Faculty Accomplishments

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."

Sherry Pineau Brown, a lecturer and coordinator of teacher education, was quoted in an article published in the National Education Association's publication NEA Today. In the article, "‘My Empathy Felt Drained’: Educators Struggle With Compassion Fatigue," Brown said that too many educators work in unduly stressful conditions. "The heart of healthy communities are healthy schools, right? And we need healthy adults working within those schools to help our kids because we know they're not healthy,” said Brown, a former high school teacher and coauthor of a recent study on the "cost of caring."

Assistant Professor of Government Nicholas Jacobs and government major Gil Imboye '24 coauthored an article recently published in the peer-reviewed journal American Politics Research. The article, "The Nationalization of Individual Campaign Contributions in U.S. Senate Elections, 1984-2020,"  focuses on U.S. Senators' increasing reliance on campaign donations from outside their state. Analyzing more than 120 million donations between 1984 and 2020, they argue that the nationalization of campaign finance challenges the Senate's representative structure and hints at another dimension of inequality in American politics—those that have geographical-constrained influence versus those with national ambitions.

Lauren Cohen Fisher '13, a lecturer in the Jewish Studies Department, presented a lecture at Bowdoin College titled "The Politics of History: Israel/Palestine 1917–1948." Cohen Fisher's talk focused on "five moments between 1917 and 1948 she considers pivotal to existing Israeli and Palestinian political dynamics: the Balfour Declaration, the White Papers of 1922, the Partition Plan of 1947, Plan D, and the Declaration of the State of Israel," according to an article in the Bowdoin Orient. Cohen Fisher is also the director of Jewish Student Life at Colby.

Assistant Professor of Geology Bess Koffman was the lead author on a paper recently published in the journal Nature Geoscience. The article, "Collaboration between women helps close the gender gap in ice core science," states that, "Within ice core science, woman-led studies contain 20% more women co-authors than man-led studies, and exceed the estimated proportion of women within the community by nearly 10%." In the paper, the coauthors conclude that "collaboration with other women is a key factor in closing gender gaps in science."