Faculty Accomplishments

Visiting Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies Leeann Sullivan coauthored three new articles in Conservation Science and Practice that explore the social dimensions of wildlife governance in the United States. The first paper, for which she was the lead author, explores the need for governance reform as social values toward wildlife shift. The second and third, which she coauthored, explore leverage points for change within wildlife conservation, first at the system level and then at the level of agency culture. The articles were part of a special issue on organizational change within the field of wildlife conservation, which brought together social science researchers and agency leadership in the summer of 2020 to address questions about how agencies can respond to changing social dynamics.

Elizabeth Jabar, Colby's Lawry Family Dean of Civic Engagement and Community Partnerships, has joined the advisory council of the New England Foundation for the Arts. Jabar is a feminist printmaker who owns and operates Hinge Collaborative, a community arts initiative and printmaking studio in Waterville. At Colby, Jabar is "designing an innovative program in community-based learning and active citizenship." Previously she was chair of the Printmaking Program and associate dean at Maine College of Art.

Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor African-American Studies and Sociology, was a guest on an episode for the podcast Interfaith-ish. Gilkes was invited to discuss "why we're falling short of MLK's prophetic vision" following her most recent opinion piece for the Religion News Service.

A new book by Assistant Professor of Government Nicholas Jacobs has just been released. What Happened to the Vital Center? "provides a long historical view of populism, party politics, and the growth of presidential power" while also tracing "the joining of executive power and movement politics over the past six decades." In this first book by Jacobs, he ultimately argues for "a reconstituted party system rather than greater presidential power."

Amanda Stent, director of the Davis Institute for Artificial Intelligence, has been named a 2021 fellow of the Association for Computational Linguistics. The association recognized Stent for her "significant contributions to computational models of multimodal and spoken dialogue, natural language generation, and summarization."

Professor of Art Véronique Plesch contributed the paper “The Anxiety of the Copy: Uniqueness and Reproduction in Hergé’s Le Sceptre d’Ottokar” for the recently released book titled Reproducing Images and Texts / La reproduction des images et des textes (Ed. Kirsty Bell and Philippe Kaenel. Amsterdam: Brill, 2021. 387-400).   The paper stems from a plenary lecture Plesch delivered in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 2017, and became the starting point for the Humanities Lab she taught last year on Copies, Fakes, and Forgeries in which students created this website

Alyssa Kullberg '18 and Gail Carlson, assistant professor of environmental studies, have coauthored a paper published in the Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences. Titled "Contamination of Maine Lakes by pharmaceuticals and personal care products," the paper reports on the under-studied presence of these PPCPs in lakes using samples from Maine's Belgrade Lakes.   Kullberg, an environmental science and Spanish double major, is the lead author; other coauthors include Serena Haver '16, also an environmental science major, and Bill McDowell, a two-year visiting assistant professor in the Department of Environmental Studies.

Professor of Art Véronique Plesch contributed an essay to the 2022 winter issue of the Maine Arts Journal: UMVA Quarterly titled “Of Dead Artists and Time Travel,” in which she had the occasion to talk about teaching and, in particular, to mention her recent Renaissance art course. Plesch also wrote the introduction to this issue, "Interview: Inner View.”

Visiting Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies Caitlin McDonough MacKenzie co-edited the new special issue of Northeastern Naturalist, Climate Change in the Mountains of Maine and the Northeast. This special issue is an outcome of the October 2020 Symposium on Climate Change in Maine’s Mountains, a two-day virtual gathering to foster collaboration between land conservation and research communities. McDonough MacKenzie was a co-organizer of the symposium and co-chaired the Alpine Habitat and Management session. Following the symposium, McDonough MacKenzie and Sarah Nelson, director of research at the Appalachian Mountain Club, co-edited the special issue and co-authored the introduction with the symposium co-organizers. The special issue summarizes and synthesizes research on the impacts of climate change on the local climate and ecosystems and offers a research and conservation agenda for Northeastern mountain ecosystems.