Faculty Accomplishments

Matthew Cumbie, visiting assistant professor of performance, theater, and dance, was invited into a cohort of creatives and changemakers through the Creative Community Fellows: New England Program of the National Arts Strategies. This cohort is an eight-month professional development program meant to support, connect, and further the work of the 20 folks in the cohort. The fellowship also comes with a grant award to support their work. Cumbie will use this opportunity to further various threads of programs and performances connected to Of This Place, an original work he created and performed at Colby in February 2024.

Assistant Professor of Mathematics Tamar Friedmann and Qidong He '21 had their paper "Counting conjugacy classes of elements of finite order in exceptional Lie groups" published in the journal Combinatorial Theory. The paper continues the study of two numbers associated with Lie groups, N(G,m) and N(G,m, s).

Bess Koffman, associate professor of geology, provided an interview on the program Yukon Morning with Elyn Jones on the CBC Yukon. In mid-June, Koffman, Audrey Lemoine '25, and other collaborators from around the world were in the Yukon doing fieldwork looking at the interplay of climate, glaciers, and dust. Funding came in part from the Buck Lab for Climate and Environment to support a day of helicopter time, providing access to four glaciers that drain from the St. Elias Mountains. Koffman also acknowledged INTERACT support (from the EU) for the fieldwork.

The summer 2024 issue of the Maine Arts Journal is out with contributions by Professor of Art Véronique Plesch. She wrote the introduction along with her "Art Historical Musings" column with an essay titled "Sketchbook Musings" in which she mentions an early 17th-century drawing in the Colby College Museum of Art. For this issue dedicated to the sketchbook, she also shared some images from her diaries.

Associate Professor of Geology Bess Koffman received the Next Generation Award from the American Quaternary Association. The award recognizes "committed and creative leadership in advancing inclusion, diversity, equity, and access in science," the association notes.  Koffman is a geochemist and climate scientist who analyzes mineral dust and volcanic ash preserved in layers of glacial ice.

Professor of English and Creative Writing Adrian Blevins won a 2024 Maine Literary Award in the poetry category for Status Pending (Four Way Books, 2023), her fourth and most recent collection of poems. The literary awards is an annual competition sponsored by the  Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. Blevins's other awards and honors include the Wilder Prize from Two Sylvias Press, a Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and a Rona Jaffe Writer’s Foundation Award.

Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies Gail Carlson coauthored a paper in the Maine Policy Review titled "Roles for Maine’s Physicians in the Climate Crisis."  Carlson and Megan Anderson surveyed 108 Maine physicians about climate change and health, reporting that "78 percent believe that climate change poses a threat to the health of their patients, particularly for asthma, vector-borne diseases, heat-related illnesses, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and mental health problems."

Tanya Sheehan, the Ellerton M. and Edith K. Jetté Professor of Art, and Professor Suzanne Hudson (University of Southern California) coedited a new transnational history of modernist art that connects discourses on art as therapy to questions of gender, disability, race, and the politics of care. Modernism, Art, Therapy (Yale University Press) is a born-digital collection of 16 original essays that explores relationships between clinically derived art therapies and the modernisms that developed transnationally in visual arts across the 20th century. Through sites of practice such as hospitals, clinics, and prisons—but also schools, art museums, and galleries—the book puts art history into conversation with critical medical and health humanities, disability studies, critical race studies, and gender and sexuality studies. Committed to exploring questions of agency and social justice, contributors to the book attend to traditionally marginalized subjects and makers, from children and the incarcerated to women artists, therapists, and care workers. The volume thus aims not only to expand the category of masterworks that art historians deem meaningful but also to expose the limitations of dominant narratives about modernism. Modernism, Art, Therapy was supported in part by the Margaret T. McFadden Fund for Humanistic Inquiry at Colby College.

On May 15 Professor of Art Véronique Plesch gave a lecture at the Baxter Society in Portland. She spoke on “The Many Paradoxes of Tom Phillips’s A Humument,” discussing the project that British artist Tom Phillips (1937–2022) carried for fifty years, altering W.H. Mallock’s Victorian novel. Founded in 1983, the Baxter Society is the Bibliophilic Fellowship of Northern New England, whose objectives are to advance the quality and diversity of private and public libraries; promote excellence in the arts pertaining to the history, design, and production of books; and provide a supportive environment for those interested in the creation, preservation, and collection of books.

Associate Professor of Environmental Studies Stacy-ann Robinson has published an article titled "Equity and Justice in Loss and Damage Finance: A Narrative Review of Catalysts and Obstacles" in the journal Current Climate Change Reports. It overviews the history of loss and damage finance, suggests five criteria that could make the Loss and Damage Fund just, and discusses four potential catalysts for just loss and damage finance: ecological and climatic impacts, institutional developments outside the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, Global South leadership on debt justice, and legal developments.