Faculty Accomplishments

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."

Assistant Professor of History Kelly Brignac was one of 204 recent recipients of a prestigious National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grant. Brignac's project, "Defining Slavery in the Era of Abolition: The Forced Indenture of Africans in the French Empire, 1817–1861," was awarded a $35,000 grant, which will allow her to begin researching and writing her first book. Brignac's work focuses on how French administrators used to force Africans to continue working in the plantation economy after the abolition of slavery in the French Atlantic (1817–1861).

Professor of Art Véronique Plesch contributed the essay “Making Absence Visible” in her "Art Historical Musings" column for the 2023 winter issue of the Maine Arts Journal: UMVA Quarterly. Plesch also wrote the introduction to this issue, "Absence/Presence?” In her introduction, Plesch poses such questions as, "Can presence exist in absence and absence in presence?" asking the reader to "take, for instance, how what is absent comes back: memories, flash-backs of repressed traumas, or ghosts (we call them in French, revenants—those who return)." The issue also contains an essay by Associate Professor of Art Garry Mitchell.

Assistant Professor of Biology Suegene Noh published a paper titled "Reduced and Nonreduced Genomes in Paraburkholderia Symbionts of Social Amoebas" through the National Library of Medicine's National Center for Biotechnology Information. Benjamin Capodanno '21, Song Xu '22, and Marisa Hamilton '19 contributed to the paper. As part of the team's research, they built a web-based genome browser to facilitate research of the symbiotic relationship based on the genomes of Paraburkholderia symbionts of D. discoideum.  

As essay by Professor of English and Creative Writing Michael Burke is included in the winter issue of Lowestoft Chronicle, an online literary journal. "A Sort of Pilgrimage Up St. Patrick’s Mountain" retells of a short trek on the west coast of Ireland Burke undertook with his wife. Does "pilgrimage" imply suffering? he asked. "Was one obliged to complete a pilgrimage, or could one, perhaps, just sort of stop when one got tired and get a cup of hot chocolate instead?" Despite encountering inclement weather and rough terrain, Burke made it up and back. "I couldn’t say that ours counted as a pilgrimage," his essay concludes, "but it had some of that quality: a combination of suffering, struggle, and, eventually, humility."