Faculty Accomplishments

Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies Stacy-ann Robinson delivered the keynote address at the Conference on Climate Adaptation Finance, held Sept. 7, 2021. In her address, she stressed that "the time is right for a new justice paradigm" for financing climate change adaptation in small island developing states and called for "more creative strategies to expand the ways in which we can deliver justice." The conference was organized by the University of Kiel in Germany and was held online.

Assistant Professor of Government Nicholas Jacobs had a paper published in Publius: The Journal of Federalism. Titled "Federalism, Polarization, and Policy Responsibility during COVID-19: Experimental and Observational Evidence from the United States," the paper "considers the ways in which partisanship structured public attitudes about the United States’ multiple governments as each tried to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 during the spring and summer of 2020."

Lauren Yoshizawa, assistant professor of education, had a paper published in the journal Educational Policy. Titled "Fidelity, Rigor, and Relevance: How SEAs are Approaching the ESSA Evidence Requirements," the paper discusses her study of eight states and their three different approaches to the evidence requirements as mandated by the Every Student Succeeds Act. "Through interviews with state administrators, [Yoshizawa] shows how each approach relied on different understandings and prioritizations of research rigor and local relevance," according to the paper's abstract.

Associate Professor of Psychology Christopher Soto coauthored a new paper, "An integrative framework for conceptualizing and assessing social, emotional, and behavioral skills: The BESSI," accepted to the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. "As the title suggests, it describes the development and validation of a conceptual framework for personality-related skills (e.g., social engagement, emotional resilience, self-management) and an inventory for measuring these skills (the BESSI)," Soto explained.

Associate Professor of English Elizabeth Sagaser gave a presentation, "Generative Reading: Shakespeare, Dickinson, Shockley,” at the Emily Dickinson International Society Annual Meeting Aug. 7-8. Integrating cognitive poetics, history, and literary experiment, Sagaser explored 19th-century American poet Emily Dickinson’s critical, creative reading of Shakespeare's Sonnets, particularly those that figure and address future readers. She then turned to 21st-century poet Evie Shockley’s critical, creative approach to Dickinson and the compelling ways Shockley’s poems “Tell all the truth/But tell it slant,” stirring or startling readers into thinking more complexly and historically about racial injustice. The talk is available on the EDIS youtube channel, here.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Economics Benjamin Scharadin has coauthored a paper, "Household time activities, food waste, and diet quality: the impact of non-marginal changes due to COVID-19," in Review of Economics of the Household. "This paper looks at how members of households' time allocations changed with Covid-19 (time spent on grocery shopping, childcare, going out to eat, etc.) and the impact these shifts have had on household food waste and diet quality," he explained.

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.