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Claudia Rankine, award-winning poet and essayist, read from her nationally acclaimed book, Citizen: An American Lyric, in the Chapel on Feb.  8. This work is a collection of stories conveyed mainly as prose poems and mixed media images.  Rankine explained that she had asked her friends to tell her a story about a time “where you were doing something ordinary […] and suddenly somebody said something that reduced you to your race” in order to explore the “white supremacist foundations inside this culture.

Human rights activist John Dau, a former “Lost Boy of Sudan,” spoke on Feb. 3 about his life experiences and his successful career in the United States. The talk was presented by the Levitt Center Speaker Series.

Seven Hamilton students have been selected to attend the Clinton Global Initiative University (CGI U) that will take place in April 1-3 at the University of California, Berkeley. Aleksandra Bogoevska ’17, Andy Chen ’16, Leonard Kilekwang ’16, Alexandru Hirsu ’17, Emily Moschowits ’16, Sharif Shrestha ’17 and Tsion Tesfaye ’16 will attend. Shrestha and Tesfaye were among four Hamilton students who participated in last year’s CGI U in Miami.

“I am convinced that individual human beings can make a difference.” The proclamation made by Prudence Bushnell, an American diplomat who served as U.S. Ambassador to Kenya and Guatemala, and the former Sol M. Linowitz Visiting Professor of International Relations at Hamilton, established the framework for the Hamilton students participating in the 5th annual Levitt Leadership Institute, Jan. 10-15.

Students from Hamilton’s Program in New York City recently visited Arthur Levitt Jr. at Bloomberg L.P. Bloomberg is a financial software, data and media company headquartered in Manhattan. Arthur Levitt is an active member of the board as well as the host of Bloomberg Radio’s “A Closer Look With Arthur Levitt.”

Hunger is a problem in many areas of the country including in the Mohawk Valley. Assisting in addressing this community challenge are two Hamilton student organizations, The Harvest and Hamilton vs Hunger.

Cyrus Boga ’90, an expert in social entrepreneurship, recently returned to the Hill as a Levitt Center Innovator-in-Residence to hold workshops and meet with students. Boga is the CEO and founder of Novamaya, an education startup serving college students, and the CEO of Campus Properties LLC, a venture offering student housing solutions. He also has experience in investment banking, corporate finance and running a successful social enterprise.

Narrative 4 (N4), an organization that aims to foster empathy through the power of storytelling, built emotional bonds in a powerful workshop on Nov. 5. The workshop, led by author and founder Colum McCann and executive director Lisa Consiglio, centered around empathy-driven social change. The crux of the workshop, and of N4’s mission, was “story exchange,” wherein two people share personal stories and then retell each other’s stories to the larger group. Consiglio defined N4 as being “founded for authors by authors, for writers by writers, and for educators by educators.”

“We aren’t all producers, but we’re all eaters,” Danielle Nierenberg pointed out last night. Nierenberg is the president and founder of Food Tank, a nonprofit organization begun in 2013 that is “dedicated to building a global community for safe, healthy, nourished eaters.” The event was part of the Levitt Center Speaker Series, and was additionally supported by the Arthur Coleman Tuggle Fund.

For many Americans, radiation exposure is often linked to cancer treatment or atomic fallout. For villagers living in and around Semipalatinsk, however, exposure to radioactivity is a part of everyday life. Semipalatinsk, nicknamed “the Polygon” due to its cartographic shape, is located in east Kazakhstan and is the world’s largest nuclear test site.  Medical Anthropologist Magdalena Stawkowski, the MacArthur Nuclear Security Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation, spent 20 months living just outside of the “official” borders of the Polygon. She spoke at Hamilton on Oct. 7 about the lifestyle and health of residents in the Polygon.