Faculty Accomplishments

Assistant Professor of Art, Digital Media Takahiro Suzuki has had two of his films screened at festival across the country. His film electric moonlight & the language within the leaves was shown at the Wisconsin Film Festival in Madison April 6 - 11 and at the Wide Open Experimental Film Festival in Oklahoma City April 26-28. The Odds & Ends Experimental Film Festival in Charlottesville, Va., showed his film The Hungry Ghost & The Earthshaker April 6. Suzuki's creative research practice utilizes forms in both still and moving imagery, primarily making experimental film and video artworks.

Tanya Sheehan, the Ellerton M. and Edith K. Jetté Professor of Art, and art historian Suzanne Hudson of the University of Southern California co-edited a Critics Page for the independent monthly magazine the Brooklyn Rail. The contributions they assembled for publication in the March 2024 issue—by 21 artists, curators, and academics—examine visual art’s relationship to the discourses and spaces of healing since the emergence of Covid-19. The Critics Page builds upon conversations that Sheehan and Hudson co-curated for the Brooklyn Rail’s New Social Environment series in 2022. It also stems from their shared research interest in the history of modern art and art therapy.

Professor of Art Véronique Plesch participated in the First International Conference of the European Research Council project Graff-IT, Writing on the Margins: Graffiti in Italy and Beyond (7th–16th c.) with a paper titled “Graffiti on Frescoes: Typology, Models, Metaphors, and Critical Frameworks.” The conference took place April 10-12 at the Royal Netherlands Institute in Rome (KNIR). Prior to the conference, Plesch taught in a graduate course of the same title, also at the KNIR. The course, coordinated by Prof. Marco Mostert from Utrecht University, gathered nine selected research M.A./Ph.D. students in classics, (art) history, general and comparative literature, heritage studies, cultural studies, or related disciplines from the KNIR partner universities (Universiteit van Amsterdam, Vrije Universiteit, Universiteit Leiden, Universiteit Utrecht, Radboud Universiteit, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen). Plesch was one of five lecturers (other faculty members came from Dutch and Italian universities) and lectured on “Graffiti and the History of Art.” The course took place April 5-13 (“enveloping” the international conference), and Plesch taught her course on April 9 and also participated in a visit to Jewish catacombs with the students.

Raffael Scheck, the John J. and Cornelia V. Gibson Chair in History, delivered a keynote address at a conference in Germany marking the anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camp of Buchenwald on April 11, 1945. His talk was titled "French Colonial Soldiers between Nazi Terror and Colonialism."

Associate Professor of Environmental Studies Stacy-ann Robinson has been selected to be part of the 2024 cohort of the Wrigley Institute Storymakers Fellows. Launched in 2022, Storymakers is a first-of-its-kind program that trains mid-career environmental and sustainability researchers in the art of storytelling so they can reach the public with creative and compelling narratives that inspire positive change. Fellows must show an established, influential body of work on environmental or sustainability topics and a demonstrated commitment to public outreach. They come from leading academic institutions, national and independent laboratories, and environmental organizations across North America.

Associate Professor of Environmental Studies Stacy-ann Robinson was an invited speaker at the Jamaica Hotel and Tourist Association's Climate Resilience Symposium. She spoke about the ways in which the local tourism sector can balance economic growth with environmental sustainability, and she shared transformative ideas that can significantly elevate the sector's resilience to coastal vulnerabilities. The symposium was a gathering of political leaders, national-level tourism and disaster decision-makers, hoteliers, community stakeholders, and students.

For the spring issue of the Maine Arts Journal, Professor of Art Véronique Plesch wrote the introduction to the issue as well as an essay for her "Art Historical Musings" column titled "Dark Dreams." In the essay, she discusses publications that affirm the fundamental role of dreams for the Surrealist ethos and works by visual artists who had “the courage to dream” and thus face the dark recesses of the unconscious mind.

Assistant Professor of Philosophy Ben Baker was the lead author in the paper "Computational Kinematics of Dance: Distinguishing Hip Hop Genres," published in the journal Frontiers in Robotics and AI. Noting that the field of dance "would benefit from a general, quantitative and human-understandable method of characterizing meaningful differences between aspects of any dance style; a computational kinematics of dance," Baker and his team introduced and applied "a novel system for encoding bodily movement as 17 macroscopic, interpretable features, such as expandedness of the body or the frequency of sharp movements. We use this encoding to analyze Hip Hop Dance genres, in part by building a low-cost machine-learning classifier that distinguishes genre with high accuracy," according to the paper's abstract.

Assistant Professor of Chemistry Greg Drozd published a paper in the journal Environmental Science: Atmospheres about his research on wildfire emissions. The paper, titled "Wavelength-resolved quantum yields for vanillin photochemistry: self-reaction and ionic-strength implications for wildfire brown carbon lifetime," is part of the journal's themed collection on wildfire impacts on atmospheric composition. This is Drozd's first work on wildfire emissions, and the paper will be featured on the cover of the journal's May edition.

Associate Professor of Psychology Jen Coane has won the 2023-24 Psychology Mid-Career Mentor Award from the Council on Undergraduate Research's Psychology Division. Coane, who studies cognitive psychology, memory, and cognitive aging, was selected for her success in incorporating research in both classroom and laboratory settings. She has authored 18 peer-reviewed articles and 41 poster presentations with undergraduate coauthors. As the awardee, Coane will deliver a virtual presentation through the council at 2 p.m. on March 25.