All News

According to the predictions of Benjamin Bowser, the African American middle class could completely disappear in as little as 20 years. Bowser, chair of the Department of Sociology and Social Services at California State University, East Bay, spoke on April 10 about his recent book “The Black Middle Class: Social Mobility – and Vulnerability,” in the Kirner-Johnson Red Pit at Hamilton. The former president of the Association of Black Sociologists has written extensively on race, ethnic relations and HIV/AIDS prevention.

The Classics Department at Hamilton College is hosting a conference, "Alexander Hamilton and the Classics," on Wednesday, April 11, from 2:30-5:30 p.m. in the Kennedy Auditorium of the Science Center (G027). The event is free and the public is welcome to attend.

Arch-enemies Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson will battle for the right to be called “master debater,” thanks to a bold trio of students from Hamilton College who have successfully goaded debaters from the University of Virginia to face off in the Hamilton-Jefferson Public Speaking Competition. The debate, initiated by seniors Michael Blasie, Scott Iseman and Joshua Agins, will take place on Saturday, April 14, at the University of Virginia’s campus in Charlottesville.

Phoebe Potter ’09 published a summary of the event “Moving Toward a Free Cuba” on the American Enterprise Institute’s web site with another intern from the University of Kansas, Gregory Trum Jr. The article summarized speeches regarding Cuba’s future after Fidel Castro dies.

Eric Kuhn ’09 presented a lecture in March in Washington, D.C. to students participating in “Year Up,” a program that provides urban young adults 18-24, with a combination of technical and professional skills, college credits, an educational stipend and corporate apprenticeship opportunities. Kuhn’s presentation was on new media and how the history of journalism has evolved with blogs, YouTube and citizen journalists playing a larger role than ever in effecting the 2008 political campaign. Kuhn integrated real life stories based on his experience working for WHCL 88.7 FM and the Spectator to talk about citizen journalism.

Evan Savage, '08, has been awarded an American Society of Pharmacognosy (ASP) Undergraduate Research Award for the summer of 2007. This highly competitive award will provide a stipend for Savage to pursue research on marine sponges with Robin Kinnel, the Silas D. Childs Professor of Chemistry, for 10 weeks.

Hamilton alumnus David Chanatry '80, a former NBC news producer, has been recognized by the Broadcast Education Association Media Arts Festival for two stories he reported from the Balkans last year. Chanatry, assistant professor of journalism at Utica College, won the audio short form category award for his coverage of an Albanian youth group. He also won the radio hard news category award for a story about lead poisoning affecting Roma refugees in Kosovo. Chanatry reported this year's award-winning stories for Public Radio International's "The World."

Professor of History Maurice Isserman was a panel member at a symposium noting the 25th anniversary of the publication of Cornell historian Nick Salvatore's prize-winning biography Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist. The symposium was held on Friday, March 30, at the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians (OAH), held this year in Minneapolis. Isserman argued that Salvatore's interpretation of Debs was shaped by a "Sixties prism," emphasizing Debs' radical individualism rather than his role as a proponent of the class struggle.

On Wednesday, April 4, Visiting Professor of Film History Scott MacDonald lectured at Colgate University as part of Colgate's Art and Art History Lecture Series. In his talk, "Aspects of a Critical Cinema," MacDonald explored some of the ways in which the varied experiences provided by avant-garde films offer critiques of the conventions of mass culture as these conventions are embodied in commercial media; create revealing avenues into essential elements of the cinematic apparatus (the set of machines and practices that make motion-picture media possible); and retrain perception, instigating new forms of engagement with the spaces and times of everyday experience.

Economics lecturer Nesecan Balkan and Gwyn Kirk, a former Jane Watson Irwin Chair in Women’s Studies (1999 – 2001), traveled in El Salvador during spring break to observe sustainability projects. They are researching sustainable development in Central America with a focus on El Salvador, a country characterized by great inequality, legacies of colonization, militarism and war; environmental devastation; and the privatization of resources, especially water.