Faculty Accomplishments
A paper by Abbie Cohen, visiting assistant professor of education, was recently published in the open-access journal of the American Educational Research Association. Her paper, "A Spectacle by Design: A Racialized Performance for Donor Dollars," explores how "racialized power dynamics impact the relationship between a youth-serving, community-based education nonprofit and its donors," according to the paper's abstract.
A course taught by Lecturer in Environmental Studies Amanda Gallinat has provided new information for an exhibition at the Fairbanks Museum in St. Johnsbury, Vt. Last year in her course Seasonal Ecology, Gallinat and her students analyzed 120 years of flowering and bird arrival records from the Fairbanks Museum. Their analysis was included into the museum's newly expanded Wildflower Table exhibition, a century-old living display. Gallinat and two students gave a scientific talk to the community at the exhibition opening, and her class’ analysis was the basis for several new wall panels highlighting warming in the region, species-level shifts in flowering times in response to warming, and the potential for mismatch with migratory birds that have not shifted their migration as much.
Associate Professor of Music Natalie Zelensky published an article in the Musical Quarterly titled "Peaceful Coexistence: Nicolas Slonimsky’s 1962 USSR Tour and 'Outside Insider' Cold War Music Diplomacy." The article looks at why Slonimsky (1894–1995), a Russian-born American lexicographer, musicologist, and composer, traveled to the USSR "mere days after President John F. Kennedy’s announcement of the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba," Zelensky says in the article's opening. Among the most compelling reasons, Zelensky argues, was Slonimsky's participation in a "cultural exchange tour, organized and implemented by the U.S. Department of State." To understand the "complex picture" of his trip, Zelensky "examines the intersection of three distinct spheres: U.S. Cold War diplomacy, music’s role in this diplomacy, and the involvement of political exiles from the former Russian Empire in these efforts."
Associate Professor of English, Creative Writing Arisa White has won the Airlie Press Prize from Airlie Press, an Oregon-based nonprofit dedicated to "cultivating and sustaining fine contemporary poetry and to promoting poets from the Pacific Northwest—and beyond." White won the prize for her forthcoming manuscript A Trusted Spectacle in a World of Incomplete Sunshine. The manuscript, which received a book workshop grant from Colby's Humanities Division, will be published in 2027.
Catherine Besteman, the Francis F. Bartlett and Ruth K. Bartlett Professor of Anthropology, was quoted in a recent article in the Portland Press Herald titled "These Mainers are collecting and sharing stories about incarceration." The story highlights a digital archive created by Freedom & Captivity, a collective of Mainers who advocate for people impacted by the criminal legal system and incarceration. A group of those Mainers will bring the archive to life with a performance that will tour the state in November. “People who are in prisons and people who have loved ones in prisons, their voices are never really heard,” said Besteman, who has played a key role in the project over the years. “It felt very important to have this archive to bring the voices to the surface of what the experience of mass incarceration is doing to us as a society.” The archive is held at the Colby College Digital Libraries and Maine Historical Society.
Véronique Plesch, the James M. Gillespie Professor of Art, was a guest on Is It? The Art Mystery Podcast to discuss a work by 17th-century painter Georges de La Tour. Each episode of this podcast, which debuted in September 2025, considers an artwork that has divided and confounded scholars, sometimes for centuries. To solve this mystery, podcast creator and host Noah Charney ’02 brings in a guest expert on the artist in question as well as an expert in AI authentication from the Swiss firm Art Recognition who reports on the results of the AI analysis of the painting in question, which is revealed in the episode’s final part.
Assistant Professor of Education Pei Pei Liu has won an Early Career Research Award from the American Psychological Association's Division of Educational Psychology, Division 15. The award comes with grant money that will fund Liu's research project "Teachers’ Conceptual Change About Supporting Student Motivation." Liu is one of three recipients for the 2025 awards.
A short story by Associate Professor of English, Creative Writing Sarah Braunstein is included in the forthcoming Best American Short Stories 2025 collection. The collection will feature Braunstein's story "Abject Naturalism," which previously appeared in The New Yorker. The Best American Short Stories 2025 is edited by Celeste Ng and published by HarperCollins. It will be available at the end of October 2025.
Gianluca Rizzo, the Paul D. and Marilyn Paganucci Associate Professor of Italian Language and Literature, won the Elio Pagliarani National Prize for Poetry from the Elio Pagliarani Literary Association. Rizzo was honored with the prize in published work section for his "Testamentum porcelli." The awards ceremony took place in the Cinema Hall of the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome and honors Elio Pagliarani, an Italian poet and literary critic for whom the prize is named.
Clare Boothe Luce Assistant Professor of Computer Science Stacy Doore and James M. Gillespie Professor of Art Véronique Plesch participated in the panel “Curating Access: Expert-AI Descriptions for Blind and Low Vision Museum Visitors” at the AI and the Liberal Arts Symposium that took place at Connecticut College Oct. 17–19, 2025. Doore and Plesch reported on the research they have been conducting for the past year developing multimodal AI tools to automate accessible artwork descriptions to support blind and low vision museum visitors. Two colleagues from Amherst College, Miloslava Hruba (study room manager and European print specialist, Mead Art Museum) and Douglas Hall (IT research computing specialist) also reported on their research on the topic.