Faculty Accomplishments

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.

Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of Sociology and African-American Studies, has an essay titled "Red Summer, Trump Summer and the politics of hate," in Religion News Service. "Living memories of terror and exclusion within my family became personal, cultural and social capital, enabling and motivating my parents to resist discrimination and to provide the spiritual and intellectual armament that prepared me to resist and stand strong against the assaults, discrimination and name-calling I experienced in my lifetime," she wrote in her Aug. 16 opinion piece

Loren McClenachan, the Elizabeth and Lee Ainslie Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies, coauthored a paper recently published in PNAS. "Challenges to natural and human communities from surprising ocean temperatures" discusses how individuals and institutions will benefit by betting that trends of increasing temperatures will continue, a "strategy [that] represents a radical shift that will be difficult for many to make," according to the paper's abstract.

Associate Professor of Philosophy Lydia Moland has a new book out, Hegel's Aesthetics: The Art of Idealism, published by Oxford University Press. The book "offers the first comprehensive book in English on Hegel's philosophy of art in thirty years, gives a new, controversial interpretation of Hegel's notorious 'end of art' thesis, and Illuminates the relevance of Hegel's aesthetics to contemporary art," according to the publisher.

The latest New York Times op-ed by Neil Gross, the Charles A. Dana Professor of Sociology, looks at a new word used by Democratic presidential candidates: structural. "Some of what the candidates are up to by using the term 'structural' is merely rhetorical, signaling the boldness of their ideas," he wrote. "Yet 'structural' is also a nod to an extensive body of social scientific theory and research."

Raffael Scheck, the Katz Distinguished Teaching Professor of History, has coedited a new book, German-occupied Europe in the Second World War, just out from Routledge. The book "provides a framework to guide occupation research with a broad comparative angle focusing on human interactions. Overcoming national compartmentalization, it examines Nazi occupations with attention to relations between occupiers and local populations and differences among occupation regimes," according to the publisher.  Scheck wrote the book's fourth chapter, titled "Genocide as Organizing Principle in Raphael Lemkin’s Analysis of Nazi-Occupied Europe."

Véronique Plesch, professor of art, was invited to deliver a plenary lecture titled Grafitis y comunidades emocionales (siglos XVI-XVIII) at the 11th conference on the History of Written Culture “Scripta in itinere. Discourse, Practice, and Use of Writing in Public Spaces (16th-21st Centuries),” at the University of Alcalá, Alcalá de Henares, Spain, June 18-20.

Plesch was also invited to join the host committee of a special event Aug. 7 at the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, Maine, that will explore the conservation of Nevelson Chapel and celebrating the chapel’s Trinity columns on view at the Farnsworth. The Chapel of the Good Shepherd at Saint Peter’s Church in Manhattan is sculptor Louise Nevelson’s only remaining intact sculptural environment and is currently undergoing restoration. For more information about the campaign to renew Nevelson Chapel, visit nevelsonchapel.org.