coleman Tuggle Fund.

For many Americans, radiation exposure is often linked to cancer treatment or atomic fallout. For villagers living in and around Semipalatinsk, however, exposure to radioactivity is a part of everyday life. Semipalatinsk, nicknamed “the Polygon” due to its cartographic shape, is located in east Kazakhstan and is the world’s largest nuclear test site.  Medical Anthropologist Magdalena Stawkowski, the MacArthur Nuclear Security Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation, spent 20 months living just outside of the “official” borders of the Polygon. She spoke at Hamilton on Oct. 7 about the lifestyle and health of residents in the Polygon.

Dmitry Suslov, deputy director for research at the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, visited Hamilton for  a lecture on Oct. 1 and told his audience that until recently, relations between the United States and Russia had been ambiguous—a “transition period” where the U.S and Russia were “neither friends nor foes.”

Now back on campus this fall for his junior year Alexandru Hirsu ’17 spent his summer exploring the impact that cooperation with the European Union has had on corruption in Romania through a Levitt Center Summer Research Fellowship. Hirsu, along with the Henry Platt Bristol Professor of International Affairs Alan Cafruny, will present on their findings during this fall’s Family Weekend.

Genevieve Caffrey ’17 recently completed a summer internship with one office of the New Jersey Division of Child Protection and Permanency (DCP&PI), under the Department of Children and Families, in Cranford, NJ. Caffrey’s internship was supported by the Arthur Levitt Public Affairs Center through a Levitt Public Service Internship Award, awards which provide funding to students taking up unpaid or minimally-paid summer work focused on public service.

Though traveling through Italy enjoying wine-tastings and local delicacies may sound like a simply ideal vacation, Emily Moschowits ’16 is taking what she’s learned this summer in the food and wine capital of the Mediterranean and applying it to Hamilton’s own local community. Moschowits is in the final stages of a food-studies project, funded through the Levitt Center, addressing methods of promoting local sustainable food in the Upstate New York area.