Véronique Plesch, professor of art, has one of her photos of early modern graffiti in an interactive database map of world graffiti at the exhibition “Sur les murs, Histoire(s) de graffitis,” organized by the Centre des monuments nationaux, château de Vincennes through Nov. 11, 2018. The database will be available after the exhibition ends. Plesch also...
Professor of Education Adam Howard has a first-person essay in Vox about his research on the culture at elite schools and how it relates to the allegations against Brett Kavanaugh. “The culture of elite schools encourages sexual assaults and humiliation as well as covering them up,” Howard wrote Sept. 27. “As Kavanaugh himself put it during a speech...
Tilar Mazzeo, the Clara C. Piper Associate Professor of English, appeared Sept. 26 on The Exchange, an NHPR podcast, discussing her new biography, Eliza Hamilton: The Extraordinary Life and Times of the Wife of Alexander Hamilton. Listen to Mazzeo talk about her book, which “follows Eliza Hamilton through her early years, to the ups and downs of her...
Loren McClenachan, the Elizabeth and Lee Ainslie Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies, and her colleagues at the Monterey Bay Aquarium received a grant for $46,012 from NOAA’s Bluefin Tuna Research Program. Their collaborative project, “Historical data mining to inform Bluefin tuna stock assessments” has involved several Colby students, including Duncan Coles ’19, a 2017-18 F. Russell Cole Student...
Professor of Education Adam Howard was interviewed Sept. 21 on NPR’s Here and Now show in an episode titled “‘Incredible’ Privilege At Elite Prep Schools Like Those Kavanaugh And His Accuser Attended.” Howard, who studies privilege and elite secondary education, commented on the role schools play for elite people. “Part of what elite schools do is teach students...
Julie Millard, Colby’s Dr. Gerald and Myra Dorros Professor of Chemistry, led a team of students and staff that led to the paper “Genotype and Phenotype of Caffeine Metabolism: A Biochemistry Laboratory Experiment” that appeared in the Journal of Chemical Education Aug. 9. Coauthors include students Tenzin Passang ’19, Jiayu Ye ’18, and Gabriel M. Kline ’19, and staff members Tina M....
Associate Professor of Art Daniel Harkett has published an essay on the innovative German curator and museum director Alexander Dorner. Harkett explores Dorner’s transformative plans for the museum at the Rhode Island School of Design in the 1930s and the resistance Dorner encountered from the local elite. The essay, “Tea vs. Beer: Class, Ethnicity, and...
Daniel Harkett, associate professor of art, wrote an academic review Sept. 7 of the volume Artistes, savants et amateurs: Art et sociabilité au XVIIIe siècle (1715–1815) for the College Art Association. Harkett offers comments on each of the book’s five sections, in the end concluding that “for an art historian of any period, this book offers a...
The Sept. 14 New York Times includes a book review by Neil Gross, the Charles A. Dana Professor of Sociology. Gross reviewed Rule Makers, Rule Breakers: How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire Our World by psychologist Michele Gelfand. “Her aim isn’t to guide readers through all the complex elements that make up a culture, but to draw attention to...
Herb Wilson, the Leslie Brainerd Arey Professor of Biosciences, was quoted in a Sept. 13 Popular Science article titled “Our seasons are out of whack, which is really bad for migratory birds.” Wilson was asked to respond to a recent study in PLOS One on an unevenness in spring’s early arrival across North America and the consequences for migratory...
Margaret Ericson, arts librarian, is a featured guest singer at the Frank Harte Festival of Traditional Singing in Dublin, Ireland, Sept. 21-23, representing “old style” North American ballad traditions alongside other singers from Donegal, Dublin, Cork, and Mayo. Ericson is an accomplished singer and will bring ballads from the Irish tradition found throughout Appalachia, Maine, and the Canadian Maritimes....
Jim Siodla, assistant professor of economics, won the 2018 Larry Neal Prize for his article “Clean slate: Land-use changes in San Francisco after the 1906 disaster,” which was published in the July 2017 issue of the journal Explorations in Economic History. The $1,000 prize, awarded by the editors and editorial board of the journal, was presented during the...
James Fleming, the Charles A. Dana Professor of Science, Technology, and Society, was a panelist at the “Right Use of the Earth: Knowledge, Power, and Duties in a Finite Planet” conference in Paris in May chaired by Bruno Latour, a leading sociologist of science, famous for his book Laboratory Life. Latour’s co-worker, Alexandra Arènes, talked of “critical zones” and...
A $231,571 National Science Foundation grant was awarded to Robert Gastaldo, the Whipple-Coddington Professor of Geology, and Ian Glasspool, research scientist in geology, for their project titled “RUI: The Timing and Evolution of Devonian Fire Systems and Their Implications for Atmospheric Oxygen Concentration.” This marks the 10th NSF grant Gastaldo has received since he began at the...
Lydia Moland, associate professor of philosophy, has edited a book just out—All Too Human: Laughter, Humor, and Comedy in Nineteenth-Century Philosophy (Springer). The book offers an analysis of humor, comedy, and laughter as philosophical topics in the 19th century, traces the introduction of humor as a new aesthetic category, and suggests important distinctions within the aesthetic philosophies...
Sarah Emily Duff, visiting assistant professor in history, wrote a guest post titled “Dried Fruit and the Cocktail Menace: Race, Food, and Purity in Interwar South Africa” for The Historical Cooking Project. Drawing upon her research, Duff discusses the South African Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) and how the “preoccupation with clean eating is part...
Sonja Thomas, assistant professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, published an article titled “‘This is America’ and the Global Erasure of Black Vernacular Traditions” in ASAP/J, where she compares the song and the video with imitations, including the cartoon “This is South India,” which, she writes, “flips the entire narrative of ‘This is America.’” Thomas also points...
Five new poems from Adrian Blevins, associate professor of English, have been published this summer. Click through to read her poems at Connotation Press: An Online Artifact, “Love Poem for Leonardo da Vinci” and “Status, Alas;” diode, “Cult Status” and “Social Status;” and Storyscape Literary Journal, “Southern Status Anxiety.” These poems come from a new manuscript-in-progress by Blevins. Watch...
A new book by Britt Halvorson, faculty fellow in anthropology, has been released. Conversionary Sites: Transforming Medical Aid and Global Christianity from Madagascar to Minnesota (University of Chicago Press, June 2018) draws on more than two years of participant observation in the American Midwest and in Madagascar among Lutheran clinicians, volunteer laborers, healers, evangelists, and former missionaries,...
Véronique Plesch was invited to contribute an essay in a volume published by the French Center of National Monuments: “Espace et temps, individu et communauté: Le Graffiti comme parole collective.” In Sur les murs: Histoire(s) de Graffitis. Ed. Laure Pressac. Paris: Éditions du Patrimoine/Centre des Monuments Nationaux, 2018, 74–78. There was a book launch June 6 at the Château de Vincennes in Paris. The...
