Faculty Accomplishments

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."    

Associate Professor of Art Gary Green is a participant in the Virtual New York Art Book Fair, which runs Feb. 24-28. Green holds a conversation with Photograph magazine's Editor Jean Dykstra, which will be available throughout the fair at L'Artiere Editions.

Assistant Professor of Geology Bess Koffman was named an Outstanding Reviewer for 2021 by Communications Earth and Environment, a Nature research journal. Koffman, a geochemist and paleoclimatologist, met the journal's criteria for the award by "making a significant and positive contribution to the peer review process, demonstrating professionalism and compassion in their reviews, and providing comments that help the authors to improve their work."

Associate Professor of Art Gary Green held an interview with the journal Urbanautica that covered Green's photography and recent books, philosophical topics, and his teaching at Colby. In the 13 years he's been at Colby, the art program "has grown and expanded. Our senior year curriculum includes a year-long capstone that includes all artistic disciplines, a thesis exhibit in our museum, and a really nice catalog. ... It’s a robust finish to four years of studying art," Green said. 

Professor of Art Véronique Plesch was invited to deliver a virtual lecture in Spanish titled “La pared y la piel.” The lecture was for the graduate course Arte Medieval taught by Professor Luis Javier Cuesta Hernández, Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City, and was delivered Feb. 19, 2021.