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Students in Introduction to Comparative Politics held a public debate for a mock election campaign in the fictitious country of West Europa on April 12. The debate was the capstone of a semester-long project in the course taught by Assistant Professor of Government Sharon Werning Rivera.

Dan Wittenberg ’07 has had one of his solar etchings accepted in an exhibition, the 27th Annual National Print Show. According to Wittenberg, the image, titled “Limbs,” shows a detail of logs in the Root Glen covered in snow that create a barrier for the viewer to attempt to see beyond. The image is a selection from Wittenberg’s senior project. He has been working with a solar etching technique to turn his photographs into graphic images. A solar etching is a type of intaglio print.

Neal B. Keating, Visiting Assistant Professor of Religious Studies, presented a paper titled “Toward a Genealogy of Iroquois Studies: Healing the Great Divide?” at the Northeast Anthropology Association meetings, at Ithaca College on April 21. The paper examined the discursive divide that has emerged in the field of Iroquois studies, between non-Native scholars of Iroquois life, and Native Iroquois/Haudenosaunee scholars, intellectuals and artists.

Dean of Admission and Financial Aid Monica Inzer has been selected as one of the "10 admissions deans who are shaping their field" by The Chronicle of Higher Education in an article in the April 27 issue. The publication assembled a list of 10 people who they determined are "making a mark on the admissions profession. Each is a thinker, with goals for improving his or her own college as well as the field of admissions in general. Simply put, people like them -- and respect them.

A quartet of Hamilton music students lent their talents to the 4th Annual “Soup For The Soul” Concert on Sunday, April 22, at the Unitarian Universalist Church in New Hartford. Jennifer Orbaker '07, Fritz Yohn '08, Brendan Conway '09 and Anthony Sali '10 performed as a saxophone quartet at the fund raiser that benefits children in South African schools. The saxophonists are students of Monk Rowe. Also performing at the event was vocalist Cassandra Harris Lockwood '74.

Thirty students from the Neighborhood Center in Utica joined 15 Hamilton students for activities and a simulated trip around the world at the 2nd Annual Culture Fair. Hamilton students volunteered to host booths for different countries; some represented their heritage while others shared experiences from studying abroad. Students represented a dozen countries and taught the children about cultures in those different nations. The Neighborhood Center group visited each station with their passports and engaged in a variety of crafts and activities ranging from folding origami in Japan to creating Blarney stones in Ireland. The event was sponosored by HAVOC.

Ken Bart, director of the Microscopy and Imaging Facility in the Biology Department, contributed images to a Discovery Health Channel program, Mystery Diagnosis, airing Monday, April 23, at 10 p.m. Bart produced images of the tick that is responsible for Lyme disease for the episode, which features Lemierre's Syndrome and Lyme Disease.

Assistant Professor of Government Sharon Werning Rivera presented a paper titled "Parliament as Teacher in Post-Communist Russia: Can Democracy be Learned?" at the Mid-Atlantic Slavic Conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, held at Barnard College in New York City on March 31.

Professor of Sociology Dennis Gilbert was interviewed for a Christian Science Monitor article (4/20/07) about the Virginia Tech shootings and the increased call for gun control. Gilbert spoke about the Hamilton College Youth poll conducted in 2006, which found that 88 percent of high school students polled supported a five-day waiting period for a hand-gun purchase. "They've seen a lot of gun violence in ways that kind of frighten them," said Gilbert in the article. "Something like 35 percent of high school seniors in 2006 knew someone who'd been shot at or threatened with a gun. That's more than 1 in 3, and it was a national survey, not just of urban areas."

Christopher Whitcomb '81, a former sniper on the F.B.I's hostage rescue unit and now head of a security company, contributed an op-ed to The New York Times (4/20/07), titled "Building a Better Lockdown." In it, he questions how, despite studies, symposiums and the adoption of crisis-response protocols in the days since Columbine, a calamity like Blacksburg can happen. Whitcomb wrote: "The most obvious reason, and one that’s been widely discussed in the days since the shootings, is complacency. Well, we can wring our hands all we want, but to some extent complacency is unavoidable: it’s what sneaks in after all the blame has been handed out, the news media have disappeared, the critics have taken their shots and the political knees have stopped jerking."