All News

Associate Professor of Africana Studies Nigel Westmaas was a guest on Jamaica Radio’s NewsTalk93FM for a discussion of Guyana’s national elections on May 11. He addressed the significance of the elections for Guyana’s future and the prospects for political and social change.

Hamilton College’s highest awards for teaching were presented to four faculty members during the annual Class & Charter Day ceremony on May 11. Professor of Classics Shelley Haley was awarded the Samuel & Helen Lang Prize for Excellence in Teaching; Assistant Professor of Mathematics Courtney Gibbons was honored with the John R. Hatch Excellence in Teaching Award; and Max Majireck, assistant professor of chemistry, received the Class of 1963 Excellence in Teaching Award. In addition, Education Studies Program Director Susan Mason received Student Assembly’s Sidney Wertimer Award.

This semester marks the introduction of a new course in the college’s Art History department: African-American Art and Black Historical Experience. The proseminar, taught by Professor Stephen J. Goldberg, is the first in the College’s history to reevaluate Western art from the African-American perspective.

Kiana “Kiki” Sosa ’15 and Kayla Cody ’15, both Boston Posse Foundation scholars, have been awarded Hamilton’s prestigious Bristol Fellowship.

The age-old adage of “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it” appears to be playing itself out yet again in Europe. From the return of “the German question,” to civil unrest in the former USSR, or the resurgence of political scapegoating and economic disarray, current conditions are raising concern from the global community. On April 2 the Government Department hosted a roundtable panel of four Hamilton faculty members to address key elements of the continent’s contemporary crisis.

Hamilton will host a faculty panel discussion, “Europe in Crisis,” on Thursday, April 2, at 7 p.m., in the Fillius Events Barn. The discussion is free and open to the public.

Associate Professor of Africana Studies Nigel Westmaas published a book review in the latest issue of The Arts Journal (Guyana and the Caribbean). He reviewed The Sky's Wild Noise: Selected Essays, a book published in 2013 by Guyanese writer Rupert Roopnaraine. Westmaas deemed the book an “almost complete witness to Roopnaraine’s discerning mind in the field of arts, literature, and politics.”

Barbara Gold, the Edward North Professor of Classics, and Professor of Comparative Literature Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz gave a lead-off talk titled “22 Years of Feminist Theory and the Classics” at a conference on “Classics and the New Faces of Feminism.” The conference was held Jan. 31 at the Institute for Classical Studies in London.

Associate Professor of Africana Studies Nigel Westmaas was a guest on WRFG Radio Atlanta in a Jan. 24 discussion on poverty and the global political economy. In the backdrop of the Davos World Economic forum Westmaas highlighted the growing gap between the super-rich and big capital on the one hand and the poor and global inequality on the other.

Shelley Haley, professor of classics and Africana studies, was invited to be a guest facilitator for a Mellon workshop on “Sex and Gender in Past Societies: New Theories and Approaches.”