Faculty Accomplishments
Assistant Professor of French Studies Flavien Falantin and Alex Firkusny '25 have coauthored a journal article recently released in The French Review. Written in French, the paper, "Le syndrome de Mishima: Psychologie du corps martyrial dans l’œuvre d’Amélie Nothomb" examines the Belgian-Francophone novelist Amélie Nothomb’s development of a new literary pathology—the “Mishima syndrome”—through the lens of the writer’s complex relationship with the sublime, the body, and art as it unfolds across her novels.
An upcoming book of short stories by Sarah Braunstein, associate professor of creative writing, received a starred review from Kirkus Reviews. The book, Baby in a Box (Norton, June 2026), contains 11 short stories, many of which have appeared in The New Yorker. "The short story form turns out to be the ideal platform for Braunstein’s talents," wrote Kirkus. "Her best work to date."
James M. Gillespie Professor of Art Véronique Plesch edited the spring issue of Maine Arts Journal. As usual, she wrote the introduction in which she discusses the theme of “The Shape of Time,” the debt the title owes to George Kubler’s 1962 book by the same title, and the issue’s contents.
Celebrating the retirement of Professor of Art Gary Green from Colby, Plesch wrote an essay (“The Passenger: Five Decades of Gary Green Following the Light”) in which she recaps Green’s five decades of photographic practice and the ways in which his work engages with the notion of time. From early photos capturing the “now” of the punk scene in the New York City of the ’70s and ’80s, to the timelessness of the Missouri Prairie and Maine trees, to the Long Island of his childhood, Green’s “quiet photos” explore the marks of passing time in elegiac meditations on time and memory—a “past that cannot be regained.” There is also a forward-looking dimension to his work as he documents the fate of a post-industrial town he now calls home.
Her essay for her "Art Historical Musings" column is titled “Picturing Time” and examines how time is grasped by artists and art historians, beginning with the limitations of “periodization” and “master narratives” that overlook history’s varying speeds. She explores how artists represent the spans of human life, civilizations, and sacred history, noting how anachronistic details “blend temporalities” and how visual strategies control the beholder’s gaze and the time spent taking in the work. After discussing how sequential moments capture the passage of time, she concludes with the modernist shift toward “simultaneity,” where measurable units give way to a subjective, ever-changing “duration.”
An essay by Véronique Plesch, the James M. Gillespie Professor of Art, appears as a chapter in the recently released book "Scripta in itinere”: Discursos, prácticas y apropiaciones del escrito en el espacio público (siglos XVI–XXI) (Ed. Antonio Castillo Gómez and VerónicaSierra Blas. Gijón: Trea, 2026. 627–40). The essay is based on a 2019 conference Plesch attended at the University of Alcalá in Alcalá de Henares, Spain, and it is her first publication in one of her mother tongues, Spanish. Titled "Grafitis y comunidades emocionales (siglos XVI–XVIII)," the essay asks, "How can repeated inscriptions over time contribute to constituting an emotional community? Considering the graffiti that appear on the frescoes of a small rural chapel (San Sebastiano, Arborio), this paper addresses the forms and functions of this public inscriptional practice. At once devotional act (the graffiti are on the bodies of saints), history writing, commemoration, coping mechanism—a scriptotherapeutic process of sorts—in the face of an overwhelmingly majority of traumatic events, this village chronicle contradicts usual conception of graffiti as illicit, popular, informal, hasty and ephemeral. Other instances come to help grasping how these marks made over time eventually bear witness of a community and also work towards constituting it," according to the translated abstract.
An article in the spring issue of Northern Woodlands magazine featured Amanda Gallinat, lecturer in environmental studies, and a museum exhibition and research project she worked on with her ES335 Phenology class last year. Gallinat and her students partnered with the Fairbanks Museum in Vermont to analyze over a century of volunteer-collected records of plant flowering and bird arrival times, showing shifts with climate change that could put some species at risk of becoming mismatched in time. The article highlights Colby students’ work digitizing handwritten ledgers, analyzing shifts in seasonal timing, and developing independent projects that expand an understanding of changes in the spring timing of birds, plants, and bees in Vermont.
Adam Howard, the Charles A. Dana Professor of Education, Lawrence Martin '26, and Declan Greene '24 coauthored a paper recently published in the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education. Titled "Brotherhoods of power: whiteness, masculinity, and elite identity in all-boys schools," the article "examines the intricate and interwoven relationship between whiteness, masculinity, and elite status within U.S. secondary elite all-boys schools. Drawing on a study of 127 recent alumni from these institutions, the authors explore how brotherhoods within these schools act as a relational infrastructure for the production and reinforcement of eliteness."
Kaushik Tekur, visiting assistant professor of English, has an article recently published in the journal Humanities. Titled "The Global Ballad: Kuyili, Female Militancy, and Romantic Untranslatability," the article "examines the revival of the Romantic Ballad in contemporary anglophone writing through Vanavil K. Ravi’s The Ballad of the Warrior-Girl, which reimagines the Tamil folk figure, Kuyili, and her role in the Sivagangai rebellion, a Romantic-era anti-colonial uprising in South India," Tekus writes in his abstract.
A short play by Bess Welden, senior lecturer and co-chair in performance, theater, and dance, has been chosen for production at the 2026 Maine Playwrights Festival, running May 15–24. The production, Soul Suds, is a 10-minute play about letting go, moving on, and a very special car wash, said Welden, an award-winning playwright who amplifies marginalized voices. The Maine Playwrights Festival, celebrating its 25th year, champions the voices of Maine playwrights, cultivates new work, and connects artists with the community.
Zach Peckham, the Jennifer Jahrling Forese Writer-in-Residence, has published As If And (New Mundo Press), his first full-length poetry collection. "As If And is a splintered, thrilling sink into the linguistic hijinks of systems incompetence, labor hypocrisy, and 'the literal it.' Zach Peckham’s ear is stellar, offering jokes within jokes, 'increasingly mirrored' mumblecore, and a line’s real-time iterations," said author Caryl Pagel in her review of the collection. Peckham is also the author of the chapbook "cycle hum" (Sistrum Books, 2025).
Assistant Professor of English Sam Plasencia wrote an article titled "Methodological Revolutions for Teaching Phillis Wheatley Peters" that was published in ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830. In the article, Plasencia discusses a course she designed "titled 'Phillis Wheatley Peters and Her Literary Afterlives,' which sought to (re)introduce Wheatley Peters to mostly white students as a literary foremother, and to do so by way of Black feminist writing that considers method," she wrote in the article's abstract.