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Cassidy (Cassie) Dennison ’16 is spending her summer interning as a legislative analyst at Williams & Jensen, LLC, in Washington D.C, a litigation and lobbying firm.  Dennison, a government major, discovered the internship through a connection at the Hamilton College Career Center, which put her in contact with Hamilton alumnus George Baker ’74, a partner at Williams & Jensen. The firm is home to a number of other Hamilton alumni, including Baker’s fellow partner Frank Vlossak ’89, Marc Pitarresi ’10 and Kevin Prior ’13.

Jonah Boucher ’17 is undertaking research this summer with a team of students under Associate Professor of Biology Michael McCormick analyzing various chemical and microbiological properties of Green Lake in Onondaga County, N.Y. Green Lake is notable for its meromictic properties, meaning that it is separated into two major layers of water, one well-oxygenated and one anoxic, that do not mix, even after the passage of long periods of time.

Although archaeology is often associated with dinosaur fossils and sarcophagi, museums only hold a small portion of the artifacts unearthed over the past few centuries. For Max Lopez ’15, who’s currently working as a teaching assistant at a summer field school in British Columbia, “it’s the day-to-day kind of stuff that really gets [him] going, the smaller stuff that tells a story everyone can relate to.” It is these types of discoveries he hopes to make, leading him to pursue a Masters of Archaeology at Cambridge University beginning in the fall.

While many students undertake research projects over the summer, Rachael Feuerstein ’16 is using her vacation to pursue a particularly charged subject of study: the social psychology behind the Holocaust. Her project, "The Psychology of Evil and Perpetration: A Psychological Analysis of Why and How the Holocaust Happened," under the direction of Professor of Religious Studies Heidi Ravven and funded through a Levitt Center grant, “aims to explain why ‘good’ people do bad things, or more generally, why people can do evil, such as commit mass genocide.”

Thomas Wilson, the Elizabeth J. McCormack Professor of History, presented a talk titled "God and Ritual Governance in Late Imperial China” at the Graduate School of East Asian Studies, Freie Universität Berlin in May. He also led a graduate workshop titled “Temporalizing the Modern: Formulating an Analytics of Governance."

Visiting Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing Andrew Rippeon was invited to the 2015 First Book Institute June 7-13 at the Center for American Literary Studies at Penn State University. Rippeon was one of eight early-career professors invited to attend.

Six Hamilton faculty members were approved for tenure by the College’s Board of Trustees during a recent meeting. The board granted tenure to Emily Conover, economics, Andrew Dykstra, mathematics, John Eldevik, history, Nathan Goodale, anthropology, Adam Van Wynsberghe, chemistry, and Zhuoyi Wang, East Asian languages and literatures. The tenures are effective July 1. With the granting of tenure comes the title of associate professor.

Hamilton Reece Thompson ’18 is undertaking research this summer to uncover and illuminate the links in ideology that connect human trafficking with societal trends such as the medicalization of the human body, and the objectification and commoditization of women via advertising. Thompson is one of this year’s four Kirkland Summer Associates. He’s working on his research with Associate Professor of Women’s Studies Vivyan Adair.

Ann Owen, the Henry Platt Bristol Professor of Economics, was featured on a June 11  American Public Media Marketplace broadcast. Referencing U.S. Commerce Department figures that showed May retail sales were up 1.2 percent, Owen warned not to pay too much attention to monthly vacillations.

Daniel Chambliss, the Eugene M. Tobin Distinguished Professor of Sociology, was recently elected to serve as an at-large member of the Council of the American Sociological Association (ASA). The Council is the 15-member governing board of the ASA and the organization’s top policy-making body.