Faculty Accomplishments

Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies Stacy-ann Robinson has coauthored a new paper on litigation and climate justice published in the journal Climate Policy. This paper, which was co-authored with Colby students Charles Beauregard '20, D'Arcy Carlson '21, Charlie Cobb '20, and Mykela Patton '22, develops a new rights-based framework and applies it to three high-profile climate litigation cases. It concludes that litigation cannot deliver all types of justice and should, therefore, be one of several policy tools in the fight against climate change.

The 2019 project-based "Digital Projects in History" seminar taught by James Fleming, the Charles A. Dana Professor of Science, Technology, and Society, was featured in the January 2021 newsletter of the History of Science Society. The article also contains a section by Ben Steib '21, who was a student in the class and is currently Fleming's research assistant. 

A new paper coauthored by Professor of Education Adam Howard has just been published in the British Journal of Sociology of Education. The paper, "Conferred cosmopolitanism: class-making strategies of elite schools across the world," looks at how elite schools "work to produce subjects that will thrive in a globalized world." Howard and his coauthor, Claire Maxwell (University of Copenhagen), conclude that "ultimately, these elite institutions are seeking to create an elite class by conferring a cosmopolitan status on their students which will have direct convertibility for the specific futures being envisioned for them."

Professor of Art Véronique Plesch contributed two essays to the 2021 winter issue of the Maine Arts Journal: UMVA Quarterly, titled “A Conversation with James Fangbone" and “When More is Better: Horror Vacui in History." She also wrote the introduction to this issue, dedicated to Maximalism: Courting Chaos or Creating Order?

A blog post on Savvy Verse & Wit featured the new poetic memoir Who's Your Daddy? by Assistant Professor of Creative Writing Arisa White. "White is a deft storyteller," the post says, "and readers will be emotionally spent by this poetic memoir."

Professor of Statistics Liam O’Brien has coauthored a paper, "Assessing Older Adult Wellness: An Assessment of the Psychometric Properties of the Lifestyle Survey," recently published in the Journal of Nursing Measurement. "The purpose of this study is to examine the validity and reliability of the Lifestyle Survey instrument," according to the study's abstract. The researchers concluded that "with refinement, the Lifestyle Survey is a valid and reliable measure of wellness among community-dwelling older adults."

Robert Gastaldo, the Whipple-Coddington Professor of Geology, Emeritus, has coauthored a new article, Trends in stable-isotopes and climate proxies from late Changhsingian ghost landscapes of the Karoo Basin, South Africa, published in Frontiers in Science: Ecology and Evolution. "The manuscript continues reports of our studies on the paleoclimatology of the latest Permian in the Karoo Basin, about 253 million years ago," explained Gastaldo. "What we have been able to demonstrate is that over a period of several hundreds of thousands to a million or more years, climate varied in the Southern Hemisphere between intervals of wet and cool conditions and warm and seasonally dry conditions. The widely accepted model for this interval of time is one of a unidirectional increase in temperature and aridity. Our data demonstrate that this hypothesis is too simplistic, and increased cooling and wetting are characteristic of the climate on land prior to a reported ecological turnover at the end of the period."

Raffael Scheck, the Gibson Professor of History, has published a new article on the treatment of Western prisoners of war during World War II in the journal, War in History. "Nazi courts martial could sentence prisoners of war for offences that did not exist in the western democracies, such as insults to the Führer, or severely punish them for acts leading only to mild disciplinary sanctions in Britain or America," according to the paper's abstract. "These asymmetries, which influenced the Geneva Convention on prisoners of war of 1949, challenge the paradigm of reciprocity and symmetry in prisoner of war regimes between Germany and the western countries in World War II."

In a correspondence published in Nature and available here, Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies Stacy-ann Robinson and colleagues draw attention to the need for an internationally agreed-upon definition of climate finance. Without this, donors decide what counts as climate finance. This has serious implications for whether countries in the Global South can adequately mitigate and adapt to the impacts of climate change.

Raffael Scheck, the Audrey Wade Hittinger Katz and Sheldon Toby Katz Professor of History, has published a paper, "The Danger of 'Moral Sabotage:' Western Prisoners of War on Trial for Homosexual Relations in Nazi Germany," in the Journal of the History of Sexuality. The article presents the Nazi approach to homosexuality and the legal framework around it. It also examines representative cases involving French, British, and Belgian prisoners of war as well as soldiers from the French and British colonies.