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The New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation recently awarded the Hamilton College Arboretum a $5,000 grant through the Zoos, Botanical Gardens & Aquariums Program for operating expenses. The award will be directed primarily toward for the maintenance and expansion of the arboretum collection with an immediate focus on protecting notable trees.

Doug Winiarski '92, assistant professor at the University of Richmond and one of Hamilton's most distinguished young alumni in academia will give a lecture, "Satan, Sinners, and the Evils of Parenthood in Provincial Boston: Lydia Proust's Dreadfullest Thought."   His talk, which is sponsored by the History Department and the Dean's Speaker Fund, will take place in the Science Center Kennedy Auditorium on Thursday, Feb. 14 at 4 p.m. (rescheduled from Wednesday because of bad weather.)  

Professor of Chinese Hong Gang Jin led a forum on recent research and best practices of Chinese language teaching in the U.S. at Swarthmore College in conjunction with Haverford and Bryn Mawr Colleges on Feb. 7-8. The workshop was intended for the Chinese professors and instructors from three colleges to receive further professional development and to discuss pedagogical issues in teaching Chinese as a second language in the U.S.

An article written by Nonny Chizea '08 for the Utica Observer-Dispatch about Easter being early this year was picked up by Gatehouse News Service and made available to all its newspapers nationwide. Chizea is an intern at the Observer-Dispatch, which is owned by Gatehouse. The article notes that this year's Easter Sunday, on March 23, is the earliest since 1913.

In reviewing "Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919-1950" by Glenda Gilmore in the Sunday, Feb. 10, edition of The New York Times, Maurice Isserman, James L. Ferguson Professor of History, summarized the book as "an exercise in radical antiquarianism, a series of disparate essays built around interesting personalities, the whole rather less than the sum of its parts."

Philip Klinkner, James S. Sherman Associate Professor of Government and Associate Dean of Students, has been interviewed and quoted recently by several media outlets including The Los Angeles Times and The New York Times political blog about Super Tuesday and future primary elections and caucuses.

Tim Elgren, professor of chemistry, presented "Halogenation and Oxidative Dehalogenation Activities Catatlyzed by Encapsulated Peroxidases" at the "Metals in Biology" Gordon Research Conference in Ventura, Calif., in January. Co-authors included Hamilton students Sydney Fasulo '09, Christina Clark '10, Nick Berry '09, Ngoda Manongi '08, Hilary Gamble '07 and Marielle Matthews '09, and post-doctoral research fellow Valentin Sukharev. The presentation described progress made in the characterization of the chemistry of sol-gel encapsulated peroxidases. 

Neal Keating, visiting assistant professor of religious studies, presented a paper titled "Indigenous Territories, Sacred Space, and Global Foreclosure" at The Creation & Contestation of Sacred Space symposium, held at The College of New Jersey in Ewing on Feb. 9.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Sociology Mikaila Mariel Lemonik Arthur delivered a paper titled "Conflict, Controversy, and Collective Action in the Collegiate Curriculum" at the Workshop on Textbook Controversies at Cornell University on Feb. 8.  It was sponsored by the Cornell University Institute for the Social Sciences Theme Project on Contentious Knowledge: Science, Social Science, and Social Movements.

Sharon Williams, director of the Writing Center said more than 250 students braved the cold to participate in the first CommaFest on Feb. 7.  Small groups of students and faculty reviewed the punctuation of standard sentence patterns and then competed for prizes.  The top prizes of the night were CommaFest t-shirts.  Cristina Garafola '11 commented, "The letter exercise was really helpful in illustrating the importance of the right punctuation in the right place.  It was interesting to see how the meaning of the letter changed drastically depending on the punctuation used."