Faculty Accomplishments
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.
Assistant Professor of Classics Kassandra Miller has won the Barbara McManus Award for Outstanding Scholarship from the Women’s Classical Caucus. The award recognizes Miller's article "Intentional Menstrual Suppression in Imperial Rome,” which originally appeared in the Journal of Roman Studies (JRS 114, 2024: 27– 59). Critieria for the Barbara McManus Award include work that reframes a debate, changes the direction of research, asks entirely new questions, and applies a theory or methodology in a new way.
Michael Burke, professor of English and creative writing, emeritus, published an essay in the journal Rustica, Issue 4. In his essay, "A Kind of Magical Thinking," Burke tells the story of the four vehicles that have been stolen from him, "which seems like more than my fair share," he said.
Assistant Professor of Science, Technology, and Society Ashton Wesner coauthored a paper out in the journal Education Sciences for its special issue "Rethinking Engineering Education." Wesner's open-access article "Educating Socially Responsible Engineers Through Critical Community-Engaged Pedagogy" investigates how social justice course content and community-engaged learning experiences can change engineering student attitudes toward civic engagement and social responsibility. The authors' interviews and focus groups showed that engagement with community-led projects during coursework were important factors in both increasing students' interest in engineering and potentially retaining underrepresented students in engineering higher education.
Zach Peckham, the Jennifer Jarling Forese Writer-in-Residence and a visiting instructor in creative writing, wrote a review for the Summer 2025 issue of the Chicago Review. Peckham reviewed the book Death Styles by Joyelle McSweeney. This review is one of many reviews, poems, and essays he has published.