Professor of Psychology Melissa Glenn has coauthored a paper, “Overtraining Strengthens the Visual Discrimination Memory Trace Outside the Hippocampus in Male Rats,” recently accepted in the journal Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience. This paper was the culmination of a multi-year collaboration with colleagues from Trent University in Ontario, Canada, and describes a series of experiments that...
Visiting Assistant Professor of History Virginia Olmsted McGraw has been awarded the Robert C. Tucker/Stephen F. Cohen Dissertation Prize for her dissertation, “Soviet by Design: Fashion, Consumption, and International Competition during Late Socialism, 1948-1982.” This prize is given to an “outstanding English-language doctoral dissertation in Soviet or Post-Soviet politics and history in the tradition practiced by Robert C. Tucker and Stephen F....
Assistant Professor of Geology Bess Koffman has been awarded a $16,700 grant by the Outreach Program of the North Pacific Research Board (NPRB) to support the development and teaching of a week-long science course, Volcanoes and the Ocean Ecosystem, for 4th- and 5th-grade students. “Following two iterations of teaching the course to Pribilof Islands students (Bering Sea, Alaska), we...
Assistant Professor of Computer Science Eric Aaron is the senior co-chair of the third annual Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence conference, held next February in Vancouver. As co-chair, Aaron reviews applicants and puts together programming for the conference. The AAAI’s mission is to advance the tools, techniques, and overall state of artificial intelligence with a...
Assistant Professor of Computer Science Hannen Wolfe’s interactive sound exhibition Cacophonic Choir was selected for the international contest New Technological Art Award (NTAA) 2022. Out of 836 applications received from around the world, Cacophonic Choir was one of 20 works selected to be exhibited in Ghent, Belgium, this February. The exhibition aims to bring attention to the first-hand...
Professor of Art Véronique Plesch contributed an essay to the Fall 2021 Maine Arts Journal. The essay, Graffiti: Captivity and Freedom, is part of the journal’s partnership with the statewide initiative Freedom & Captivity, spearheaded by Catherine Bestman, the Francis F. Bartlett and Ruth Bartlett Professor of Anthropology. Plesch’s essay stems from her research on graffiti, and specifically “on graffiti...
Colby’s Charles A. Dana Professor of Education Adam Howard will be a visiting scholar at Purdue University’s Honors College for three days in late September. Howard, an expert on social class issues in education, will give talks in classes, present a lecture at the Graduate School of Education, and deliver a keynote titled “Crisis of Privilege.”
Damon Mayrl, associate professor of sociology, has coauthored a new study, “Visualizing the Expanding Space of Consecration in American Sociology, 1980-2020,” which was recently published in Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World. “We show that the number of award-winning books and articles in sociology has continued to increase, even as membership in the discipline’s flagship association,...
Associate Professor of Sociology Damon Mayrl has coauthored a new paper, “Religion at the Frontline,” forthcoming in the journal Sociology of Religion. The study examines how religion mattered to local officials’ responses to the Covid-19 pandemic. “We found that overall, local officials personally and publicly complied with public health recommendations,” said Mayrl, “but that religious affiliation and religious nationalism...
Joanna Weidler-Lewis, visiting assistant professor of education, was the lead author of a paper published in the journal Mind, Culture, and Activity. Titled “The identity affordances of tools: an examination of visual design tool use in STEM,” the article “compares how visual design tools are used during an internship for high schoolers co-researching science journalism through infographics” and...
Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies Stacy-ann Robinson has been invited to visit Perry World House at the University of Pennsylvania. Through its rich programming, Perry World House facilitates critical conversations about global policy challenges and fosters interdisciplinary research on these topics. It presents workshops and colloquia, welcomes distinguished visitors, and produces content for global audiences and policy leaders around...
Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies Stacy-ann Robinson delivered the keynote address at the Conference on Climate Adaptation Finance, held Sept. 7, 2021. In her address, she stressed that “the time is right for a new justice paradigm” for financing climate change adaptation in small island developing states and called for “more creative strategies to expand...
Assistant Professor of Government Nicholas Jacobs had a paper published in Publius: The Journal of Federalism. Titled “Federalism, Polarization, and Policy Responsibility during COVID-19: Experimental and Observational Evidence from the United States,” the paper “considers the ways in which partisanship structured public attitudes about the United States’ multiple governments as each tried to mitigate the spread of...
Lauren Yoshizawa, assistant professor of education, had a paper published in the journal Educational Policy. Titled “Fidelity, Rigor, and Relevance: How SEAs are Approaching the ESSA Evidence Requirements,” the paper discusses her study of eight states and their three different approaches to the evidence requirements as mandated by the Every Student Succeeds Act. “Through interviews with state...
Associate Professor of Psychology Christopher Soto coauthored a new paper, “An integrative framework for conceptualizing and assessing social, emotional, and behavioral skills: The BESSI,” accepted to the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. “As the title suggests, it describes the development and validation of a conceptual framework for personality-related skills (e.g., social engagement, emotional resilience,...
Associate Professor of English Elizabeth Sagaser gave a presentation, “Generative Reading: Shakespeare, Dickinson, Shockley,” at the Emily Dickinson International Society Annual Meeting Aug. 7-8. Integrating cognitive poetics, history, and literary experiment, Sagaser explored 19th-century American poet Emily Dickinson’s critical, creative reading of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, particularly those that figure and address future readers. She then turned...
Visiting Assistant Professor of Economics Benjamin Scharadin has coauthored a paper, “Household time activities, food waste, and diet quality: the impact of non-marginal changes due to COVID-19,” in Review of Economics of the Household. “This paper looks at how members of households’ time allocations changed with Covid-19 (time spent on grocery shopping, childcare, going out...
Laurie Osborne, the Zacamy Professor of English, published her paper “Canon Fodder and Conscripted Genres: The Hogarth Project and the Modern Shakespeare Novel” in the journal Critical Survey. The paper will be published in the summer 2021 issue 33.2.
A short story, “Superstition,” by Sarah Braunstein, assistant professor of English (creative writing), appears in the Aug. 9 issue of The New Yorker. The web version includes an audio recording of Braunstein reading the story as well as a link to an interview with her, where she mentions Colby students.
Professor of Psychology Melissa Glenn, Ariel Batallán Burrowes ’15, Waylin Yu ’15, Lisa Blackmer-Raynolds ’19, Amanda Norchi ’20, and Lab and Research Coordinator Amanda L. Doak have coauthored a new paper, “Progression of behavioral deficits during periadolescent development differs in female and male DISC1 knockout rats,” published in Genes, Brain and Behavior. “In the paper, we report...
