Colby welcomed eight new tenure-track faculty members at the beginning of the 2003-2004 school year.

Assistant Professor of Government and Environmental Studies Liliana Botcheva-Andonova received her Ph.D. from Harvard in 2001 and has been an adjunct professor in the department of political science at Columbia University and a post-doctoral scholar at the Columbia Earth Institute. She has published widely on environmental management and legislation and has a forthcoming book from MIT Press, Transnational Politics of the Environment: EU Integration and Environmental Policy in Eastern Europe.

Philip H. Brown, assistant professor of economics, earned his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Michigan in 2003. He served as a team leader and financial manager in a Tanzanian refugee camp in 1994, and he teaches development economics, labor economics, demography, Chinese economy and the economics of education. He has made presentations on rural China at several seminars and conferences.

Instructor in English Tracy H. Carrick received an M.A. in English with a concentration in composition from San Francisco State University in 1997. She has been a writing instructor at Ithaca College and Syracuse University, taught in adult education and literacy enrichment programs, made numerous presentations at conferences on basic writing and is preparing a book on composition and rhetoric.

Assistant Professor of English Daniel Contreras researches issues of longing, unrequited love and utopian aspiration in Latino and American literature, film, art and popular culture. Trained in Latina/o and queer studies, he received his Ph.D. from Stanford in 2002.

With a background in engineering physics, mathematics and computer science and an interest in longitudinal and multivariate data analysis, Instructor in Mathematics Liam O'Brien has taught statistics and basic statistical programming involving study design, data collection and data analysis. He also is interested in statistical issues in the field of psychiatry.

Instructor in History Jason M. Opal has been a teaching assistant at Brandeis University, where he is completing his Ph.D. in American history. His fields include cultural and intellectual history, the age of the American Revolution, the social and cultural history of capitalism in the 17th to 19th centuries, family relations and education in early America.

Assistant Professor of English Jennifer Thorn comes to the College from Duke University, where she was an assistant professor of English. She has taught the 18th-century British novel, 18th-century British women writers and colonialism, and 18th- and 19th-century British women writers and place. Since receiving her Ph.D. from Columbia in 1994 she has presented numerous conference papers.

Assistant Professor of Sociology Jonathan M. White earned a Ph.D. in sociology from Boston College in 2002. After a year at Bowdoin College, he returns to Colby, where he taught from 2000 to 2002. His interests include principles of sociology, classical sociological theory, contemporary sociological theory and genocide and political violence. He has published widely in the areas of hunger, poverty, race and ethnicity.