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Ann Owen, associate professor of economics and director of the Levitt Center's Sustainability Program, presented a paper she wrote with economics professors Julio Videras and Stephen Wu at Brown University on Feb. 14. The paper, "More Information Isn't Always Better: The Case of the Voluntary Provision of Environmental Quality" examines how individuals' beliefs about the impact of their actions is related to their behavior.

Professor Norton of the Dance Department was quoted as an authority on set and costume designs of the Diaghilev Ballets Russes era in a January 27, 2008 NYT article by dance critic Claudia La Rocco. The article, "Time to Retire Those Sets and Tutus," discusses the extra-choreographic elements that contribute to a complete artwork and suggests that the traditional expectations and conservative tastes of today's classical ballet audience may have contributed to an inhibited visual aesthetic since the Diaghilev era (1909-29), when artists like Picasso, Matisse, and Dalí were employed to design sets and costumes for the Ballets Russes.

The photography of Visiting Instructor of Art Sylvia de Swaan is included in a four-page spread in a new book titled The Elements of Photography – Understanding and Creating Sophisitcated Images. De Swaan's "Sub-Version Series" is represented with three images and is accompanied by an artist's statement and her comments on framing and borders.

A photograph by Visiting Instructor of Art Sylvia de Swaan was selected by The Center for Fine Art Photography as part of it most recent exhibition of photographic fine art, Planes, Trains and Automobiles, which opened on Feb. 1. Andrew Darlow, editorial director at Digital Imaging Techniques magazine and a former instructor at the International Center of Photography in New York City, was the juror for the exhibition.

Charter trustee Jack Withiam '71 posed his Leap Year Challenge with every confidence that Hamilton's 29 youngest classes would rise to the occasion -- and did you ever! Together you surpassed our ambitious goal of 841 commitments over 29 days, finishing at the end of the day on February 29 with an astounding 1,066 gifts and pledges. Your remarkable, collective accomplishment demonstrates the power Hamilton alumni have when they work toward a common goal. It's who we are!

Visiting Assistant Professor of Chinese Yuwen Hsiung's paper "Emotion, Visuality, and Subjectivity: Meng Jinghui's Urban Play Rhinoceros in Love" won the 2008 Emerging Scholar award at the Association for Asian Performance (AAP). She is invited to present her paper during the AAP conference in Denver in July, and her article will be published in Asian Theatre Journal.

McCullough Visiting Professor of Political Philosophy Laura Purdy's article "Assisted Reproduction, Prenatal Testing, and Sex Selection" will be published in the forthcoming second edition of "A Companion to Bioethics," edited by Helga Kuhse and Peter Singer, Blackwell. The "Companion" provides a comprehensive array of in-depth papers on central issues in bioethics.

Priya Ananth, Visiting Assistant Professor of Japanese, presented at the annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, held at Atlanta, Georgia, April 3-6, 2008. She gave a poster presentation titled "Form-Meaning Association in toki 'when' clauses in Japanese -- A corpus analysis of native speakers' data." This study comprehensively examined the associations of the past (perfective) and non-past (imperfective) verbal morphology with the four verbal classes based on their semantic characteristics such as telicity and durativity, by native speakers of Japanese. This study has important pedagogical implications in the systematic teaching of verbal morphology in the tense-aspect system of Japanese as a foreign language.

Cheng Li, William R. Kenan Professor of Government and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, will be a guest on the nationally syndicated Diane Rehm Show on Thursday, April 10, at 10 a.m. The topic of the program will be the Beijing Olympics. Li is the editor of the recently published book, China's Changing Political Landscape: Prospects for Democracy.