All News

Students in Boston's Citizen Schools program 8th Grade Academy are spending three days exploring the Hamilton campus this week in their fourth consecutive visit to the Hill. Citizen Schools is a national education initiative utilizing adult volunteers to help improve student achievement through skill-building apprenticeships, rigorous academic and leadership development activities and real world learning projects.

Derek Jones, Irma M. and Robert D. Morris Professor of Economics, has accepted an invitation to join the editorial advisory board of the Journal of Co-operative Studies. His membership on the editorial board of the Annals of Public and Cooperative Economy has also been renewed.

Donald Martin Carter, visiting associate professor of Africana Studies, presented a paper at the Center for African Studies Gwendolen M. Carter conference at the University of Florida, Gainesville, on Feb. 15-16. Carter's paper was titled "Navigating Diaspora: Shipwrecks, Identity and the Nation." This year's conference theme was "Migration in and out of Africa: old patterns & new perspectives."

Marla L. Jaksch, visiting assistant professor of women's studies, published a co-authored article in the February 2008 issue of AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Scholarship. The article, titled "Developing Excellence in Indigenously Informed Research: Collaboration between African Communities and the Academy," explores a community-based participatory research strategy called Community Driven Development (CDD).

Assistant Professor of Africana Studies Nigel Westmaas presented a paper at the 16th annual conference of the National Association of African-American Studies (NAAAS) held in Baton Rouge, La., on Feb 11-16. His paper, "The 'Quiet' Pan-Africanist: The significance, work and scholarship of Eusi Kwayana of Guyana and his impact on Pan Africanism" assesses the scope of Eusi Kwayana's pan-africanism. It evaluates why, in spite of his substantial literary, cultural and political output over time, Kwayana is scarcely accredited in pan-Africanist historiography and scholarship.

Visiting Professor of Communication John Adams contributed an op-ed to the Syracuse Post-Standard (2/17/08) titled "College can light the way for vets." In it Adams recounts his college experiences post-Vietnam and writes that "One of my major reasons for enlisting in the Army was to get a college education." Adams describes how he attended a community college, and then went on to the University of California, Santa Barbara. "I'll never forget how welcome I felt at UCSB. That welcome feeling bolstered my soul, washed away a lot of fear and worry and enabled me to put my efforts into learning. At UCSB I discovered rhetoric. It lit a fire in my head. It was my bliss."

Professor of Biology Jinnie Garrett published an article in the International Journal of Biochemistry and Cell Biology. The article is titled "Amino acid transport through the Saccharomyces cerevisiae Gap1 permease is controlled by the Ras/cAMP pathway." Ras proteins are important cell growth regulators and are often found in activated forms in human tumors.

Canyon Cinema: The Life and Times of an Independent Film Distributor written by Visiting Professor of Film History Scott MacDonald was published by University of California Press in January 2008. According to the publisher's Web site, MacDonald brings alive a remarkable moment in American cultural history and "tells the colorful story of how a small, backyard organization in the San Francisco Bay Area emerged in the 1960s and evolved to become a major force in the development of independent cinema."

"Regional differences in wage inequality across industries in China," a paper written by Associate Professor of Economics Ann Owen and Bing Yu '03, appears in the February 2008 issue of Applied Economics Letters. The paper explores the causes of very large regional differences in wage inequality in China over the period 1996 to 2001 and finds that the effect of foreign direct investment (FDI) varies across Chinese provinces.

Associate Professor of Mathematics Debra Boutin recently published a research article "Thickness-Two Graphs Part One: New Nine-Critical Graphs, Permuted Layer Graphs, and Catlin's Graphs" in the Journal of Graph Theory with co-authors Ellen Gethner, the University of Colorado at Denver, and Thom Sulanke, Indiana University. A graph (or network drawing) is called thickness-two if it can be drawn in two layers in which neither layer has edges that cross. The thickness of a network is important in computer chip design. In this paper Boutin and her co-authors give new progress on an old problem concerning thickness-two graphs.