Faculty Accomplishments

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.

An interview with Professor of English and Creative Writing Debra Spark appeared on the literary website Bloom. Spark talks, in part, about the challenges and joys of being an older writer. "I just think a lot of us are better when we’re older. ... My better books definitely came later. Maybe that’s not true for everyone. But I think as you learn more, you’re better. Maybe that’s more true of writing than visual art. Writing is so dependent on life experience."

Associate Professor of English Aaron Hanlon has four recent publications. A short book, Empirical Knowledge in the Eighteenth-Century Novel (Cambridge University Press, 2022); a coedited volume of essays (with Kristin Girten), British Literature and Technology, 1600-1830 (Bucknell University Press, 2023); a journal article, “Information and Credibility in A Journal of the Plague Year,” in Digital Defoe; and a chapter in an edited collection, “Smollett’s Ramblers and the Law of the Land,” in A Clubbable Man: Essays on Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture in Honor of Greg Clingham (Bucknell University Press, 2022).

Two papers by Assistant Professor of English Samantha Plasencia have recently been published. "Teaching Phillis Wheatley Peters through Black Liberation Theology" appeared in the special issue of Early American Literature on Phillis Wheatley. And "Metalinguistic Analysis in the Orations on the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 1808–1823" in this issue of Early American Literature. Plasencia also delivered a pedagogical talk for the UMaine Civilization Lecture Series titled “Engendering Vulnerability: The Anti-Sympathetic Work of Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.”

Mary Ellis Gibson, the Arthur Jeremiah Roberts Professor of Literature, has been elected to chair the book prize committee of the North American Victorian Studies Association. Additionally, she has been invited to serve on the editorial boards for the Liverpool University Press Book Series, Studies in the Global Nineteenth Century and on the editorial board of Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature.

Professor of Mathematics Scott Taylor and Qidong He ’21 have published the paper "Links, bridge number, and width trees" in the January 2023 issue of the Journal of Mathematical Society of Japan. The authors study how the properties of abstract networks can encode information about knots in three dimensions. They are particularly interested in the relationship to a quantity called “bridge number,” which measures how many maxima or minima a particular knot must have. Taylor and He began working on this study while He was student at Colby.

A new book by David Freidenreich, the Pulver Family Associate Professor of Jewish Studies, has been released by the University of California Press. Jewish Muslims: How Christians Imagined Islam as the Enemy uncovers the "hidden history of Islamophobia and its surprising connections to the long-standing hatred of Jews" through an examination of "anti-Muslim sentiment in texts and images produced across Europe and the Middle East over a thousand years."