All News

Sixty-nine members of the Hamilton College Choir will spend a portion of their spring break this month traveling to the Midwest for the annual choir tour. This year's tour will take the choir as far south as Cincinnati and north to Appleton, Wisc.

Associate Professor of Music Lydia Hamessley recently published two articles that feature stereoscopic images of musical instruments. The first, "Within Sight: Three-Dimensional Perspectives on Women and Banjos in the Late Nineteenth Century," 19th-Century Music 31 (2007): 131-63, focuses on the relationship between images of women playing banjos and depictions of the new woman.

Hamilton's Mock Trial team competed in the national tournament hosted by Miami University of Ohio, on March 7-9. Liz Farrington '10 won an Outstanding Witness award. Other students who competed at nationals were Megha Hoon '11, Tim Kubarych '10, Caitlin Fitzsimons '11, Andrew Bjorkman '10, Eddie Ajaeb '11, Ngoc Nguyen '11 and Wenxi Li '10.

Hamilton College and Colgate University will co-host a film symposium, "Nature/Place/Cinema," on April 4-6 and April 11-13 that will be held on both campuses. The symposium will focus on the representation of landscape, place and the natural world in film and video. It will feature visiting filmmakers who will screen their films and videos as well as lectures by cinema scholars. All events are free and open to the public.

MTV news correspondent SuChin Pak spoke at Hamilton about MTV, Generation X and multiculturalism as part of the College's Voices of Color Lecture Series on March 6. Pak used examples from her own life to discuss race, identity and empowerment.

U.S. Secretary of the Treasury and conservationist Henry M. Paulson Jr. will deliver the Commencement address at Hamilton College on Sunday, May 25, at 10:30 a.m. in the Margaret Bundy Scott Field House.  Paulson and his wife Wendy, an educator, will be awarded a joint honorary degree at the College's 196th Commencement ceremony, along with 1972 Hamilton graduate and glass artist Josh Simpson and Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Taylor Branch.

The final rounds of the annual public speaking competition were held on Saturday, March 8, in the Chapel. Students were selected based on their performance in the February 16 preliminary rounds and competed for three different prizes: The McKinney Prize, The Clark Prize, and The Warren Wright Prize. Winners of the McKinney Prize were Amr Rouvan Mahmud '11, Thomas Coppola '10, Asia Agers '09 and Emma Slane '08. Ryan Murphy '08 was awarded the Clark Prize and Alexandra Berkley '08 won the Warren E. Wright Prize.

Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature Melek Ortabasi co-authored an article with Dr. Charlotte Eubanks (Penn State) for the ADFL Bulletin (38.3/39.1, Spring/Fall 2007), the journal for the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. The article discusses the issues surrounding the study of less commonly taught languages (such as Asian languages) in the context of comparative literature.

Hamilton students in the New York City Program had the opportunity to attend a performance of Carmen at the Metropolitan Opera in February. The students are sampling all New York has to offer, with visits to the Frick Museum and Tenement Museum, in addition to holding internships at Merrill Lynch, MTV/CH1, NBC and the Clinton Foundation. Vivyan C. Adair, the Elihu Root Peace Fund Professor of Women's Studies, is director of this semester's program, Globalization: The City as Text.

Professor of French John C. O'Neal has edited a volume of essays on Rousseau for  Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century (SVEC), a publication of the Voltaire Foundation in Oxford, England. Titled The Nature of Rousseau's 'Rêveries': physical, human, aesthetic, the volume brings together the work of international specialists to explore new approaches to the defining feature – the 'nature' – of the Rêveries. In essays which range from studies of botany or landscape painting to thematic or stylistic readings, authors re-examine Rousseau's intellectual understanding of and personal relationship with different conceptions of nature.