Faculty Accomplishments

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."

Associate Professor of Psychology Jen Coane coauthored a paper with students Grace Arnold '17, Kimberly Bourne '16, and Sarah Boland '17 recently published in the journal Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications. Titled "Reading the news on Twitter: Source and item memory for social media in younger and older adults," the study "examined how the presentation of news-like content in social media affected both item and source memory across two age groups," according to the paper's abstract. "Although both younger and older adults remembered the content of social media better than the content of news sources, older adults were more sensitive than younger adults to congruency effects in source memory. These findings suggest that older adults rely more on their prior knowledge of conventional language and style in traditional and social media."

Associate Professor of Psychology Erin Sheets has a newly published paper out. "Daily Interpersonal and Noninterpersonal Stress Reactivity in Current and Remitted Depression" was published in Cognitive Therapy and Research March 23. The paper's primary findings were that currently depressed individuals demonstrated greater emotional reactivity to daily perceived stress and daily negative events, relative to previously depressed and never depressed individuals. Additionally, currently depressed participants were particularly sensitive to interpersonal negative events.

Loren McClenachan, the Elizabeth and Lee Ainslie Associate Professor of Environmental Studies, and three of her senior environmental studies students collaborated on a paper published in the journal Spire, the Maine Journal of Conservation and Sustainability.  The paper, "Youth perceptions of climate change and climate action in Waterville, Maine," was completed by seniors in McClenachan's Domestic Policy capstone course: Mariel Ferragamo '20, Melody Larson '20, and Peter Brown '20. The paper shows that even though "students associated the current state of the environment with more negative than positive emotions, the Maine environment was perceived more positively than that of the globe," according to the paper's abstract. However, "Students in Waterville appear to be invested in the issue of climate change, and they have an important voice to contribute to the discourse regarding action and policy."