Calendar of Events

The Class of 2013 graduates as the College observes its bicentennial. Gregory White Smith, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author whose recent biography, Van Gogh: The Life, was called “magisterial” by the New York Times, will speak at Colby's 192nd Commencement. To mark the occasion, all honorary degrees this year will be presented to alumni. See more details on commencement and related activities.

This annual exhibition features art by seniors who have completed extensive work in their media.

Nicolás Alberto Dosman leads the Colby College Chorale, Colby-Kennebec Choral Society, and the Colby Symphony Orchestra in a performance of Fauré’s spectacular Requiem. Far from the painful and frightening impact often associated with this genre, Fauré’s Requiem stands apart as an innovative expression of a happy deliverance and an aspiration towards celestial delight. Eric Thomas will lead the Colby Symphony in Schumann’s Manfred overture and a work featuring the winner of the Colby Concerto Competition.

May 2, 3 and 4 at 7:30 p.m.

Theater and dance majors create and produce their own work with guided feedback from a team of faculty mentors. After a successful inaugural performance last year, the Theater and Dance Department is pleased to present round two of this innovative and selective creative research laboratory.

Barbara Leonard '83, vice president for programs at the Maine Health Access Foundation (MeHAF), will discuss current issues related to healthcare reform and access to health care. Her talk will draw from current issues at the state and/or national level. Health care is both a driver of employment and economic activity and a major driver of rising federal and state expenditures. Leonard also will share emerging information from several of MeHAF's grant making and policy research activities. 

The Maine Health Access Foundation is the state's largest private, non-profit foundation focused exclusively on health and health care. Leonard has worked with the foundation since 2007. She previously was a consultant with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and worked for over a decade at Maine's state health department, primarily focusing on chronic disease prevention and control. This event is co-sponsored by the Goldfarb Center, Student Health on Campus (SHOC), the Garrison Foster Health Center, Career Center, Psychology, and Sociology Departments.

Mia Mingus will be the guest speaker at the 2013 Ralph J. Bunche Symposium. Mingus is a writer and organizer working for disability justice and transformative justice. She identifies as a queer, physically disabled Korean woman and a transracial and transnational adoptee raised in the Caribbean, nurtured in the South, and now living on the West Coast. She works for community, interdependency, and home for all of us, not just some of us, and longs for a world where disabled children can live free of violence, with dignity and love. As her work for liberation evolves and deepens, her roots remain firmly planted in ending sexual violence.

This brief inter-faith remembrance, in the wake of the Boston Marathon attacks, will feature readings and prayers from a range of traditions, as well as time for silence and reflection.

Spring 2013 Hollis Lecture in Environmental Studies
Jeremy Jackson, Smithsonian Institute and Scripps

Overfishing, pollution, and climate change are laying the groundwork for a massive transformation of the oceans with dire implications for biodiversity and human well-being. Global climate change exacerbates these problems and is accelerating sea level rise that will flood the homes of a billion people by 2100. People are the problem and saving the oceans and ourselves will require fundamental changes in the ways we live and obtain food and energy for everything we do.

Jeremy Jackson is director of CMBC,  the William E. and Mary B. Ritter Professor of Oceanography at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, and a senior scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in the Republic of Panama. He was professor of ecology at the Johns Hopkins University from 1971 to 1985. Jackson is the author of more than100 scientific publications and five books. His current research includes the long-term impacts of human activities on the oceans and the ecological and evolutionary consequences of the gradual formation of the Isthmus of Panama.

Jackson is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and he received the Secretary's Gold Medal for Exceptional Service of the Smithsonian Institution in 1997 and the UCSD Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Science and Engineering in 2002. His work on overfishing was chosen by Discover magazine as the outstanding environmental achievement of 2001.

The annual Government Department lecture will feature recently retired Representative Barney Frank, who served for sixteen terms as member of the United States House of Representatives for the 4th District of Massachusetts. During his years in Congress he was conspicuous for his fierce intelligence, sarcastic wit, and proud liberalism.
 

In celebration of Earth Day, Colby students have organized a number of events including an Earth Day expo and film screenings of The Island President and Trashed. See a complete schedule of events here.

April 19 and 20 at 7:30 p.m.
Over the course of four shows, emerging playwrights, choreographers, actors, dancers, and designers demonstrate what the future of live performance could look like. This year’s showcase features a world premiere by Theater and Dance Professor Annie Kloppenberg and five plays by students. See student-created slideshow and promo video.

A panel featuring independent scholarship on Colby's Civil War veterans by Carter Stevens '13, 19th-Century Colby missionaries in the Far East by Stephanie Ruys de Perez '14, and Colby's World War I veterans by Katherine Fecteau '13, with comments by professors Elizabeth Leonard and Raffael Scheck. Part of the History Department's Bicentennial Lecture Series. Reception follows.

Francine D. Blau is Frances Perkins Professor of Industrial and Labor Relations and professor of Economics at Cornell University. She is also a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a research fellow of the Institute for the Study of Labor in Bonn, Germany, and of the Center for Economic Studies/Ifo Institute in Munich, Germany, and a research professor at the German Institute for Economic Research, Berlin, Germany.


 

She received her Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University and her B.S. from the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University.



 Blau has served as president of the Society of Labor Economists and the Labor and Employment Relations Association (formerly the Industrial Relations Research Association), vice president of the American Economic Association (AEA), president of the Midwest Economics Association, and chair of the AEA Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession. She is a fellow of the Society of Labor Economists, the American Academy of Political and Social Science, and the Labor and Employment Relations Association. In 2010, she received the IZA Prize for outstanding academic achievement in the field of labor economics; she was the first woman to receive this prestigious award. In 2001, she received the Carolyn Shaw Bell Award from the American Economic Association Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession for furthering the status of women in the economics profession.

Professor Allen Lynch from the Woodrow Wilson Department of Politics at the University of Virginia will deliver the 2013 Hunt Lecture. His books and monographs include: Vladimir Putin & Russian Statecraft (Potomac Books, 2011); How Russia is—Not—Ruled: Reflections on Russian Political Development (Cambridge University Press, 2005); Does Russia Have a Democratic Future? (Foreign Policy Association, 1997); Europe from the Balkans to the Urals (Oxford University Press/Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, 1996), with Reneo Lukic; The Cold War Is Over—Again (Westview Press, 1992); Political & Military Implications of the “Nuclear Winter” Theory (Institute for East-West Security Studies, 1988); and The Soviet Study of International Relations (Cambridge University Press, 1987), which received the Marshall D. Shulman Award of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies.

A painter for more than 50 years, Ed Douglas has traveled throughout his professional life to sources in the landscape that, in his words, resonate as "a natural and symbolic place, a refuge for solitude, work, and play, where nature and nurture combine and incubate slowly into paintings that compress my history yet breathe freely."

These investigations have brought him to Eastern and Western Europe, Scandinavia, Egypt, North Africa and the Near East. The paintings that result from his journeys are evocative of both the place and the reverie of being in its presence. Douglas received a BFA in painting from Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from San Francisco Art Institute. His work is represented in the collections of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Portland Museum of Art, San Francisco Art Institute Art Bank, Cincinnati Art Museum, and others. This talk is sponsored by the Humanities Art Lecture Fund.

The Gulf of Maine has long been considered to be among the most productive fishing areas on the planet. The historical fishery for Atlantic cod was so profitable and landings so great that it quickly became New England’s most important colonial industry. Though heavily fished, the Gulf continued to produce impressively until cod stocks collapsed along the eastern 400 km of New England’s coastal shelf in the 1990s.Twenty years later, cod stocks have still not recovered and show few signs of recovery.Cod were not the only depleted species along that coast. So many species of groundfish disappeared from the area that the entire eastern coastal shelf has reverted to a crustacean-dominated ecosystem. What factors contributed to this paradigm shift and is it possible that the fish-dominated ecosystem can be restored?Historical fishermen’s knowledge and period scientific data provided sufficient information about cod and other gadids to determine their distribution, population structure and movements. Evaluation of predator-prey dynamics and the processes associated with depletion give clues about what factors had triggered the collapse of cod and discovery of opportunities that could enhance their recovery.

Ted Ames is a founding board member and senior advisor of Penobscot East Resource Center, an external Graduate Faculty Member at University of Maine, Orono, and visiting research scientist at Bowdoin. He fished commercially for 28 years. He was formerly vice-chair of Maine Department of Marine Resources Hatchery Technology Committee, executive director of the Maine Gillnetters Association and director of Alden-Ames Lab, an environmental and analytical laboratory.Ames is the recipient of a 2005 MacArthur Award, 2007 Geddes W. Simpson Distinguished Lecturer at the University of Maine and Bowdoin’s visiting Coastal Studies Scholar in 2010-11. His current research explores the ecological connection between marine and riverine ecosystems.

Activist Shelby Knox will contextualize gender justice by examining how our culture enacts and responds to domestic and sexual violence and how it manifests in colleges. Knox is nationally known as the subject of the Sundance award-winning film The Education of Shelby Knox, a 2005 documentary chronicling her teenage activism for comprehensive sex education and gay rights in her southern Baptist community. She has appeared on Today, the Daily Show, Hardball, and sat down with both Dr. Phil and Al Franken to discuss sex education and youth activism. Knox travels across the country as an itinerant feminist organizer, doing trainings, workshops, and civil disobedience in the name of reproductive justice and sexual health. She is currently the director of Women’s Rights Organizing at change.org. Knox lives in New York City, where she is working on a book about the next generation of feminist activism and plotting the revolution via Twitter, handle @ShelbyKnox.

Woodsmen compete in events such as the pole climb, crosscut saw, and pulp toss.

Gerhard L. Weinberg, the William Rand Kenan Jr. Professor of History, Emeritus at the University of North Carolina, is one of the most distinguished historians of World War II and a leading expert on the foreign policy of Nazi Germany. His book A World in Arms: A Global History of World War II (Cambridge University Press, 1994, second edition 2005) has been characterized as a "brilliant and exhaustive masterwork" and as "splendid and truly encyclopedic." Weinberg was centrally involved in the analysis of captured German documents in the 1950s and discovered and edited Hitler's so-called "Second Book," a sequel to Mein Kampf that had not been published during Hitler's lifetime. Weinberg was a Fulbright professor, a Guggenheim Fellow, a senior scholar in residence at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, and president of the German Studies Association (GSA). Among the many honors bestowed on Weinberg is the Pritzker Military Library Literature Award for lifetime excellence in military writing. At Colby, Weinberg will present the 2013 Annual Berger Holocaust Lecture and discuss the role of Pope Pius XII during the Second World War, a subject that has inspired great controversy and many polemical works.

Professor Cal Mackenzie (government) first saw Vietnam as a soldier in 1970. He traveled to Vietnam again in January 2012 for a six-month Fulbright Fellowship. He'll show slides of Vietnam and Cuba and reflect on his journey to the two countries. Registration is required and lunch will be provided. Register with Megan Fossa at the Goldfarb Center: mevigue@colby.edu or 207-859-5300. See more of Mackenzie's work in this Colby magazine photo feature.

Author of fourteen books, and most recently The Politics of Gun Control, Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at SUNY Cortland Robert J. Spitzer will explore the issue of gun control and politics in light of recent events. "Gun control has proved to be one of the most enduringly contentious, even acrimonious issues in American politics. I set out to discover why," he said. 

Greg Lynn, architect and professor at UCLA and Yale is the founder of the studio Greg Lynn FORM, a firm that defines the cutting edge of design in a variety of fields. Time magazine named him one of the 100 most innovative people in the world for the 21st century, and Forbes named him one of the ten most influential living architects. In 2008, he won the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale of Architecture. His Korean Presbyterian Church of New York was officially listed by the New York City Landmarks Commission as one of the 30 most important buildings built in the city in the last 30 years. The buildings, projects, publications, teachings and writings associated with his office have been influential in the acceptance and use of advanced materials and technologies for design and fabrication. Lynn is a studio professor at UCLA’s School of Architecture and Urban Design where he is currently spearheading the development of an experimental research robotics lab. Since the turn of the century he has been the Davenport Visiting Professor at Yale. Lynn’s lecture has been approved for one CES credit from the American Institute of Architects and is open to the public without charge.

Egg-sploring Art begins with a scavenger hunt at the Colby museum followed by an egg-decorating workshop at Common Street Arts. This event is free and open to all ages, but attendance is limited and preregistration is required. To register, call 207.859.5613. Cosponsored by Waterville Main Street and Common Street Arts.

William G. Bowen will address the state of higher education today, whether or not there is an “opportunity” agenda for America, and whether or not we can and should teach values. Bowen was president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation from 1988 to 2006 and president of Princeton University, where he also served as professor of economics and public affairs, from 1972 to 1988. His tenure at the Mellon Foundation was marked by increases in the scale of the foundation’s activities, with annual appropriations reaching $220 million in 2000. He is the author or coauthor of more than 20 books, including most recently Lessons Learned: Reflections of a University President and Crossing the Finish Line: Completing College at America's Public Universities. Bowen is founding chairman of Ithaka Harbors and serves on the board of Ithaka/JSTOR.

Perry Link, Professor Emeritus, Princeton University; Chancellorial Professor, University of California, Riverside; co-translator and co-editor of work by Nobel Prize-winner Liu Xiaobo

What is the writer's place in China today? What should it be? What responsibilities does a writer have to readers? To the state? To art? To moral principle?

China's two recent Nobel Prize winners, Liu Xiaobo for peace, and Mo Yan for literature, offer some contrasting answers.

(See also Professor Link's 4 p.m. lecture March 18, "Slippery Jingles and Other Political Satire in China Today.")

Jonathan Hallstrom, guest conductor

The orchestra’s bicentennial homage continues when former Colby Symphony Orchestra conductor Jonathan Hallstrom interrupts his sabbatical year to return as guest conductor. The concert features Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7, written in 1813, the year of Colby’s founding. Also on the program are Gabriel Fauré’s Overture to Penelope, written in 1913, Colby’s centennial year; Stravinsky’s Ragtime for Eleven Instruments (1918); and Handel’s Eternal Source of Light Divine (1713), written exactly 100 years before Colby’s birth and featuring virtuoso trumpeter Mark Tipton and countertenor Michael Albert.

Lala (Ines Efron, in a performance called evocative of early Sissy Spacek and Chloe Sevigny) is the privileged teenage daughter of a powerful judge, and she’s fallen hard for her family’s maid, La Guayi (singer Mariela Vitale, making her feature-film debut). The two women plot to escape Buenos Aires and live together on the remote shores of Paraguay’s Lake Ypoa. Before they can carry out their plan, Lala’s father is murdered and she runs away from home and heads toward Guayi’s village in Paraguay, hoping that her lover will follow. While in Paraguay, she begins to explore Guayi’s troubled past. Lucía Puenzo / 96 min. / 2011 / Argentina, Spain, France

Heidi Henderson '83 brings her dance company, elephant JANE dance, to the Strider Theater stage. “In my dances the neatness of minimalist art meets the messiness of life. Simple structures, when filled with human bodies moving, create meaning." Henderson has danced in the companies of Bebe Miller, Nina Wiener, Peter Schmitz, Sondra Loring, and Paula Josa-Jones. Presented by the Theater and Dance Department as part of the the Bicentennial Alumni Professional Series.

This conference on the future of Maine's coastal communities, ecosystems, and fisheries will bring together experts on marine ecology, history, policy, law, and community development. The conference is free, and the public is welcome.
 
Carl Safina, an internationally recognized marine conservation activist, host of the PBS series Saving the Ocean, and director of the Blue Ocean Institute, will deliver the keynote address at 1 p.m. He is the inaugural Mellon Distinguished Fellow in Environmental Studies at Colby this academic year.
 
Formal presentations will conclude with a panel discussion including all presenters beginning at 4:20 p.m.
 
A full schedule of talks, with links to information about speakers and panelists, is at www.colby.edu/gulfofmaine. Speakers include experts from the Bigelow Laboratory for Marine Sciences, the Island Institute, the Conservation Law Foundation, Maine's Department of Marine Resources, and the University of Connecticut.

Mirken Curator of Education Lauren Lessing and Associate Professor of Music Steven Nuss explore Japanese ideas of spring as expressed in Japanese works in the Colby collection and in the ancient chanted poetry of the Noh theater.

Super PACs, micro targeting, novel voter mobilization, record-breaking fundraising, the gender gap, early voting, hidden cameras, and much more. As the 2012 election begins to fade into our collective memory, scholars are exploring whether recent trends will alter the nature of our systems. Helping us understand these undercurrents and sort out long-term implications will be a team of renowned scholars:

Ray La Raja, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Jennifer Lucas, St. Anselm College

Michael Franz, Bowdoin College

Tony Corrado, Colby College

Dan Shea, director of the Goldfarb Center for Public Affairs and Civic Engagement, will moderate.

The inaugural faculty lecture exchange between Colby and the faculty of Journalism at Moscow State will bring Mikhail Makeenko, a specialist in media theory and economics at Moscow State. Makeenko is the author of two books on the U.S. media and more than thirty scholarly articles. During his residency, he will provide a lecture about media censorship in what is considered by many to be one of the most dangerous countries to work as a journalist.

The Forge, North America’s most powerful new traditional Irish group, presents a dynamic fusion of Ireland’s yesterday and today, breathing fresh life into traditional dance music from the Emerald Isle. Hailing from both sides of the Atlantic, Maeve Gilchrist (harp and vocals), Anna Colliton (bodhran), Colby Music Associate Nicole Rabata (flutes), and Cara Frankowicz (fiddle) are leading performers of this music and have appeared together and in a variety of ensembles throughout North America, Europe, and Asia.

This conference will provide students, practitioners, and scholars with the opportunity to network with, and learn from, peers and leading experts in the field of large landscape conservation from North America and beyond.

Scheduled speakers will include leaders in large landscape conservation: Director of the Program on Conservation Innovation at the Harvard Forest James Levitt; E.L. Giddings Associate Professor of Forest Policy at the University of Maine Robert Lilieholm; Executive Director of The Nature Conservancy in Maine Mike Tetreault; and Senior Fellow at the Center for Natural Resources and Environmental Policy at the University of Montana Gary Tabor.

The conference is co-sponsored by Colby's Environmental Studies Program, the Goldfarb Center for Public Affairs and Civic Engagement, and the Lincoln Institute for Land Policy.

Registration and additional information about the conference 

Margaret Lowman, a world-renowned tropical canopy ecologist, is a professor at North Carolina State and director of the N.C. Museum of Natural Sciences. She will speak on Undergraduates Under the Trees: North Carolina's Nature Research Center, focusing on initiatives to get students of all ages and all abilities involved in field research.Lowman promotes cutting-edge research by students in developed and developing countries.The Meg Lowman Treetops Camp gives science education to at-risk teenage girls.This summer Lowman will be a mentor for students in wheelchairs studying forest canopies. Lowman has been sampling insects of small indigenous forests in Ethiopia in collaboration with Colby Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies Travis Reynolds and Colby environmental studies majors.Wherever she has worked, part of her approach has been to educate local children and have them collect data. Lowman shows why research experience is good for students and educators.

Text, lyrics, and projection score by Lynne Conner
Music and interactive multimedia by Jonathan Hallstrom
Performances at 4 and 5 p.m.
Advance tickets are required.

Light of the Mind is a theatrical multimedia performance work created by professors Lynne Conner (theater and dance) and Jon Hallstrom (music). The piece celebrates 200 years of liberal learning through music, text, and a projection score made up of hundreds of images from Colby's past and present. Professional musicians and artists perform with a student ensemble under the direction of Conner and Hallstrom.

William D. Adams is Colby's 19th president. Prior to joining Colby in 2000, he served as president of Bucknell for five years, and he taught political philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Santa Clara University. Adams served as coordinator of the Great Works in Western Culture program at Stanford University and vice president and secretary of Wesleyan in Connecticut. He has been an advocate of liberal arts education since his own undergraduate years at Colorado College, from which he graduated magna cum laude in 1972. He spent a year in France as a Fulbright Scholar and earned a Ph.D. in the History of Consciousness Program at the University of California at Santa Cruz.

Students, professors, and community members will give 15-minute talks. The event is ticketed and has limited seating. For those without tickets, there will be a live stream in the Pugh Center, Cotter Union.

Who we are is not as obvious as commercials, religious platitudes, or political slogans imply. Our identities are fragile, regularly mutating, and contested. Only within the last generation has nonsectarian ritual reemerged as a nuanced and helpful way for us to remain flexible while becoming clearer about who we are. Whether exercise routines, religious practice, or meditation, renewed forms of ritual expression now provide both nuance and coherence to more people. Examples from the raucous meal of early Christian groups, contemporary secular life and re-imagined religious practice prompt new ways of thinking about 21st-century identity. Sponsored by the the Religious Studies Department and the Office of Religious and Spiritual Life

Light of the Mind gets its name from Colby’s motto, Lux Mentis Scientia (“Knowledge is the Light of the Mind”). This 35-minute multimedia piece includes spoken word, song, dance, and animated projections of imagery from Colby's history, and it features the work of three professional and six student performers.

Tickets will be given away at the information desk in Pulver Pavilion (one per ID) on Tuesday, Feb. 19, from 7 a.m. to 1 a.m. If you can’t pick up your ticket yourself, you can give your ID to someone who can.

Performances are Feb. 27 at 4 and 5 p.m. in Strider Theater. Ticket holders need to be seated 15 minutes prior to the performance or the seat may be given to another patron.