Faculty Accomplishments

Assistant Professor of Mathematics Ayomikun "Ayo" Adeniran has won an AMS-Simons Travel Grant from the American Mathematical Society. The competitive grant supports an early-career mathematician with $2,500 per year for two years to be used for research-related travel. Adeniran joined Colby in 2021 and researches graph theory and combinatorics, a field of mathematics concerned with problems of selection, arrangement, and operation within a finite or discrete system.

A new book, Obelisks, by Professor of Art Gary Green and Associate Professor of Italian Gianluca Rizzo has been released by Danilo Montanari Editore. With poems by Rizzo and photography by Green, the book explores what makes obelisks so irresistible to builders of empires. "Green’s photographs explore the relationship between Rome, its Egyptian obelisks, and the people who move through the city’s piazzas and side streets as part of an ever-changing landscape representing thousands of years of history," while "Rizzo’s poems contemplate the forms this ancient symbol has taken across the United States."

Assistant Professor of Government Carrie LeVan and scholars from the University of Maine have won a research grant from the Maine Chapter of the Scholar Strategy Network to study election protection. Specifically, they're looking at how to mobilize more poll workers and volunteers who help run Maine’s elections. LeVan and her colleagues political scientist Rob Glover and psychologist Jordan LaBouff are preparing the study this summer with plans to implement it this fall.

Catherine Besteman, the Francis F. Bartlett and Ruth K. Bartlett Professor of Anthropology, was featured on the New Books Network discussing her latest book, Militarized Global Apartheid. "Exploring the different manifestations of global apartheid, Besteman traces how militarization and securitization reconfigure older forms of white supremacy and deploy them in new contexts to maintain this racialized global order," New Books Network writes.    

Professor of Art Véronique Plesch will deliver a lecture titled "Le Grand Siècle: Art at the court of the Sun King" as part of the Blue Hill Bach festival. Plesch's lecture on Friday, July 15, at 1 p.m., will discuss "the magnificent painting, sculpture, architecture, and landscaping of 17th- and early 18th-century France."

The New Yorker has published the poem "A Theory of Human Origin," written by poet Marianne Boruch, the 2022 Jennifer Jahrling Forese Writer-in-Residence at Colby College. "Though she knew no English, / or only little, I could put my small hand into / her leather glove to read," the opening stanza reads.

Assistant Professor of English Dyani Johns Taff wrote a guest blog post titled "Europa into the Waves: John Dee and Meandering Research" for the The Collation, Folger Shakespeare Library's blog. "Research feels nonlinear, like tracing a spiral, or a meandering river, or possibly like following ants’ pheromone trails, squiggly lines that crisscross each other and yet create a navigable chaos central to the ants’ communication," Taff's opening lines read. Taff was the Omohundro Institute-Folger Shakespeare Library Fellow for 2021-2022.

Professor of Art Véronique Plesch contributed an essay titled “Plein Air and Beyond” to the 2022 summer issue of the Maine Arts Journal: UMVA Quarterly, in which she "considers the tension between faithful rendering of a vista and artistic practice and license and, along with it, the motivations for capturing a particular landscape." Plesch also wrote the introduction to this issue, "Beyond Plein Air," making a point to discuss every contributor in the issue.

Tanya Sheehan, the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Art, will deliver a virtual Wyeth Day lecture organized by the Farnsworth Art Museum. She will speak about the exhibition Andrew Wyeth: Life and Death, which she curated and is currently on view at the Colby Museum of Art. "Sheehan will discuss objects in the exhibition with her insights into how the exhibition evolved, exploring ideas of life, mortality, and self-portraiture in this period of work," the Farnsworth said in a release.

In celebration of Juneteenth, the Los Angeles Lakers will donate 125 copies of Biddy Mason Speaks Up, a book by Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing Arisa White, to the Crete Academy in the Crenshaw District of Los Angeles. "We are absolutely in love with [the] treatment of Biddy Mason in Biddy Mason Speaks Up," a spokesperson for the Lakers said. "The Lakers Juneteenth planning committee all agree that there is no better person to highlight this year than Biddy Mason," a former slave turned civil rights activist.

In separate news, White  will be the artist in residence at Indigo Arts Alliance in Portland, Maine, in July.