Faculty Accomplishments

Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of Sociology and African-American Studies, presented a paper at the 2020 Eastern Sociological Society Annual Meeting, held Feb. 28 in Philadelphia. Gilkes's paper is titled "The Gift of W.E.B. Du Bois's The Gift of Black Folk: African Cultural Capital and the Making of America."

Loren McClenachan, the Elizabeth and Lee Ainslie Associate Professor of Environmental Studies, was coauthor on a recently published paper titled "Use of historical data to assess changes in the vulnerability of sharks" that appears in the journal Fisheries Research. McClenachan worked with the lead author, Ilse Martínez-Candelas, in 2019 when Martínez-Candelas was a visiting researcher at Colby. The research involved "a historical characterisation [that] was performed to define the most important periods for the shark fishery in Campeche, southern Gulf of Mexico, and a PSA [productivity and susceptibility analysis] was conducted to determine the vulnerability of the eleven most important commercial shark species in each three periods," the paper's abstract says. 

Assistant Professor of Biology Suegene Noh has a new publication in the journal Ecology and Evolution titled "Wild Dictyostelium discoideum social amoebae show plastic responses to the presence of nonrelatives during multicellular development." Noh's research involved using "RNA‐sequencing and photographic time series analysis to detect possible conflict‐induced plastic differences between wild D. discoideum aggregates formed by single strains compared with mixed pairs of strains (chimeras)," according to the paper's abstract.

Professor of Art Véronique Plesch organized and chaired the session “Word and Image in the Studio Practice” at the 108th College Art Association Annual Conference that took place in Chicago Feb. 12–15. The session was sponsored by the International Association of Word and Image Studies. Plesch also presented a response to the three papers in the panel, one of which by John Tyson, Colby Class of 2004, who is currently assistant professor of modern and contemporary art at UMass Boston.

Luis Millones, Charles A. Dana Professor of Spanish, has joined the board of directors of the Maine Humanities Council. The Maine Humanities Council, a statewide nonprofit organization, uses the humanities—literature, history, philosophy, and culture—as a tool for positive change in Maine communities. The MHC programs and grants encourage critical thinking and conversations across social, economic, and cultural boundaries.

Marta Ameri, assistant professor of art, has published an article titled "Who Holds the Keys? Identifying Female administrators at Shahr-i Sokhta" in Iran: Journal of the British Institute of Persian Studies. The article compares the physical and iconographic aspects of seals found in the cemetery of the third millennium BCE Iranian site of Shahr-i Sokhta with those of seals used for administrative sealing to identify different groups of people responsible for controlling goods and resources. Ameri uses the observed similarity between seals used for sealing and those found buried in women’s graves to suggest that women were responsible for most of the administrative sealing at Shahr-i Sokhta in the mid-third millennium BC, and to call into question the often-unchallenged assumption that men were by default responsible for administration in ancient societies.

Morehouse College has nominated Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of Sociology and African-American Studies, for induction in its Martin Luther King Jr. International College of Ministers and Laity.

Leticia Mercado, assistant professor of Spanish, has a new article published in the double-blind peer-reviewed journal Imago: Revista de Emblemática y Cultural Visual. Titled “Bocángel's Silva 'El Retrato': A Textual Trojan Horse?” the article studies the dialogue of emblematic and poetic image in Spanish Baroque poet Gabriel Bocángel’s silva "El retrato" (c. 1638), framed within the context of the war for poetic patronage at the early modern court and the tradition of the descriptio puellae. This study, the author notes, proposes a re-examination of the text as a defense of the role of poetry and a commentary on the nature of the true leader built on the symbolic and emblematic meanings of three plants: the laurel, the olive, and the ivy.

Through the Boston Medical Library, the Center for the History of Medicine at Harvard Medical School offers annual fellowships to support research in the history of medicine. Tanya Sheehan, William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Art, has been awarded a 2019-20 fellowship to conduct research for her new book on African-American artists and their engagement with medicine and public health. The book focuses on the 1930s through the 1960s, when the Harlem-based artistic circle of Charles Alston, Henry Bannarn, Jacob Lawrence, Georgette Seabrooke Powell, and others painted hospital murals, collaborated with medical doctors, experienced their own health crises, and practiced art therapy. Sheehan will spend one month digging into the rich resources of Harvard’s Countway Library of Medicine.