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Ilana Gershon, author of The Break-Up 2.0: Disconnecting Over New Media (Cornell University Press, 2010),will lecture at Hamilton on Thursday, April 14, at 4 p.m., in the Bradford Auditorium, KJ Building. The lecture is free and open to the public.

Professor of Anthropology Charlotte Beck was quoted in the journal Science, in LiveScience, in The Oregonian and in U.S. News & World Report about a study, published in the journal Science on March 4, that raised questions about how prehistoric peoples, upon their arrival from Asia, journeyed south to the Americas. Beck and Professor of Anthropology Tom Jones published a paper in 2010 that concluded that the initial colonization of the intermountain region of the Great Basin was probably by populations from the Pacific coastal area and not, as conventional wisdom holds, from the Great Plains.

Over fall break, a group of researchers from Hamilton College embarked on a research trip to the Slocan Valley, containing one of the few undammed rivers in the Upper Columbia River Basin of Canada’s British Columbia province. The purpose of their trip was to film interviews with local people regarding the presence of aboriginal people in the valley.

Donald Carter, professor of Africana studies, has been appointed chief diversity officer by President Joan Hinde Stewart this summer to “oversee efforts in the area of diversity and help us to build the most inclusive and welcoming community possible.” Carter hopes “to develop a broad diversity plan based on what’s going on today - the problems and successes we are having - and to build organically from the bottom up on what is already here.”

Nine Hamilton College faculty members were approved for tenure by the College's Board of Trustees during a recent meeting. The Board granted tenure to Donald Carter (Africana studies), Anne Lacsamana (women’s studies), Tina Hall (English), Chaise LaDousa (anthropology), Rebecca Murtaugh (art), Angel David Nieves (Africana studies), Edna Rodriguez-Plate (Hispanic studies), Chad Williams (history) and Yvonne Zylan (sociology).

Assistant Professor of Anthropology Nathan Goodale, Science Center Administrator Alissa Nauman and students Erica Kowsz ’11, Madeleine Gunter ’11 and Laura DeFrank ’10 presented their work at the 75th anniversary meeting of the Society for American Archaeology in April in St. Louis, Mo. 

Professors of Archaeology Charlotte Beck and Tom Jones have a co-authored an article that appears in the latest issue of American Antiquity (vol 75, no. 1). Their article, "Clovis and Western Stemmed: Population Migration and the Meeting of Two Technologies in the Intermountain West," evaluates whether terminal Pleistocene cultural traditions of the Great Basin and Columbia Plateau were derived from an early colonizing population known as Clovis or represent independent cultural developments.

A group of four Hamilton faculty members has been awarded a grant of $177,950 through the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) program to fund a shared-use state of the art computing cluster. The project, titled "MRI-R2: Acquisition of a High Performance Computing cluster with a fast interconnect to enable shared-use, college-wide computational investigations at Hamilton College” is led by Assistant Professor of Chemistry Adam Van Wynsberghe as principal investigator with Assistant Professor of Biology Wei-Jen Chang, Assistant Professor of Physics Natalia Connolly, and Assistant Professor of Anthropology Nathan Goodale contributing as co-principal investigators.

Heather Otis '10, Assistant Professor of Anthropology Nathan Goodale, and Ken Bart, director of the microscopy and imaging facility, published an article, "Sickle blade life history and the transition to agriculture: A case study from Southwest Asia," in the Journal of Archaeological Science. The article appeared online on Dec. 21 and will be published in the March issue of the journal. The study examines the importance of sickle technology during the transition to agriculture in the Middle East at an early Neolithic community occupied circa 11,500 years ago in Jordan.

“I want to research the experiences of British and Indian women during the British colonial rule in India,” explains Fiona Kirkpatrick ‘10. And as a Senior Fellow, she has done (and will continue to do) just that: she is exempt from taking classes so that she may devote her time to writing a lengthy thesis of her choosing.