Faculty Accomplishments

Professor of Art Véronique Plesch and Pulver Family Associate Professor of Jewish Studies David Freidenreich have coauthored a paper recently published in the journal Studies in Iconography. Titled “’What is That to Us?’: The Eucharistic Liturgy and the Enemies of Christ in the Beam of the Passion," the paper addresses the so-called Beam of the Passion, an early 13th-century painted pine beam "created in Iberia for display above the eucharistic altar, which unexpectedly depicts Judas’s second encounter with the priests in its central Crucifixion scene," according to the paper's abstract. "Even more surprisingly, the priests and elders of first-century Jerusalem look like stereotypical African Muslims. Prior scholarship emphasizes the Beam’s depictions of Muslims as Christ’s enemies, but this work is not ultimately about Muslims. Rather, “Moorish” figures—like the Jewish figures they displace—play an instrumental role in an effort to bolster faith in Christ and the eucharist. In this respect, the Beam’s anomalous iconography illustrates a common dynamic within medieval anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim rhetoric, whose true focus is often a fellow Christian. The full significance of the Crucifixion’s Moorish figures and their dismissive quid ad nos becomes apparent through analysis of the Beam in its entirety within its architectural, liturgical, and political contexts." Plesch frequently lectures on art in Freidenreich’s classes (in particular on depictions of Jews in medieval art) and this is how this research first started. Over the course of years, different Colby students were involved in the project, in particular, Anna Spencer ’16 and more recently, Plesch’s research assistants Sarah Rossien ’19 and Annie Muller ’22.

James Fleming, the Charles A. Dana Professor of Science, Technology, and Society, contributed an item to Smithsonian Magazine's article "50 Things We've Learned About The Earth Since the First Earth Day." Fleming's contribution: That the Air Has Gotten Better."Since 1970 smoking (at least of tobacco) is way down, sick building syndrome is far less common, acid deposition from sulfur dioxide is lower, lead additives have been removed from gasoline, and stratospheric ozone levels are on the mend. Let’s work to see these trends continue and accelerate in years to come," wrote Fleming, who is also a research associate at the National Museum of American History.

Professor of Art Véronique Plesch was in conversation with artist Abby Shahn on the occasion of her retrospective, Abby Shahn—50 Years, at SPEEDWELL projects in Portland, Maine. More than 80 people attended the April 19 Zoom event, which was hosted by SPEEDWELL's founder/director Jocelyn Lee (aunt of Austin Lee '20), who was in situ at the gallery, making a virtual tour of the show possible.

Assistant Professor of English (Creative Writing) Arisa White has published an interview with the writer Emerson Whitney in Believer magazine in advance of their new book, Heaven. At one point, White says to Whitney: "Your Heaven is gorgeous. There’s a tenderness, a pinch of academic reflexity, and critical compassion given over to the language. The way you’re weaving queer theory, feminism, and shouting out theorists and artists in lyrical paragraphs, poetic in its economy and associative eye."  

Professor of Education Adam Howard and Kayla Freeman '19 have published an article in the journal International Studies in Sociology of Education titled "Teaching difference: global citizenship education within an elite single-sex context." The article is the culmination of their collaboration on the project, which "employs the concept of ‘everyday multiculturalism’ to examine what students at an elite school in Australia are taught about working with and across difference through global citizenship education within a single-sex classroom model." Freeman was Howard's student research assistant for two years, and they presented an earlier draft of this article at the Eastern Sociological Society conference last year. 

Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of African American Studies and Sociology, has contributed a chapter on W.E.B. Du Bois to the Sage Encyclopedia of Sociology of Religion. "In addition to many well-known publications, he produced a massive body of work—a hardcover annotated bibliography weighs 5 pounds—and his sociology of religion is embedded throughout work produced over 80 years of published writing, scientific scholarship, and activism," Gilkes writes in the opening paragraph of the chapter.

Spire, the Maine Journal of Conservation and Sustainability, published an article titled "Diversifying Maine’s coastal economy: A transition from lobster fishing to kelp aquaculture?" cowritten by Loren McClenachan, the Elizabeth and Lee Ainslie Associate Professor of Environmental Studies, and Madeline Greene '20, Mae Sefransky '20, and Christopher Wang '20. The students were in McClenachan's Domestic Policy capstone course last fall, and they contributed to the study's main question: identifying kelp’s potential to diversify Maine’s coastal economy. "While our results demonstrate that kelp has the potential to be economically and socially beneficial to Maine’s economy, they also indicate that continued injections of social and economic resources are needed for kelp to mirror the success of the Maine lobster industry," the authors conclude in the paper's abstract.

Associate Professor of Philosophy Lydia Moland contributed an essay to the American Philosophical Association's blog series "Women in Philosophy" titled "The Philosophical Activism of Lydia Maria Child." Moland is currently working on a biography of Child, and in this essay, she notes that in 1833 Child "authored the country’s first book-length condemnation of slavery: a book so progressive in its commitment to immediate emancipation and racial equality that she was ostracized from Boston society. Undaunted, she spent the next thirty years arguing against slavery in every venue imaginable."

Associate Professor of Sociology Christel Kesler contributed a post to the Work in Progress, a blog of the American Sociological Association. Kesler's post is titled "Public preschool helps some families more than others" and discusses her recent study, in which she sets out "to better understand the implications of the rise in children’s preschool attendance for the work lives of their parents, focusing on the very simple outcome of whether parents with children of this age participate in the labor market."

Associate Professor of Mathematics Scott Taylor has published a paper in the Journal of Topology titled "Distortion and the bridge distance of knots." In the study, the coauthors relate the rigid geometric properties of a knot to its more flexible topological properties. A more rigorous explanation of their work is found in the paper's abstract:  "We extend techniques due to Pardon to show that there is a lower bound on the distortion of a knot in R3 proportional to the minimum of the bridge distance and the bridge number of the knot. We also exhibit an infinite family of knots for which the minimum of the bridge distance and the bridge number is unbounded and Pardon's lower bound is constant."