Faculty Accomplishments

Visiting Assistant Professor of American Studies Amber Hickey will facilitate a workshop for the forthcoming Anti-Racism in Art School Colloquium at Portland State School of Art & Design. The workshop, “Decolonizing the Art History Classroom,” provides educators and students with decolonial strategies that they may implement in their own classrooms, arts practices, and research.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies Caitlin McDonough MacKenzie coauthored a new paper titled "Trends in ecology and conservation over eight decades" published in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment. This research reviews 80 years, 52 journals, and a half-billion words to track changes in the way that ecologists write about ecological and conservation research. The paper traces the trends in words and phrases published in peer-reviewed papers since 1930 and tracks the evolution of ecology from a largely descriptive field focused on natural history and observational studies to a more data‐driven, multidisciplinary field focused on applied environmental issues.

Professor of Art Véronique Plesch contributed two essays to the 2021 spring issue of the Maine Arts Journal: UMVA Quarterly, titled “The Comforts of Domesticity" and "Leading with the Arts: A Conversation with Teresa McKinney and Jacqueline Terrassa.” She also wrote the introduction to this issue, "The New Normal: A Dialogue.”

A paper by Nicolas Jacobs, visiting assistant professor of government, titled "Economic Sectionalism, Executive-Centered Partisanship, and the Politics of the State and Local Tax Deduction," was published in Political Science Quarterly. The paper "examines the partisan implications of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and its reform of the state and local tax deduction. Jacobs concludes that fundamental changes in the geographic composition of the electorate and the centrality of presidential politics in the party system explains why the Republican Party reduced one of the most unequal features of the U.S. tax code, but chose not to emphasize its egalitarian consequences," according to a summary on the PSQ website.  

Assistant Professor of Performance Studies and Curatorial Practice Gwyneth Shanks has won a $25,000 grant from the MAP Fund, one of the largest funders for live and performance-based art. The grant will help support a new project, currently in the early stages of development, that draws upon research conducted with AB Brown, assistant professor of contemporary performance, and in conversation with May Joseph, a professor of global studies at the Pratt Institute, and Sarah Lewis-Cappellari, a research-based artist and curator. Shank's research focuses on how the historical and ongoing material effects of the colonial project reveal themselves with particular force in relationship to watery sites and spaces. Her project is specifically focused on how oceanic circulations of plant life during the long and ongoing colonial project are conditioned by racialized power, queer desire, and the body. The MAP Fund will support a series of site-specific performances in and along the Atlantic Coast of the Americas and, Covid travel restrictions allowing, the Caribbean.

Adam Howard, the Charles A. Dana Professor of Education, appears in the documentary The Boys in Red Hats, which was reviewed by Film Threat, a website that champions indie filmmakers. The second page of the review includes a screenshot of Howard, an expert on social class issues who plays a prominent role in the film by presenting one of the two sides in the January 2019 confrontation at the Lincoln Memorial between Native American activist Nathan Phillips and Nicholas Sandmann from Covington Catholic High School in Kentucky.  

Visiting Assistant Professor of American Studies Amber Hickey contributed a chapter to the recently published Routledge Companion to Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Climate Change (eds. TJ Demos, Subhankar Banerjee, and Emily Eliza Scott). The chapter, titled “Remembering the Land: Art, Direct Action, and the Denial of Extractive Realities on Bougainville,” mobilizes the work of Bougainvillean artist Taloi Havini as a lens through which to learn from movements for environmental justice and decolonization in Bougainville. Hickey also contributed a chapter to the recently published volume Violence and Indigenous Communities: Confronting the Past, Engaging the Present (eds. Susan Sleeper-Smith, Patricia Marroquin-Norby, Jeff Ostler, and Josh Reid). The chapter, titled “Pathways toward Justice: Walking as Decolonial Resistance,” focuses on long-distance protest walks as a form of embodied decolonial resistance. 

Assistant Professor of Creative Writing Arisa White coedited a newly released anthology, Home is Where You Queer Your Heart. Worked on during the Covid-19 pandemic, the book, "organized around the four cardinal directions, encompasses poetry, prose, hybrid and concrete works, and highlights a diverse group of authors along the queer and trans spectrum." 

Loren McClenachan, the Elizabeth and Lee Ainslie Associate Professor of Environmental Studies, delivered the keynote address for the virtual symposium "Oceans Past, Present & Future: Historical Ecology & Circumpolar Fisheries Management." Her address, titled "Historical Ecology & Shifting Baselines in Fisheries," was part of the symposium hosted by the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future at Boston University.

A new book by Assistant Professor of Creative Writing Arisa White, Who's Your Daddy, has been released by Augury Books. Who's Your Daddy is a memoir in the form of narrative poems. It's described as a "lyrical, genre-bending, coming-of-age tale featuring a queer, Black, Guyanese-American woman who, while seeking to define her own place in the world, negotiates an estranged relationship with her father."