Faculty Accomplishments

The first interview with Associate Professor of Art Gary Green by Brad Feuerhelm from the Nearest Truth is now online. Feuerhelm, a respected photography critic whose writing and interviews are seminal to the contemporary dialogue on photography, calls Green's work "multi-layered and incredibly interesting." Feurehelm's essays, published by the Nearest Truth, Ordinary Light (Instagram), and American Suburb X (ASX), are read by tens of thousands of people around the world. The second interview, addressing Green's ongoing work has been recorded and will be online soon.

An essay by Catherine Besteman, the Francis F. Bartlett and Ruth K. Bartlett Professor of Anthropology, appeared in Artforum, an international magazine focusing on contemporary art. The article, "Profiteer Motive," looks at an international militarization system that is the subject of Besteman's newest book, Militarized Global Apartheid. "Militarism—the ongoing investment of massive sums in technology and personnel ready to perpetrate violence—is the support structure for capitalism, facilitating the relentless search for profit through dispossession, labor exploitation, and resource extraction," she writes.

Associate Professor of French Audrey Brunetaux was nominated and elected to the Academic Council of the Holocaust Educational Foundation of Northwestern University. Brunetaux's research focuses on 20th- and 21st-century French literature, culture, and cinema with an emphasis on Holocaust narratives, including that of Holocaust writer and survivor Charlotte Delbo, and films.

Luis Millones, the Allen Family Professor of Latin American Literature, has been named the associate editor of Colonial Latin American Review (CLAR), the leading academic journal in his field. Prior to this role, he was the book review editor of CLAR. Millones's research interests include pre-Columbian and colonial studies with an emphasis on the Andes, early modern science and natural histories of the New World, and Jesuits writings from a transatlantic perspective.

Assistant Professor of Psychology Derek Huffman has coauthored a new paper, which will appear in the February issue of the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. "In our paper, we review recent research that has studied how body-based cues contribute to how we learn and remember the locations of landmarks within large-scale environments, such as cities," Huffman explained. The article also discussed limitations of the most commonly used laboratory tasks (rats in a small environment with limited behavioral demands) to study the neuroscience of navigation, furthering the understanding of spatial memory in humans and non-human animals. "Specifically, we argue that we should develop behavioral tasks and measures of the brain that allow us to study navigation under more naturalistic conditions."

Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies Stacy-ann Robinson has been invited to guest-edit a special issue of Sustainability on "Transformations for a Sustainable Future." Papers will interrogate the transformations that are relevant or applicable to small island developing states, the least developed countries (LDCs), and African countries, given their complex histories and varying development circumstances and trajectories. It is hoped that the papers will contribute to discussions at the Fifth United Nations Conference on the LDCs, which will be held in Doha in January 2022.

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?