News

What do slavery in 19th century England, foot binding in China, and dueling by the English elites all have in common? As Dr. Kwame Anthony Appiah explained, each of these practices was ended due to the mobilization of honor.

Kwame Anthony Appiah, professor of philosophy and law at New York University, and author of The Honor Code and Cosmopolitanism, will give a lecture titled “Honor and Moral Change: At Home and Abroad,” on Monday, Sept. 29, at 7:30 p.m., in the Chapel. The lecture is free and open to the public.

Hamilton College has been designated a Changemaker Campus by Ashoka U, the higher education program of Ashoka, an international organization that promotes social innovation to solve society’s most persistent social issues. The designation recognizes Hamilton for being a leader in social innovation education among an exclusive network of only 29 colleges and universities worldwide.

Sarah Izzo ’15 recently presented summer research from a Levitt Center Research Grant at the Atlanta Neuroethics Consortium Conference, “Neuro-Interventions and the Law Conference: Regulating Human Mental Capacity.” Izzo is a neuroscience major at Hamilton.

A recent video from Assistant Professor of Art Robert Knight’s project In God's House is featured in GLOBALissues. CLIMATEmatters. SocialCHANGE at ArtRage in Syracuse, N.Y. The exhibition opens Saturday, Sept. 6, with a reception from 7-9 p.m., and continues through Oct. 18.

Out of Utica’s some 60,000 residents, as many as a quarter of them could be refugees, Shelly Callahan, the executive director for the Mohawk Valley Resource Center for Refugees (MVRCR), revealed in a recent New York Times article. The Center is a not-for-profit organization that has helped resettle thousands of immigrants from over 30 countries since its founding in 1979. Today, Utica is truly a mix of cultures, reflected in the more than 40 languages spoken by the 2,700 students at Utica’s Proctor High School.

Roughly every five or six years, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) publishes a report that indicates the current impact of climate change and consequent policy recommendations. The most recent report, the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report, contains three separate reports based on the IPCC’s working groups. Ming Chun Tang ’16, under the guidance of Professor of Government Peter Cannavo, is researching online news media’s coverage of the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report for his Levitt Fellowship this summer.

For her Levitt Summer Research Fellowship Grant, Sarah Izzo ’15 is working on a project with Professor of Philosophy Rick Werner titled “Brains on the Stand: The Implications of Emerging Neuroscience Research on our Judicial System.” Izzo is examining new neuroscience research on topics like decision-making and free will as well as associated technological advances (such as improved precision in lie detection). 

About one in every seven American men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer in their lifetime1. Combatting cancer is difficult, but one crucial step is early detection, which is made possible through screening examinations such as the Prostate Specific Antigen (PSA) test. Philip Parkes ’17 is working with Professor of Biology Herm Lehman on a project titled “The Origins of Over-Testing: Prostate Specific Antigen (PSA) Test” that is sponsored by a Levitt Summer Research Grant.

While the U.S. is a global leader in many fields, such is not the case with our public education system, which lags behind 13 other countries.1 Brian Sobotko ’16, a public policy major and education studies minor, thinks that the solution for failing public schools may be more obvious than we imagine. As a Levitt Summer Research Fellow, he is working on an independent examination of  “Transformational Leadership in American Public Schools.”