Faculty Accomplishments

Associate Professor of Psychology Erin Sheets published a paper in the journal Clinical Psychological Science titled "A Brief Group Social-Belonging Intervention to Improve Mental-Health and Academic Outcomes in BIPOC and First-Generation-to-College Students." The paper reported on a brief social-belonging intervention that significantly reduced risk for depression over the first two years of college and specifically reduced risk for participants experiencing more discrimination. The research was conducted at Colby, with the brief intervention led by Colby student research assistants.

Jennifer Yoder, the Robert E. Diamond Professor of Government and Global Studies, has published a new book, World War II Memory and Contested Commemorations in Europe and Russia (Oxford University Press, 2024). "Using a comparative, conceptually original approach, the book identifies the actors who manipulate memory surrounding wartime anniversaries, such as the bombing of Dresden and ceremonies to honor fallen soldiers and fascist collaborators," said Yoder, who has special interests in German politics, remembrance and reckoning after communism, and borderlands in Europe. This is her third book.

In January 2024, Professor of Art Véronique Plesch led a group of 20 Colby-connected people to Sicily for a type of "Alumni Jan Plan."  Titled "Sicily, Crossroads of Cultures: Art, Architecture & Cuisine," the 13-day trip "entailed a near-circumnavigation of the island of Sicily to explore its many treasures and extraordinary range of cultures," according to Bruce Drouin '74, who instigated the trip.  Plesch lined up an itinerary with sites (a staggering number of which are on the UNESCO World Heritage List) that retraced the many cultures and artistic styles that left their mark on the island: Phoenician, ancient Greek and Roman, Jewish, Byzantine, Muslim, Norman, Gothic, Romanesque, Mannerist, and Baroque—all the way to 20th- and 21st-century contemporary art. Plesch also took the group to a winery,  an artisanal chocolate maker, and a hillside olive oil maker.

Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies Alison Bates, in partnership with Karp Strategies, has been selected to conduct critical research on offshore wind in Maine. According to Maine Governor Janet Mills's Energy Office Newsletter, their project will create a baseline inventory of socioeconomic data pertaining to Maine’s fishing communities.

The poem "Facebook Status," by Professor of English and Creative Writing Adrian Blevins, was the featured poem Feb. 6, 2024, on the podcast The Slowdown, which creates a short episode that includes a poem every weekday. Host Major Jackson introduced "Facebook Status" by saying, "Today’s poem hilariously explains why our internet connections are like electrical wires that thread the night, connecting all of our lives." Blevins's poem came from her new collection of poetry, Status Pending, from Four Way Books.

Assistant Professor of Biology Suegene Noh and six previous students published a paper in the open access journal Evolution Letters about the social amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum. The amoebas are predators of soil bacteria but some also host symbiotic Paraburkholderia bacteria. Noh and her team used fitness comparisons of native vs. novel host and symbiont pairings to understand the evolutionary forces affecting facultative symbiotic relationships. They also showed that P. bonniea symbionts can spread to new amoeba hosts when hosts aggregate together during the social stage of their life cycle, and that less virulent P. bonniea strains are more successful at this horizontal transmission.

Professor of English and Creative Writing Adrian Blevins was interviewed by the Adroit Journal, an American literary magazine and arts nonprofit. Her conversation with Kevin Prufer covered a range of topics relating to poetry, literature, teaching,  and her most recent book and fourth collection of poems, Status Pending. "Good poems contradict the STEM fact of our actual existential aloneness with what we might call the miracle of articulation," Blevins said. "The feeling you should get after reading a good poem is, well, thank God somebody finally found a way to say that."

The winter issue of the Maine Arts Journal is out with several contributions by Professor of Art Véronique Plesch and connections to Colby. As usual, Plesch wrote the Introduction and her "Art Historical Musings" column with an essay titled "Playing with the Marvelous," in which she mentions the course on Surrealism that she regularly teaches. For this issue, Plesch contributed a conversation with artist Angela Lorenz, who was invited to Colby in the fall of 2022 to deliver the James M. Carpenter Lecture. The issue's theme of Play was chosen to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the birth of Surrealism and thus by a remarkable coincidence coincides with Colby's Center for the Arts and Humanities current theme. The journal invited Associate Professor of Spanish and Director of the Center for the Arts and Humanities Dean Allbritton to report on Colby's theme.

Assistant Professor of Education Pei Pei Liu has published a new book, Invisible Forces: Motivational Supports and Challenges in High School and College Classes (SUNY Press, 2023). The book "explores the critical role that classroom educators play in supporting student motivation throughout the transition from high school to college," according to the publisher. The book presents "four rich case studies of educators' efforts to support student motivation and the challenges they encounter in secondary and postsecondary writing classrooms" that ultimately "shed light on different strategies, make a case for institutional support of instructors, and pave the way for greater alignment between secondary and postsecondary settings." Liu also discusses her approach to writing the book in a post on SUNY Press's blog.

Assistant Professor of Art Amanda Lilleston is presenting an artist talk on Wednesday, Dec. 13 to accompany her solo show currently on view at the Zillman Art Museum at the University of Maine in Orono. The exhibition is titled deep field and features Lilleston's woodcut printing and collage pieces that "highlight the concept of transformation, depicted in burgeoning colors of flora."