Faculty Accomplishments

Professor of English and Creative Writing Michael Burke has an essay published in the 200th-anniversary issue of Down East magazine. Burke's essay, titled "Pre-Digital Connectivity," is included in the magazine's "200 Things to Love about Maine" section. The essay is about a local radio station's call-in program "Phone Mart," which provides a place for people to sell things, but also functions as a kind of social media. Burke says the program is "a low-tech, old-fashioned kind of social media that gives you insights into your fellow citizen's lives."

Professor of Education Adam Howard was recently appointed to the editorial board of the journal International Studies in Sociology of Education. He was also re-appointed for a five-year term to Curriculum Inquiry's editorial board. 

Robert Gastaldo, the Whipple-Coddington Professor of Geology, and Kaci Kus '18 have coauthored a paper just published in the Journal of Sedimentary Research that's based on Kus's honors thesis. The paper, "Calcic Vertisols in the upper Daptocephalus Assemblage Zone, Balfour Formation, Karoo Basin, South Africa: Implications for Late Permian Climate," stems from research Kus conducted for a project in South Africa where she detailed the ancient (Permian age) soil profile in one of the classic latest Permian localities in the Eastern Cape Province. With her data, the authors reconstructed the mean annual temperature and mean annual precipitation estimates for an interval prior to the end-Permian crisis on land. According to Gastaldo, "previous interpretations of soils with calcium-carbonate soil nodules have been that these features formed under dry and arid conditions. Our geochemical data from stable carbon isotopes shows that these soils developed under regionally cool conditions, with a mean annual temperature of 10 C (68 F), and an estimate of 1100 mm/year (+/- 180 mm). Hence, these soils, often thought to represent dry conditions, formed under a cool and humid climate. These results change our understanding of the paleoclimate of the latest Permian in the Karoo Basin of South Africa."  

Professor of Art Véronique Plesch, a member of the editorial board for the Maine Arts Journal, wrote the introduction for the summer issue and contributed two essays: “Teaching in a Time of Confinement,” on her experience teaching remotely, and “Plague Art? An Art Historian’s Musings on Pandemics,” on art during the plague. Plesch reports that Colby interns Sabina Garibovic '22 and Andrew MacDonald '21 were of great help putting together this historical issue on the theme "Art in a Time of Pandemic and Quarantine.”

Assistant Professor of Government Lindsay Mayka, an expert on Latin American politics, has been named a 2020 Clarence Stone Scholar by the Urban and Local Politics Section of the American Political Science Association, a leading professional organization for the study of political science. THE APSA committee selected Mayka based on her significant contributions in the area of local politics in Latin America and her attention to methodology in comparative urban politics, according to a citation from the APSA. The committee was also impressed with Mayka's leadership in the field as well as with her applied work as a consultant in the field of Latin American urban policy. "It is an incredible honor to receive this award recognizing my research on citizen participation, urban planning, and human rights in Latin American cities," Mayka said. "I'm thankful for my Colby colleagues who have supported me, and for my remarkable Colby student research assistants who have provided invaluable help on these projects." Mayka's first book, Building Participatory Institutions in Latin America: Reform Coalitions and Institutional Change (Cambridge University Press, 2019), “examines the idea and implementation of participatory institutions, asking the question about when they actually work, and when they do not work, and why this is the case, especially in Latin America,” New Books Network reported. Additionally, Mayka has won two awards from the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) this year: the Best Paper Award from the Subnational Politics and Society section of LASA, and the Best Paper by a Junior Section member by the Defense, Security, and Democracy Section. The Clarence Stone award recognizes up to two young scholars who are impacting the study of urban politics with their scholarship and leadership. Mayka began teaching at Colby in 2013. Previously, she was a Democracy Fellow at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at the Harvard Kennedy School. More than 11,000 professionals from 100 countries belong to the American Political Science Association. Its programs and services unite political scientists from across specialties and regions to further their understanding of politics, democracy, and citizenship everywhere in the world.

An essay by Professor of Creative Writing Adrian Blevins was recently published by Waxwing magazine. "How I Wrote The Brass Girl Brouhaha" showcases the choices Blevins made in write her award-winning book of poetry.  "The Brass Girl Brouhaha is a record of how alive I wanted to be back when I was a not-yet-quite-really-alive sleepwalking baby. It is a record of the oar I had to walk through to become as wrong as possible as a way of staying alive in an oppressive Empire that likes its southern girls all zipped-up and sweet. It’s the story of my unwillingness to quit. It’s a book of loss and sacrifice that I hope does not feel too grave because somewhere along the way I also stumbled across Charles Simic’s idea that 'poetry is best when it finds itself at the heart of human comedy,'" Blevins writes in her essay.

Steven Simon, professor in the practice of international relations, coauthored the paper "19 Years Later: How to Wind Down the War on Terror" that appeared on the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace website. "The policy departures recommended in this paper are intended to thread the needle by reducing the scope and intensity of U.S. CT operations and increasing congressional oversight while retaining an effective capacity for self-defense," Simon and his coauthor, Richard Sokolsky, wrote.

A new paper, "Culturalized Religion: A Synthetic Review and Agenda for Research," by Associate Professor of Sociology Damon W. Mayrl and Avi Astor from Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona's Sociology Department was recently published in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. "Scholars have taken a growing interest in what we call 'culturalized religion'—that is, forms of religious identification, discourse, and expression that are primarily cultural in character, insofar as they are divorced from belief in religious dogma or participation in religious ritual," writes Mayrl and Astor in their paper's abstract. "This article aims to clarify our current thinking about these phenomena so as to facilitate future theoretical and empirical work. ... In so doing, we develop an inclusive and dynamic approach to studying culturalized religion that clears the ground for further research into its diverse modalities and manifestations, as well as their points of intersection and interaction."

Professor of Education Adam Howard has coauthored an entry on "elite universities" for the SAGE Encyclopedia of Higher Education. Howard collaborated with his colleague Jane Kenway (Monash University, Australia) on the entry.

Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies Stacy-ann Robinson has been appointed to the Editorial Board of Regional Environmental Change. The journal publishes research on the interactions between human and natural systems at the regional level. It is currently ranked 33rd of 116 environmental studies journals and has an impact factor of 3.149. She will serve a three-year term.