News Stories 2005

As the Congress considers expanding the country's guest-worker programs, Cindy Hahamovitch, associate professor of history at the College, urges caution. Recently she went to Washington, D.C., to voice her concerns during a forum sponsored by the Farmworker Justice Fund. In short, her advice is this: As long as employers hold the deportation card, working conditions for international farmworkers in the United States may remain marginal, at best. Hahamovitch, who is writing a history of the H-2 (guest-worker) program in the United States, recently answered the following questions.

Mitchell Byrd likes to tell people that his 50 years at William and Mary are due either to his perserverance or administrative benevolence.

Griffin delivers distinguished faculty lecture on thermoregulation

During her comments at an Alumni Association awards ceremony on Sept. 22, Laurie Koloski, associate professor of history, spoke of "teaching as conversation." Following is the text of her speech.

Considered one of the top constitutional legal minds of his time, William W. Van Alstyne, Alfred Wilson and Mary I. W. Lee Professor of Law at the College's Marshall-Wythe School of Law, has given countless lectures and presentations on his favorite subject-the world's oldest Constitution. However, those programs were never part of a law mandated by Congress.

Knee deep in a perfectly rectangular hole, bandana-clad William and Mary sophomore Julia Elkin flings shovelfuls of rich, dark dirt into a suspended sifting box. Hardly a clump misses its target, and as each pile of dirt arrives, Elkin's fellow workers shake and sift the soil through a screen. They coax uncooperative chunks through the sifter with troughs and probe anxiously, hoping to catch an artifact that will uncover some piece of the history they hope to help reassemble.

"Writing with light" as an expression to describe filmmaking did not originate with Sharon Zuber. When she first heard the phrase, however, something clicked. The words lent unity to her academic passions. They contributed clarity to her ongoing life journey.

Between his last class as a member of the faculty at the College and his scheduled presentation of the baccalaureate address, Hans Tiefel spoke about teaching, joy and a source of pessimism in his own life.

Frankenstein had every moral right to create the monster in his attempt to advance medical science, Hans Tiefel and Alan Fuchs agreed, as they used Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus to discuss the ethics of stem-cell cloning.

Hans Christian von Baeyer, Chancellor Professor of Physics, is more than primed for serious conversation. Ever since the Einstein centennial in 1979, when he published that little piece about general relativity in the "William and Mary Gazette"-it won the Science Writing Award from the American Institute of Physics-he has honed wit and wonder to become one of America's most engaging popularizers of physics. During the ensuing three decades, he has made it his work to talk, to write and to explain the nature of things. Today, roughly 70 articles, a couple of television series and five books later, it has proved to be a fitting vocation.

Hans Christian von Baeyer spoke to the William and Mary News about his recent book, Information, as well as about what non-physicists need to know about our world. The following partial transcript reflects that conversation.

Of all the threads that bind the College and the Williamsburg community, none will prove stronger than those spun by James McCord, chair of William and Mary's Lyon Gardiner Tyler Department of History. Some threads are visible. As a two-term member of the Williamsburg City Council, as the founder of First Night celebrations, as an originator of the Town-and-Gown luncheons and as one of the most-respected chairs in his department's history, McCord's service contributions have been very public for more than 40 years. Yet, far more threads are hidden. They are wound through countless kindnesses quietly extended toward colleagues and friends.

On the first day of each sociology course he teaches at the College of William and Mary, Tom Linneman assigns himself the first classroom project.

Harvey Langholtz, U.N. peacekeeping expert and associate professor of psychology at the College of William and Mary, responds to questions regarding Iraq's preparedness for national elections scheduled for Jan. 30.

Olbrych explores history of guitar on his first CD

Nearly 20 years of political strife and civil war ensure that images of death and displacement mark Western perceptions of Sudan. Indeed, the nation is known for lostness-the Lost Boys, 1,000 lives lost daily from war-related famine and disease, 4 million citizens forced to flee their homes and their farms. For those same 20 years, Ismail Abdalla has maintained a lifeline.

Henry Hart is restless-restless in the tradition of many writers, restless in the sense of his great-grandfather, the Swedish "Duke of Mongolia," whose celebrated adventures as missionary, diplomat, horse trader, expedition leader and spy made him both subject of admiring international biographers and something of a cult hero within the Hart clan.