Faculty Accomplishments

Professor of Art Véronique Plesch is the guest assistant editor for the Fall 2019 issue of the Maine Arts Journal: UMVA Quarterly. Organized around special themes, the journal features essays by and about artists, interviews, submissions by members of the Union of Maine Visual Artists (UMVA), poetry, UMVA updates about local chapters and current projects, and more. In addition to two essays in the current issue (one co-authored, one on the Colby College Museum of Art’s current exhibition), Plesch wrote the introduction to the fall issue, on the theme of Appropriation.

A book by Chandra Bhimull, associate professor of anthropology and African-American studies, has been awarded honorable mention in the 2019 American Ethnological Society Sharon Stephens Prize competition. Bhimull's book Empire in the Air: Airline Travel and the African Diaspora (2017, NYU Press) examines the role that race played in the inception of the airline industry. "This important topic is in the hands of a poet who has crafted a style of writing that is both exquisite and compelling, revealing the literary dimensions of anthropology," selection committee member Shirley Lindenbaum writes. "The committee found [Dr. Bhimull's] writing poetic and [her] consideration of the intersection of race and state power in the creation of air travel wonderfully imaginative and illuminating," Katherine McCaffrey, chair of the selection committee, wrote in an email notification.  Bhimull's book was also awarded honorable mention in the 2019 Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing, given by the Society for Humanistic Anthropology.

Laurie Osborne, the Zacamy Chair of English, contributed a chapter to the forthcoming book The Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Global Appropriation, which "brings together a variety of different voices to examine the ways that Shakespeare has been adapted and appropriated onto stage, screen, page, and a variety of digital formats," according to the publisher. Osborne's chapter, "Teaching Global Shakespeare: Visual Culture Projects in Action," draws on the Humanities Lab she taught in conjunction with the Colby Museum of Art a few years ago.

This summer Mary Ellis Gibson, the Arthur Jeremiah Roberts Professor of Literature and chair of the English Department, published her latest book, Science Fiction in Colonial India, 1835–1905. [While the publication date is March, copies were not available in the U.S. until June.] This collection of stories shows, for the first time, how science fiction writing developed in India years before the writings of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells in Europe. The five stories presented in this collection, in their cultural and political contexts, help form a new picture of English language writing in India and a new understanding of the connections among science fiction, modernity, and empire. Speculative fiction developed early in India in part because the intrinsic dysfunction and violence of colonialism encouraged writers there to project alternative futures, whether utopian or dystopic. These stories, created by Indian and British writers, responded to the intellectual ferment and political instabilities of colonial India. They add an important dimension to our understanding of Victorian empire, science fiction, and speculative fictional narratives. They provide new examples of the imperial and the anti-imperial imaginations at work. In Victorian India, technological change was necessarily understood through differences between the colonizer and the colonized. Since India was not a settler colony, new British-imposed forms of government could scarcely claim continuity with the past, and political and cultural dislocations gave rise to speculation about wholly new forms of social organization. Creation and destruction, cultural innovation and colonial resistance gave rise to the plots and tropes of science fiction. In the stories collected in Science Fiction in Colonial India, 1835–1905,19-century Indian writers project successful and failed revolutions into a 20th-century future. British writers imagine, on the one hand, a catastrophic flood – thanks to the projected Panama Canal – and, on the other, a utopian future of peaceful multi-ethnic parliamentary government. And a Muslim writer designs a feminist utopia in which women practice science and men keep house.

Kerill O'Neill, professor of classics and director of the Center for the Arts and Humanities, wrote an article titled "Creating a Space for the Humanities: Colby Center for the Arts and Humanities" published in July by CHCI. The article recounts the formation of the center and its programs and successes to date. Among the lessons O'Neill has learned from Colby's center are, "to be bold and dream big; to trust the collective wisdom of colleagues; and to think strategically, take what you can get, and then build on your strengths."

Professor of English Debra Spark has had several essays and stories published in the last since May. Spark also won a residency at the artist colony Arteles in Finland. Here are the titles, publications, and links (when available):

"Something Had Gone Wrong," Cincinnati Review  (short story), spring 2019

“A Container for Art,” Decor Maine, May 2019

“Writer Susan Orlean Restores a Schindler Classic In LA,” Dwell, May/June 2019

"My House: Writer Susan Orleans," Dwell+, May/June 2019 (interview)

“Scandinavian-Inspired Maine Retreat,” Dwell+, July 2019

“The Power of the Lens,” Elysian, summer 2019

“The World’s Greatest Art Fair,” Elysian, summer 2019

“A Clapboard Classic on a Maine Island,” New England Home, July-August 2019

“Compact Cape Contemporary,” New England Home, July-August 2019

“Childhood Redux,” New England Home, May-June 2019

“Shop Visit:  23 Milk Street,” New England Home, May-June 2019

“Like Mother, Like Son,” New England Home/CT, Summer 2019

Stacy-ann Robinson, Colby's new assistant professor of environmental studies, has been invited to share her expertise on climate change adaptation in small islands by being a contributing author to Chapter 15 (Small Islands) of Working Group II's contribution to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The IPCC is the United Nations body set up in 1988 to provide policymakers with regular assessments of the scientific basis of climate change, its impacts and future risks, and options for adaptation and mitigation. Working Group II focuses on climate impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability. Coordinating lead authors and lead authors enlist other experts as contributing authors to provide specific knowledge or expertise and to help ensure that the full range of views held in the scientific community is reflected in the report. The Sixth Assessment Report is due to be finalized in 2021. It will inform policymakers, international climate negotiators, and other stakeholders about the latest knowledge on all aspects of climate change.

An essay by Jim Fleming, the Charles A. Dana Professor of Science, Technology, and Society, titled “Terraforming Planets, Geoengineering Earth” is a finalist for the 100 Year Starship Canopus Award for Excellence in the “original non-fiction” category. The Canopus Awards are administered by the Dorothy Jemison Foundation for Excellence with support from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. A version of this essay will be published in Nature Remade: Engineering Life, Envisioning Worlds (University of Chicago Press, 2020).

Garry Mitchell, associate professor of art, has new work showing at the ICON Contemporary Art Gallery in Brunswick, Maine. His exhibition is called Lost and Found and is on view through Sept. 14, 2019.

Fish and Fisheries published the paper "Shifting perceptions of rapid temperature changes’ effects on marine fisheries, 1945–2017" with Loren McClenachan, the Elizabeth and Lee Ainslie Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies, as lead author. Coauthors include Ben Neal, adjunct assistant professor of environmental studies, Seabird McKeon, former visiting assistant professor of biology, and Madison Marra '17. The paper "documents the effects of rapidly changing water temperatures along the United States’ east coast using observations from fisheries newspapers during a warming phase (1945–1951) and subsequent cooling phase (1952–1960) of the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, which we compared to similar recent observations of warming waters (1998–2017)," according to the paper's abstract.