Faculty Accomplishments

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."

Tiffany Creegan Miller, assistant professor of Spanish and Latin American studies, has published the book The Maya Art of Speaking Writing: Remediating Indigenous Orality in the Digital Age (University of Arizona Press, 2022). The result of nearly 10 years of fieldwork, the book "draws from Maya concepts of tz’ib’ (recorded knowledge) and tzij, choloj, and ch’owen (orality) to look at expressive work across media and languages."  

Recently, Miller has been invited to give presentations on her book at institutions such as Williams College, California State University-Northridge, and the University of Maine. On Nov. 21, she engaged in a conversation about the book on Contacto Ancestral, a Spanish- and Kaqchikel-language radio show based in Los Angeles.

The latest book by Professor of Government, Emeritus Walter Hatch has been published by the University of Michigan Press. Ghosts in the Neighborhood: Why Japan is Haunted by its Past and Germany is Not, explores the idea that "Germany, which brutalized its neighbors in Europe for centuries, has mostly escaped the ghosts of the past, while Japan remains haunted in Asia," according to the UMichigan Press. Hatch's book rejects conventional wisdom on the topic and instead "rigorously defends the argument that political cooperation—not discourse or economic exchange—best explains Germany’s relative success and Japan’s relative failure in achieving reconciliation with neighbors brutalized by each regional power in the past."

A poem by Professor of English and Creative Writing Adrian Blevins was included in the Village Soup's latest "Poets' Walk" column, written by Judy Kaber, poet laureate of Belfast, Maine. Kaber turned to Blevins's "Pastoral" to complement the column's focus on wildness and "a taste for country." The poem "tries to make a case for this more natural mode of being in a world still struggling to understand difference," wrote Kaber.

Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies Alison Bates has published an article titled "Enabling an Equitable Energy Transition through Inclusive Research.” Bates is joined by leading energy and justice scholars across the country to lay out a progressive research agenda for energy equity and justice. Appearing in the journal Nature Energy, the authors outline an interdisciplinary research agenda centering frontline communities and address the intersecting dimensions of equity. The authors conclude with action items for funding agencies to operationalize an equitable energy transition to meet national priorities such as the White House Justice40 initiative.

Tanya Sheehan, the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Art, authored an essay titled "Where to Begin: Marking Race in Surveys of American Art" that appeared in American Art, the journal of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. "The pedagogical strategies presented in this essay aim to address the racial biases and foundations of American art history as a field and, more broadly, to expose and undermine the enduring power of Whiteness," according to the essay's abstract.

Assistant Professor of Education Pei Pei Liu was the first author in a paper titled "A Mixed-Methods Exploration of Mastery Goal Support in 7th-Grade Science Classrooms" recently published in the journal Cognition and Instruction. "Mastery goal structures, which communicate value for developing deeper understanding, are an important classroom support for student motivation and engagement, especially in the context of science learning aligned with the Next Generation Science Standards," according to the paper's abstract." In the study, Liu and her team "aimed to provide a stronger understanding of how middle school science teachers can support students’ mastery goal orientation, facilitating the effective implementation of NGSS instruction and deeper learning in science."