Faculty Accomplishments

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?"

In a New York Times op-ed, Steve Simon, professor of the practice of international relations, discusses hypersonic missiles, weapons that "have long been an object of desire by Russian, Chinese and American military leaders, for obvious reasons: Launched from any of these countries, they could reach any other within minutes," Simon wrote in the Jan. 2 opinion piece. "The biggest threat from hypersonics is that they come at a time when the world’s arm control treaties are falling apart," he concludes.

In a New York Times op-ed, Steve Simon, professor of the practice of international relations, discusses hypersonic missiles, weapons that "have long been an object of desire by Russian, Chinese and American military leaders, for obvious reasons: Launched from any of these countries, they could reach any other within minutes," Simon wrote in the Jan. 2 opinion piece. "The biggest threat from hypersonics is that they come at a time when the world’s arm control treaties are falling apart," he concludes.

Adrian Blevins, professor of English and creative writing, has five new poems published in the January-February 2020 issue of American Poetry Review. The poems, including "Crone Status," "Old Boyfriend Prison Status," and "Academician Abecedarian Status," come from her forthcoming collection, Status Pending. 

The Smithsonian Institution Fellowship Program (SIFP) has continued the appointment of Robert Gastaldo as an academic researcher. Gastaldo, the Whipple-Coddington Professor of Geology, had been associated with the Smithsonian for close to 35 years. His current research with SIFP is with the Smithsonian’s William DiMichele, and together they seek to understand what happened to Deep Time tropical ecosystems of the Carboniferous and Permian to changes in glaciation and climate.