Faculty Accomplishments

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.

Associate Professor of Art Bradley Borthwick has an exhibition of sculptures and prints on display in Puyloubier, France titled une œuvre...un monument...ou plutôt, me voilà au travail. On view Sept. 14-Oct. 11, 2024, this exhibition presents a sequence of marble sculptures and a series of photographic prints that collectively reflect upon a one-year relocation to the south of France. In the spirit of the flaneur, an exploration of the Bouches-du-Rhône, the Var, and the Luberon has informed a body of work that brings landscape topographies, material indexes, and cultural ritual into sculptural and print format. A sense of obscurity experienced when living slightly outside the language and customs of a place finds its relevance within the creative process, forming choices made within both stone carving and the photographic record.

Photographer and Professor of Art Gary Green will have his fourth photobook officially released at Paris Photo in November. Including over a dozen year's worth of work made in Central Maine, Almost Home describes the resilience of the natural world as it battles constant changes in the built environment. It is also a metaphoric telling of our own limited time on earth.  Printed in tritone in Bologna, Italy, it is his third photobook with L'Artiere Editions. Green has also been invited to exhibit his work from After Morandi—a visual dialogue with the modernist painter Giorgio Morandi—at Casa Morandi, now a small museum in Italy, where the painter lived and worked. The exhibit will happen in October 2025 during Bologna's Foto Industria Festival. 

Debra Spark, the Zacamy Professor of English (Creative Writing), had her article titled "Look Out!" published in American Scholar, a publication of Phi Beta Kappa. Subtitled "Why did it take so long to protect spectators of America’s favorite pastime?" Spark chronicles the fiction writer Susan Perabo's relationship with baseball.

Associate Professor of English Aaron Hanlon was recently named a  Faculty Champion and Fellow by the Center for Community News at the University of Vermont to promote journalism partnerships between students and community news organizations. The program is a national initiative to support the people running local news reporting programs at U.S. colleges and universities across the country. Hanlon plans to build journalism development and recruitment components into his first-year writing course, identify professional journalists to help mentor students, and establish journalism pathways for interested students.