Faculty Accomplishments
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Associate Professor of French Mouhamédoul Niang has written an essay for Africa to Maine, a photo exhibition at the Portland Public Library that runs through June 18. It was produced by the Greater Portland Immigrant Welcome Center as a community response to Outside the Frame: Todd Webb in Africa, currently on display at the Portland Museum of Art. In the 1950s, Webb, an American documentary photographer, documented emerging industries and technologies in nine African countries. In contrast, the photos in “Africa to Maine” show the lives of individuals and families in Africa during the past 60 years. In his essay, “Photography and Immigrants,” which was also printed in the April edition of Amjambo Africa, Niang writes about those photos.
The spring issue of the Maine Arts Journal contains essays by Professor of Art Véronique Plesch, Professor of Art Bevin Engman, and painter and illustrator Sam Onche '22. For this issue, which addresses the theme of Truths and Lies, Plesch wrote the introduction, her "Art Historical Musings" column (“Artful Lies"), and an essay on the drawings that Josefina Auslender did during the dictatorship in Argentina.
Professor of Art Véronique Plesch participated in the International Workshop on Standards and Criteria for the Photo Reproduction, Diagnostic Analysis, and Preservation of Graffiti that took place March 23-24, 2023, at the Dipartimento di Lettere, Arti e Scienze Sociali (DiLASS) of the Università degli Studi “G. d’Annunzio,” Chieti-Pescara, Italy. She presented a paper titled "La relazione tra testo e immagine nello studio dei graffiti" (The Relationship Between Word and Image in the Study of Graffiti). The workshop was organized in the context of the European Research Council project Graff-IT, “Writing on the Margins. Graffiti in Italy, 7th to 16th century," a five-year project that received a grant of 2.5 million Euro. Plesch is part of Graff-IT's Team of Experts. Plesch also gave a guest lecture titled “I graffiti, oggetto del patrimoniale culturale?” (Graffiti as Cultural Heritage?) in the context of the doctoral program in Cultural Heritage Studies, Università degli Studi “G. d’Annunzio,” Chieti-Pescara, Italy.
Tanya Sheehan, the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Art, has been appointed a Beinecke Senior Visiting Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery Art. CASVA fellowships are highly selective, and the program is among the most sought-after research opportunities for art historians in the U.S. At CASVA Sheehan is working on her third book, a study of African-American artists’ engagement with the subjects of medicine and public health between the 1930s and 1950s. Sheehan is also the principal investigator for Colby's initiative Critical Medical Humanities: Perspectives on the Intersection of Race and Medicine.
Assistant Professor of Government Nicholas Jacobs and Lukas Alexander '22 coauthored an article recently published in the journal Congress & the Presidency. Titled "Presidential Partisanship and Legislative Cooperation in the U.S. Senate, 1993–2021," the article unveils a historical change in the way legislation works its way through the U.S. Senate. The research shows how Senators have increasingly based their votes on presidential partisanship, particularly when they are members of the opposition party. Consequently, one reason that legislative gridlock has become so common is because presidents now occupy a central role in dictating party affairs, mobilizing the party base, and setting the legislative agenda.
The Maine Governor's Energy Office recently named Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies Alison Bates as an advisory board member for the Maine Offshore Wind Research Consortium. The board's role is to establish a research strategy to identify opportunities and challenges caused by the deployment of floating offshore wind projects to the existing uses of the Gulf of Maine; methods to avoid and minimize the impact of floating offshore wind projects on ecosystems and existing uses of the Gulf of Maine; and ways to realize cost efficiencies in the commercialization of floating offshore wind projects. The board began its work in February 2023.
Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies Alison Bates has published an article titled "Hydrodynamic effects of biofouling-induced surface roughness – Review and research gaps for shallow water offshore wind energy structures” in which Bates and her colleagues review technical, environmental, and social conditions caused by the “artificial reef” effect of offshore wind turbines. This project is part of a larger undertaking to understand the nuanced implications of wind turbines in the marine environment. This study was supported by the Sea and Littoral Research Institute; Nantes Université, in partnership with the Ocean Resources and Renewable Energy Lab; Colby's Buck Lab for Climate and Environment and Department of Environmental Studies; and the Region de la Loire under the WEAMEC community and European Community under the FEDER program.
On Feb. 16, 2023, Professor of Art Véronique Plesch gave a paper at the 111th College Art Association Annual Conference in New York City. Her paper, “Tattooing and/in Art History,” was based on the seminar she regularly teaches at Colby (The Visual Culture of Tattooing) and reflects upon what her students gain from this course, how teaching it has impacted her own scholarship, and, more generally, what the study of tattooing brings to the discipline of art history and its practice.
A paper by Professor of Mathematics Scott Taylor was recently published in the journal Mathematical Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society. Titled "Equivariant Heegaard splittings of reducible 3-manifolds,” it shows how symmetries of three-dimensional spaces affect their structure. In 1898 Poul Heegaard, a Danish mathematician, introduced what are now called Heegaard splittings as an abstract method for creating three-dimensional spaces. Since then, they have become important mathematical objects, but their relationship to symmetries of particular three-dimensional spaces remains poorly understood. In this paper Taylor show that there is an interesting behavior when highly symmetric three-dimensional spaces are added together.
The Proceedings of the Royal Society B published a paper coauthored by Associate Professor of Biology David Angelini with three former students as coauthors. The paper, "Distinct developmental mechanisms influence sexual dimorphisms in the milkweed bug Oncopeltus fasciatus," discusses their project that examines the ways that female and male bodies differ and uncovers the unexpected fact that structures differing among the sexes attain those different states using different genetic regulatory mechanisms. The article grew out of the honors thesis in biology by Josefine Just '19. Yee Jin Lee '21 and Zhuofan Zhang '18 were also important contributors to the experiments and coauthors on the paper.