In a Washington Post essay by Assistant Professor of English Aaron Hanlon titled “The real threat to free speech on campus isn’t coming from the left,” Hanlon argues that, “For years now, conservative pundits and politicians have amplified and exploited a small number of elite-college speech controversies for political gain. The benefit of hindsight shows they’ve been...
Steve Simon, professor of the practice of international relations, is coauthor of an article in the November/December issue of Foreign Affairs titled “America’s Great Satan: The 40-Year Obsession With Iran.” When historians look back at countries most feared by the United States following the end of the Cold War, “only one country would be depicted as a persistent and...
Robert Gastaldo, the Whipple-Coddington Professor of Geology, is the featured speaker at the New Hampshire Geological Society’s fall meeting. Gastaldo talk is titled “The Terrestrial Record of the End-Permian Mass Extinction – Karoo Province, South Africa,” which will discuss the end-Permian extinction event as it is recorded in South Africa, as a model for the Sixth...
Keith Peterson, associate professor of philosophy, published a book just out, Nicolai Hartmann Ontology: Laying the Foundations (Walter De Gruyter, October 2019), which is the first English translation of the German philosopher’s first volume of his four-volume ontological work. “The book deals with ‘what is insofar as it is,’ and its four parts tackle traditional ontological assumptions and prejudices and...
Jim Fleming, the Charles A. Dana Professor of Science, Technology, and Society, was an invited guest speaker at MIT’s annual PAOC (Program in Atmospheres, Oceans, and Climate) retreat at Jiminy Peak Mountain Resort in western Massachusetts. PAOC is a subset of graduate students, postdocs, researchers, and faculty in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary...
Marta Ameri, assistant professor of art, published an article titled “Variations on a Theme: Iconographic Variability in the Horned Anthropomorphic Figures of the Indus Civilization” in the most recent issue of Artibus Asiae. The article revisits two of the most distinctive motifs found in the corpus of seals and sealings from the Greater Indus Valley in order...
Mark Mayer, faculty fellow in English, contributed a story, titled “The Clown,” in the recently released book The Best American Mystery Stories (Houghton, Mifflin, Harcourt). He also received a five-week funded summer residency at the Djerassi Resident Artists Program in California.
Professor of Art Véronique Plesch is the guest assistant editor for the Fall 2019 issue of the Maine Arts Journal: UMVA Quarterly. Organized around special themes, the journal features essays by and about artists, interviews, submissions by members of the Union of Maine Visual Artists (UMVA), poetry, UMVA updates about local chapters and current projects, and more. In...
A book by Chandra Bhimull, associate professor of anthropology and African-American studies, has been awarded honorable mention in the 2019 American Ethnological Society Sharon Stephens Prize competition. Bhimull’s book Empire in the Air: Airline Travel and the African Diaspora (2017, NYU Press) examines the role that race played in the inception of the airline industry. “This important topic is...
Steven Simon, professor of the practice of international relations, coauthored an article titled “How Trump Can Escape His Iran Jam” that appeared in Politico and was also picked up by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Simon and his coauthors have a combined 80 years experience in U.S. Middle East policy, and they concur “that...
Laurie Osborne, the Zacamy Chair of English, contributed a chapter to the forthcoming book The Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Global Appropriation, which “brings together a variety of different voices to examine the ways that Shakespeare has been adapted and appropriated onto stage, screen, page, and a variety of digital formats,” according to the publisher. Osborne’s...
This summer Mary Ellis Gibson, the Arthur Jeremiah Roberts Professor of Literature and chair of the English Department, published her latest book, Science Fiction in Colonial India, 1835–1905. [While the publication date is March, copies were not available in the U.S. until June.] This collection of stories shows, for the first time, how science fiction writing developed in India...
Professor of English and Creative Writing Michael Burked penned a light-hearted essay that appeared in the Appalachian Mountain Club Outdoors magazine. Titled “A Maine River Guide Reflects on Taking His Grown Kids Paddling,” the essay recounts the author’s feelings at giving his children instructions before rafting a stretch of the Kennebec River in western Maine. “My charges...
Kerill O’Neill, professor of classics and director of the Center for the Arts and Humanities, wrote an article titled “Creating a Space for the Humanities: Colby Center for the Arts and Humanities” published in July by CHCI. The article recounts the formation of the center and its programs and successes to date. Among the lessons...
Disability Studies and the Environmental Humanities, an anthology co-edited by Jay Sibara, assistant professor of English, has received critical reviews in top environmental literature and disability studies journals, including in ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Disability & Society, and Disability Studies Quarterly, which said the book “delivers a marvelous first-of-its-kind compendium in this quickly growing and dynamic intersection...
An essay by Aaron Hanlon, assistant professor of English, appeared in Inside Higher Ed Sept. 9. His piece, titled “Centering the Humanities,” discusses how “humanities centers and institutes are key to improving the image of the humanities among the public and policy makers.” Hanlon argues that institutions need to better define what the humanities are and to...
Professor of English Debra Spark has had several essays and stories published in the last since May. Spark also won a residency at the artist colony Arteles in Finland. Here are the titles, publications, and links (when available): “Something Had Gone Wrong,” Cincinnati Review (short story), spring 2019 “A Container for Art,” Decor Maine, May 2019 “Writer Susan...
Stacy-ann Robinson, Colby’s new assistant professor of environmental studies, has been invited to share her expertise on climate change adaptation in small islands by being a contributing author to Chapter 15 (Small Islands) of Working Group II’s contribution to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The IPCC is the...
Laura Seay, assistant professor of government, wrote the article “To Cure Ebola Will Take More Than a Pill” that appeared in Foreign Affairs Sept. 4. While experimental drugs are helping the country with its latest Ebola outbreak, “eradicating Ebola in Congo will require building public trust among Congolese and working with community organizations in order to reach...
An essay by Jim Fleming, the Charles A. Dana Professor of Science, Technology, and Society, titled “Terraforming Planets, Geoengineering Earth” is a finalist for the 100 Year Starship Canopus Award for Excellence in the “original non-fiction” category. The Canopus Awards are administered by the Dorothy Jemison Foundation for Excellence with support from the National Aeronautics...
