Faculty Accomplishments

Laurie Osborne, the Zacamy Professor of English, published her paper "Canon Fodder and Conscripted Genres: The Hogarth Project and the Modern Shakespeare Novel” in the journal Critical Survey. The paper will be published in the summer 2021 issue 33.2.

A short story, "Superstition," by Sarah Braunstein, assistant professor of English (creative writing), appears in the Aug. 9 issue of The New Yorker. The web version includes an audio recording of Braunstein reading the story as well as a link to an interview with her, where she mentions Colby students.

Professor of Psychology Melissa Glenn, Ariel Batallán Burrowes '15, Waylin Yu '15, Lisa Blackmer-Raynolds '19, Amanda Norchi '20, and Lab and Research Coordinator Amanda L. Doak have coauthored a new paper, "Progression of behavioral deficits during periadolescent development differs in female and male DISC1 knockout rats," published in Genes, Brain and Behavior. "In the paper, we report the early emergence of behavioral dysfunction in female and male rats with a biallelic functional deletion in the disrupted-in-schizophrenia-1 (DISC1) gene," explained Glenn. "The study goals aligned with significant national and international imperatives to study biological sex differences in pre-clinical animal models, and the paper describes marked sex differences in the kind and timing of behavioral effects of the DISC1 knockout with pronounced impacts of the gene manipulation in female rats."

Professor of Art Véronique Plesch organized and chaired the session “The River: Reality, Myth, and Metaphor” (Le Fleuve: Réalité, Mythe, et Métaphore) at the international conference “Water and Sea in Word and Image” (L’Eau et la mer dans les textes et les images) held at the University of Luxembourg July 12–16, 2021 (originally scheduled for July 2020, the conference was postponed and was held online). Plesch also delivered a paper. In “The River of Life: Drawing Lessons from Thomas Cole in Images and Words,” she considered works that present surprising connections with Maine: a young Waterville lady painted a copy after Thomas Cole (today in Waterville Historical Society); a minister, who hailed from Hallowell and settled in New York City, acquired the four paintings that form Cole’s The Voyage of Life and had them reproduced; and a mate from a schooner from Machias, Maine, annotated a copy of a book that draws moral lessons from Cole’s series. All these instances bear witness to the reception of Cole’s celebrated paintings while, combined with writings by Cole himself and by others, as well as with prints and paintings reproducing The Voyage of Life, weave a fascinating fabric of word and image interactions.

Assistant Professor of Mathematics and Statistics Tamar Friedmann has coauthored a new paper, "Euler’s reflection formula, infinite product formulas, and the correspondence principle of quantum mechanics," recently published in Journal of Mathematical Physics.

Assistant Professor of Psychology Jin Goh and Jameson McCue '22 have coauthored a new paper titled "Perceived Prototypicality of Asian Subgroups in the United States and the United Kingdom." Accepted for publication at Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, the study "examined how (non-Asian) Americans and Britons perceive different Asian subgroups in terms of how prototypically Asian and how foreign they seem."

A chapter by Tom Morrione, the Charles A. Dana Professor of Sociology, Emeritus, was included in the recently published Routledge International Handbook of Interactionism (D. vom Lehn, N. Ruiz-Junco and W. Gibson, eds. Routledge, June 2021). The chapter, titled "Herbert Blumer, Symbolic Interactionism, and 21st-century Sociology," presents the theoretical framework for that perspective and explores its relevance for guiding contemporary social science research, with special emphasis on large-scale social phenomena, industrialization, and race prejudice.

Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies Stacy-ann Robinson has been accepted to join Climate Strategies, a member-based international, not-for-profit research network of world-leading researchers. Climate Strategies works at the science-policy interface, advancing climate policy through meaningful interactions between decision-makers and researchers across Europe and internationally. Her membership was approved at a recent board meeting.

Associate Professor of History Arnout van der Meer was a guest on a Cornell Press podcast discussing his new book, Performing Power: Cultural Hegemony, Identity, and Resistance in Colonial Indonesia. van der Meer "explores the importance of material and visual culture ... for both the legitimization of colonial authority as well as its contestation in turn of twentieth-century Indonesia," Cornell Press reports. 

The summer issue of the Maine Arts Journal opens with an introduction written by Professor of Art Véronique Plesch, who is one of the journal's editors; contains a Q&A between Plesch and Associate Professor of Art Bradley Borthwick; and includes a historical piece in which Plesch mentions the Isamu Noguchi sculpture in the Colby College Museum of Art. Moreover, noted art critic Carl Little reviewed the L.C. Bates show that Whitney White '21 and Carissa Yang '21 curated under Plesch's supervision and which is on the same theme, Marks and Tracks, as the journal.