Faculty Accomplishments

Professor of Mathematics Scott Taylor coauthored an article published in the Mathematical Association of America's news magazine Focus. His paper, "Math + The Arts is More than the Sum of its Parts," details Sum Camp, which Taylor organizes each summer in Waterville. "Sum Camp is our collaborative attempt to impact our local community by infusing music, art, theatre, and playground games with mathematics in a way that reinforces K–5 state mathematics standards. We take a nontraditional approach to traditional mathematics," he writes in the article.

Professor of Art Véronique Plesch published her paper "On the Patrimonialization of Graffiti.” In Medieval Cultural Heritage, Then and Now (Mediaevalia 45 [2024]: 205–29). In her abstract, Plesch writes that, "'Graffiti' is not a word one immediately associates with the concept of 'heritage.' In fact, the two are more often than not thought as antinomic and yet, as this paper argues, we are at a crucial moment of what can be termed the 'patrimonialization' of graffiti. Retracing the steps involved in this process of patrimonialization, starting with Raffaelle Garrucci’s study of Pompeian graffiti in the first half of the nineteenth century, this paper surveys the steps that have paved the way for a recognition of graffiti’s significance and the need for preservation. Recent initiatives demonstrate a new awareness, expressed in many ways through the work of individual scholars and heritage agencies. This paper interrogates the mutations that have led to such a renewed conception of graffiti as worthy of scholarly study, preservation, and display, while considering the implications and gains that such a patrimonialization holds." One of the issue's editors called Plesch's article "a mainstay of the issue."

Catherine Besteman, the Francis F. Bartlett and Ruth K. Bartlett Professor of Anthropology, has won a $187,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for her project "The Praxis of Care: Carceral Disruptions and Community Resistance." The grant will cover her research and writing leading to a coauthored book that examines the experience of incarceration and caring for inmates in Maine and Massachusetts. This peer-reviewed grant, through relatively small, enables Besteman to continue her work in an important ongoing area of research. It was among $37.5 million in grants for 240 humanities projects across the country.

Michael Burke, professor of English and creative writing, emeritus, published an essay titled "You Move to Maine" in an anthology called Alive to This from Littoral Press. The anthology includes essays by 20 writers from all parts of Maine who share their experiences of living fully. Burke is one of two memoirists who contributed to the publication.

Assistant Professor of Geology Evan Dethier won the Kirk Bryan Award for Research Excellence from the Geological Society of America's Geomorphology and Quaternary Geology Division. The award recognizes a publication (within past five years) of distinction advancing the science of geomorphology or Quaternary geology. Detheir was recognized for being the lead author of the paper "Rapid changes to global river suspended flux by humans," which appeared in the journal Science in 2022.

Assistant Professor of Performance, Theater, and Dance AB Brown won a $10,000 award from the Ellis-Beauregard Foundation in support of their research project The Garden of Trans Care. Brown is one of five Maine artists to win the award. The Rockland, Maine-based foundation supports "bold, compelling, risk-taking work in and outside of the standard exhibition venue," according to a press release. “The support of the Ellis-Beauregard Project Grant will allow me to materialize The Garden of Trans Care, a space for staging collective mourning and care for transgender people and for more broadly gathering and celebrating trans community in Maine and beyond,” said Brown, who will teach a class around it in the spring 2025 semester. 

For the fall issue of the Maine Arts Journal, Professor of Art Véronique Plesch wrote the introduction to the issue. She also wrote an essay for her "Art Historical Musings" column titled "Who's There," in which she discusses portraiture, the issue's theme. Plesch notes that "fundamental tensions underlie portraiture," and goes on to quote the great German art historian Erwin Panofsky: "A portrait aims by definition at two essential and, in a sense, contradictory qualities: individuality, or uniqueness; and totality, or wholeness." 

Dasan Thamattoor, the J. Warren Merrill Professor in Chemistry and Natural History, is co-lead author in a paper recently published in the journal Nature Communications. Titled "Probing the alkylidene carbene–strained alkyne equilibrium in polycyclic systems via the Fritsch–Buttenberg–Wiechell rearrangement," the paper's significance lies in the fact that this is the first instance in which both an exocyclic alkylidene carbene and its cycloalkyne Fritsch–Buttenberg–Wiechell rearrangement product have been "trapped." Strained cycloalkynes are valuable building blocks in synthetic chemistry because of their high degree of reactivity and ability to form structurally complex scaffolds, common features of many pharmaceuticals and natural products.

Continuing conclusions from an NSF grant have resulted in the acceptance of three new publications from the collaboration of Robert A. Gastaldo, the Whipple-Coddington Professor of Geology, Emeritus, and Research Scientist Ian Glasspool. Two publications were accepted in the high-profile journal Geology from studies done in the Maritimes of New Brunswick and Baxter State Park, Maine, with a companion paper in Palaios on the deep-time wildfire record in northern Maine. The two Geology papers are open access and titled "To rush into the secret house of death; the fate of a Tournaisian plant," with coauthors from the University of North Carolina, New Brunswick Museum, and New Brunswick Department of Natural Resources; and "Don't mind the ‘Charcoal Gap’: a reassessment of Devonian wildfire." The manuscript focused on new charcoal records in northern Maine is titled "Through fire, and through water, an abundance of Mid-Devonian charcoal" and the reconstruction of the Trout Valley Formation's Middle Devonian estuary ecosystem is featured on the journal cover.

Associate Professor of Geology Bess Koffman coauthored a paper published in Nature Geoscience, the top journal for publishing Earth sciences research. Titled "Pollution drives multidecadal decline in subarctic methanesulfonic acid," the paper discusses the findings from a study on ice cores from Alaska and Greenland, led by Dartmouth University, that "found that air pollution from the burning of fossil fuels reaches the remote Arctic in amounts large enough to alter its fundamental atmospheric chemistry," according to a press release.