Faculty Accomplishments

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.

Professor of Education Adam Howard has coauthored the article "Preparing Democratic Leaders Within a Middle Eastern Context" recently published in the Kappa Delta Pi Record. Cowritten by his colleague Claire Maxwell from the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, the article focuses on the global citizenship education (GCE) initiative at Olive Grove Academy, an elite coeducational boarding school in Jordan. The authors have been "examining Olive Grove and other elite schools in various parts of the world to determine whether school leaders see GCE as problematic in any way and whether they adapt a commitment to GCE that is contextually located."

An essay by Associate Professor of English Elizabeth Sagaser was published in 2019 in the Bulletin, the publication of the Emily Dickinson International Society. The essay, titled "’Tis Centuries - and yet’: Teaching Dickinson and the Presence of the Past," describes Sagaser's approach to helping her students become more analytical readers and thinkers by teaching them to learn poems by heart in step-by-step analytical, hands-on ways. "Learning poems by heart enables well-crafted language and ideas to play a role in everyday thought," Sagaser wrote, "sometimes in unexpected and important ways," Click here for a PDF of Sagaser's essay.    

An article by Steve Simon, professor of the practice of international relations, appears in the upcoming Feb. 13, 2020, issue of the New York Review of Books. Titled "The Middle East: Trump Blunders In," Simon writes that the assassination of Qassim Suleimani "perpetuated the inconsistency of US policy toward the Middle East and its tendency to overreach. As the United States under Trump lurches between withdrawal of its troops from Iraq and Syria and sending more, between reasonable restraint in its use of force and then suddenly assassinating a regional leader, it has worsened the anarchic conditions that have waxed and waned in the region since the Iran–Iraq War of 1980–1988, Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, and the Gulf War that followed six months later."

Assistant Professor of Art Bradley Borthwick has been invited by the Contemporary Sculpture Society to speak at the University of Arkansas. Borthwick "has completed stone-carving residencies in Country Donegal, Ireland, and Gunnison County, Colorado. He has also received research grants supporting travel to Rome, Italy, and the Orkney Islands of Scotland, where studies of remnant cultural form continue to influence his studio practice," according to a news release from the university.

Professor of Art Véronique Plesch has been invited to join the editorial board of the Maine Arts Journal. Appearing on a quarterly basis, the Maine Arts Journal is the official online publication of the Union of Maine Visual Artists. In addition to writing the introduction to the issues (which she did for the first time in the fall issue as a guest editor) and editing the journal’s content, Plesch will contribute a regular feature on Colby (read her review of the Colby College Museum of Art’s Wíwənikan…the beauty we carry: “Decolonization and Appropriation at the Colby College Museum of Art” and “Art and Activism in the Classroom,” which reports on the course taught in the fall semester by Amber Hickey, faculty fellow in U.S. visual culture in the American Studies Program). Colby is supporting a student intern to work under her supervision on MAJ.

Professor of Biology Catherine Bevier coauthored a paper in the January 2020 issue of Ecology and Evolution titled "Environmental influences on and antimicrobial activity of the skin microbiota of Proceratophrys boiei (Amphibia, Anura) across forest fragments." Together with her research colleagues in Brazil, Bevier's research seeks to answer such questions as "what factors determine the microbial community profile that can establish over the amphibian skin? In other words, what fraction of an environmental microbiota has the potential to colonize the skin, what elements become a filter, and how do intrinsic and extrinsic factors matter in this context?"