Faculty Accomplishments

Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies Stacy-ann Robinson has coauthored an article titled "Understanding 'Islandness.'” Appearing in the journal Annals of the American Association of Geographers, it explores the different meanings of "islandness"—as smallness, culture, identity, and the "other." It concludes that, although there is much to be gained from appreciating differing understandings of islandness, these different meanings make it critical to reflect on context wherever the term is used and to exercise care in assigning attributes and outcomes to the phenomenon.

Neil Gross, the Charles A. Dana Professor of Sociology, presented a talk at the annual Public Safety Summit, held April 21-23 at Harvard University. Gross talked about his new book, Walk the Walk: How Three Police Chiefs Defied the Odds and Changed Cop Culture, to a group of 75 police chiefs and other officials from big and medium-sized cities. The book's premise, as he writes in the introduction, is that policy and culture changes are vital to reforming police departments. Each attendee was given a copy of Gross's book to take with them.

Colby researchers are coauthors of the recent article "Land-use change is associated with multi-century loss of elephant ecosystems in Asia" published in the journal Scientific Reports. More than three million square kilometers of the Asian elephant’s historic habitat range has been lost in just three centuries, the report from an international scientific team led by a University of California San Diego researcher reveals. This dramatic decline may underlie present-day conflicts between elephants and people, the authors argue. “This study has important implications for our understanding of the history of elephant landscapes in Asia and it lays the groundwork for better understanding and modeling the potential future of elephant landscapes as well,” said Philip Nyhus, professor of environmental studies at Colby and one of the study coauthors. In addition to Nyhus, three Colby undergraduate students contributed to the study, Josiah Johnson '19, Ashley Weaver '22, and Tiffany Wu '19. Wu's honors thesis provided an important foundation for this study. “This was a collaborative and multi-institutional effort,” added Nyhus, “and I was proud that Colby students contributed significantly to the models and analyses used in the study.”

Professor of Art Véronique Plesch delivered a paper titled “Who’s On First? When Illustrations Are Not Text-Bound” at the international conference "Illustration Studies: New Approaches, New Directions" held in Birkbeck, University of London, April 19–21, 2023.

Evgeniy Maloletka, a freelance photojournalist working for the Associated Press, has won first place in the renowned international "World Press Photo" competition for an image he took while embedded in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol in March 2022, a few weeks after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The image of an injured, heavily pregnant woman from a bombed maternity hospital in Mariupol "shocked people around the world" and "captures the human suffering caused by the Russian invasion of Ukraine," said jury chairman Brent Lewis. Maloletka and Mstyslav Chernov were co-recipients of Colby's 2023 Lovejoy Award for Courage in Journalism.

Elizabeth Leonard, the John J. and Cornelia V. Gibson Professor of History, Emerita, has been awarded the 2023 John Nau Book Prize in American Civil War Era History for her book Benjamin Franklin Butler: A Noisy, Fearless Life (University of North Carolina Press in Chapel Hill). Butler is Colby’s most significant Civil War-era alumnus, graduating from Waterville College—later Colby—in 1838 and becoming among the most significant civilian Union generals in the Civil War. Leonard is an award-winning biographer with specialties in the Civil War, and Benjamin Franklin Butler: A Noisy, Fearless Life is her seventh book. It was also a finalist for the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize.

Adam Howard, the Charles A. Dana Professor of Education, Kevin O'Boy '23, and Clay Bolster '24 traveled to Gothenburg, Sweden, to present a paper as part of the 2023 European Social Science History Conference. Their paper, "Privileged Brotherhoods: Becoming Men at Elite All-Boys Schools in the United States," highlights the distinctive role that elite all-boys schools play in making and remaking elites in the United States. O'Boy and Bolster were coauthors on the paper and have been working on this project throughout their time at Colby. Next school year, the team plans to publish an article based on this research.

Associate Professor of Art Marta Ameri has joined the team of series editors for the Women in Ancient Cultures book series, published by Liverpool University Press. This series "aims to unite groundbreaking research from all fields of ancient-world studies, publishing research that pertains to all aspects of women’s lives in the ancient world and the various levels of agency that they could, and could not, attain as well as the dynamics and modalities of female agency under, and against, oppressive conditions—patriarchal, heterosexist, and otherwise." Ameri will work with the other series editors to solicit and vet book projects focusing on women's lives in the Ancient Near Eastern, South Asian, and Early Islamic Worlds.

An article by Assistant Professor of English Dyani Taff was recently published in the journal Coastal Studies & Society. The article, titled "Rivers and Bogs: Slow Protests in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko,” received critical praise from its reviewers. "I’m very impressed with this smart, persuasive, and important article that places readings of Behn’s Oroonoko in dialogue with emerging scholarship about early modern critical race studies and ecocritical studies, with a particular emphasis on rivers, estuaries, and swamps," said one reviewer. While another said, "I find this an intelligent take on 'protest' that moves beyond simply ascertaining whether Oronooko 'fails' to combat environmental and social injustice; I think it helpfully historicizes racial and colonial ideologies and underscores recent critical responses to their ills; and I admire its concluding, compelling call for modern readers to attend to 'slowness' as both a method and a movement (in multiple senses of the word)."

Professor Robert A. Gastaldo, Whipple Coddington Professor of Geology, emeritus, has joined Maine's Department of Education's Science Standards Steering Committee in their evaluation of the state's NextGen Science standards. The Steering Committee is composed of education experts who represent the cultural diversity found in Maine and a range of viewpoints as to the content of the standards. He served as a developer and writer for the American Geological Institute's middle school earth science curricula—Constructing Understandings of Earth System and Investigating Earth Systems—and as a development leader and author for their high school, inquiry-based curriculum, EarthComm. Gastaldo's college-level laboratory manual, Deciphering Earth History, has been on the market since the mid-1990s, and he recently edited an advanced undergraduate/beginning graduate level textbook, Nature Through Time.