Associate Professor of Global Studies Maple Razsa won the 2016 William A. Douglass Prize in Europeanist Anthropology for his monograph Bastards of Utopia: Living Radical Politics After Socialism. The annual prize, given by the Society for the Anthropology of Europe, honors the best book published in Europeanist anthropology. Razsa’s project is a “multimedia approach [that] offers substantial innovations not...
Ainslie Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies Loren McClenachan coauthored an article titled “Collateral damage to marine and terrestrial ecosystems from Yankee whaling in the 19th century,” which appeared in Ecology and Evolution. The results of the research show that “the ecosystem impacts of whaling reverberated on both marine and coastal environments.” The article was a collaboration among McClenachan, Joshua...
An op-ed by Professor of Education Mark Tappan calls for resistance to Donald Trump’s “toxic masculinity,” noting its perpetrators and sources, while also pointing to examples of healthy masculinity. “White working-class men are suffering, economically, socially, and physically,” Tappan writes in the Portland Press Herald Oct. 23, and their allegiance to Trump stems from “fear and shame...
Bartlett Professor of Anthropology Catherine Besteman will present a paper titled “Refugee Matters and the Anthropological Gaze” at the 115th annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association. Besteman’s paper will be part of session called Life Matters: Accountability, Complicity, Politics sponsored by the Association for Political and Legal Anthropology and the Society for Cultural Anthropology....
Associate Professor of Philosophy Lydia Moland will give a keynote address at the fourth annual Lehigh Philosophy Conference Oct. 27-28. Moland’s talk, “Artistic Idealism: Hegelian Themes in Contemporary Art,” reflects her expertise on Hegel and her most recent project, a comprehensive interpretation of Hegel’s aesthetics. Moland received a 2015 grant from the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst to...
Assistant Professor of Art Bradley Borthwick installed a site-specific sculpture at Borthwick Castle, in Midlothian, Scotland. The project, “Flodden—The Mote of Locherwart,” investigates past intent upon a landscape and the impact of Borthwick’s familial ancestry within feudal structures of 16th-century Scotland. With an English longbow and several hundred arrows made to historical specification, Borthwick addresses the...
Professor of Education Lyn Mikel Brown has released her sixth book, Powered by Girl: A Field Guide to Supporting Youth Activists (Beacon Press, 2016). An advocate for and mentor to youth activists, Brown interviews girls and women on the frontlines of activism, and her book acts as a field guide for their adult supporters. She argues...
Dana Professor of Sociology Neil Gross responded to the FBI’s recently released crime stats with a New York Times op-ed titled “Is There a ‘Ferguson Effect’?” In it he examines theories about why the crime rate has gone up. Conservatives “claim is that crime rose because the police found themselves hamstrung in a political environment in which...
Tilar Mazzeo, Clara C. Piper Associate Professor of English, released a new book titled Irena’s Children (Simon & Schuster) that tells the true story of a woman who saved thousands of Jewish children in Nazi-occupied Poland during the Holocaust. Kirkus Reviews named Irena’s Children one of the 10 most anticipated nonfiction books of fall 2016, and wrote, “Mazzeo chronicles...
Tanya Sheehan, associate professor and chair of art, edited Grove Art Guide to Photography, to be published October 2016 by Oxford University Press. A field guide for students, instructors, and scholars, the Grove Art Guide to Photography provides a thorough overview of photography’s history, from the early 19th century to the present. This wide-ranging volume examines photographic...
Kenan Professor of Government L. Sandy Maisel has an op-ed in the Aug. 19 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette titled “The Trump Phenomenon,” on Trump’s statements about a rigged system. “The danger is that Mr. Trump will convince his followers that the system defeated him,” Maisel writes. “And that may have serious consequences for our democracy.” On Aug. 21...
A World Bank Policy Research working paper authored by Assistant Professor of Economics Sahan T. M. Dissanayake and collaborators was published in a special issue of the World Bank Research Digest. Dissanayake’s paper showcases World Bank research on International Development Association countries and was published to coincide with the IDA18 replenishment meetings held in Myanmar. The...
Assistant Professor of Government Laura Seay used a series of tweets to respond to Donald Trump’s call to shut down the Clinton Foundation. An expert on the Democratic Republic of Congo, Seay first tweeted “Surfacing from vacation to throw some knowledge at this nonsense,” and continued “I know teens & young adults who were kids then &...
David Strohl, assistant professor of anthropology, has received a six-month writing fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Goettingen, Germany. From July to December Strohl will complete work on a manuscript for a book project titled Moral projects: social imaginaries of religious revival and civic engagement among the...
In a New York Times op-ed titled “The Decline of Unions and the Rise of Trump,” Dana Professor of Sociology Neil Gross explores why unions are not as effective at pushing their members to “overcome prejudices bearing on politics” as they have been historically. Gross asks why unions haven’t “been able to tamp down the appeal of...
Professor of Art Véronique Plesch will deliver the plenary lecture “La pared y la piel: inscripción y reinscripción, cruzando fronteras” at the Second International Symposium in Comparative Literature “Cruzando fronteras: traducción, transposición, transmutación” in Bogotá, Colombia. The symposium is organized by the Department of Literature of the National University of Colombia, in collaboration with the...
A book that Professor of English David Suchoff translated and coedited, In Those Nightmarish Days: The Ghetto Reportage of Peretz Opoczynski and Josef Zelkowicz, was reviewed in Forward June 11. Suchoff translated most of the subjects’ writings from Yiddish in this “compendium that takes its name from the final story, a cri de coeur about the...
Professor of Government Dan Shea is quoted in a Washington Post story about Republican vice presidential candidate Mike Pence, who has been called “apologist-in-chief” for cleaning up Donald Trump’s “messes.” While most vice presidential candidates are on the offense, Pence’s role is reversed. “He has gone from attack dog to pooper scooper,” Shea told the Post, which...
Whipple-Coddington Professor of Geology Robert Gastaldo received a two-year grant from the National Science Foundation to continue his research in South Africa. The grant, Gastaldo’s eighth from the NSF since coming to Colby in 1999, supports his groundbreaking work on the End-Permian extinction event that he has researched since 2003 in South Africa’s Karoo Basin....
Associate Professor of Biology Catherine R. Bevier is one of three editors of the book Amphibian and Reptile Adaptations to the Environment: Interplay Between Physiology and Behavior (CRC Press, 2016). Bevier, an expert on animal behavior and behavioral ecology, wrote one of the chapters in the volume, “Physiological and Biochemical Correlates of Calling Behavior in Anurans with...
