Faculty Accomplishments

Associate Professor of Art Tanya Sheehan coauthored the latest installment in the Smithsonian’s “Double Exposure” book series. Pictures with Purpose: Early African American Photography (2019) examines photographs from the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Sheehan’s contribution to the book focuses on vernacular, or everyday, photos and what they can tell us about the African-American experience before and after Emancipation. Through case studies from the museum, she outlines the many motivations that shaped the creation, dissemination, and consumption of such images. While most aimed to preserve likenesses and memories, honor individuals, and uplift the Black race, others reinforced racial stereotypes and challenged Black agency. The book has been reviewed by the Wall Street Journal and at Buzzfeed, among others.

Professor of Education Adam Howard has been awarded a visiting fellowship in the Department of Sociology at University of Copenhagen for the fall 2019 term. The fellowship is designed to "attract world-leading social scientists who spend three months collaborating with members of the faculty" according to the university.  During the fellowship, Howard will mainly work with Claire Maxwell, professor of sociology, on a book that they're coauthoring. He will also work with doctoral students, give lectures, and collaborate with scholars involved in the Sino-Danish Center at the university on the development of a new research project on elite schools in China.   

Associate Professor of English Adrian Blevins has a poem in Bounty Everlasting, a new collection of poetry by Southern Cultures. "Semantic Relations" comes from Blevins's collection of poems Live from the Homesick Jamboree. “My people are not killers—they are romantics—they like to sit around on porches and tell false stories…,” the poem begins.

Scott Taylor, associate professor of mathematics, cowrote the paper "Two More Proofs that the Kinoshita Graph is Knotted" published in the American Mathematical Monthly. According to the abstract, "The Kinoshita graph is a particular embedding in the 3-sphere of a graph with three edges, two vertices, and no loops. It has the remarkable property that although the removal of any edge results in an unknotted loop, the Kinoshita graph is itself knotted. We use two classical theorems from knot theory to give two particularly simple proofs that the Kinoshita graph is knotted."

Zeitschrift für Pädagogik, the leading education journal in Germany, published an article by Professor of Education Adam Howard titled "Enduring Privilege: Schooling and Elite Formation in the United States." The abstract, translated from German, says, "Drawing on two studies of American elite schools, the author explores the ways in which both private and publicly funded elite schools engage in contemporary class-making and remaking through teaching students particular lessons about themselves, others, and world around them that cultivate privilege as a collective identity. In this exploration, the author moves beyond commodified conceptions of privilege to provide a more useful framework for investigating the role that privilege plays in the production of elites. The article concludes by arguing that the processes of social reproduction seem to be well in place within elite schools despite the shifting social and economic landscapes of the United States."

Associate Professor of Art Tanya Sheehan has been elected to the membership of the American Antiquarian Society. AAS members—who currently number over one thousand individuals around the world—are elected by their colleagues in recognition of their eminent works of scholarship, artistic endeavors, or public engagement in pre-20th-century American history and culture. Members include scholars, educators, publishers, collectors, cultural administrators, civic leaders, journalists, writers, and filmmakers, as well as lay persons with an interest in American history. Sheehan previously held a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship at the AAS in 2010 and led the 2017 summer seminar organized by the AAS’s Center for Historic American Visual Culture.

Fernando Gouvêa, Colby's Carter Professor of Mathematics, recently reviewed two books for the Mathematical Association of America. Linear Algebra I, a textbook for both undergraduates in need of advanced material with full proofs and graduate students "in need of a deeper and more complete introduction to linear algebra." Gouvêa concludes that "a course based on this book would make a very nice capstone course for students interested in applied mathematics, particularly if some links to applications were provided. The other review is for Notes on Jacquet-Langlands' Theory, which "is the record of the lectures Godement gave at the Institute for Advanced Study to help people understand and read the book" Automorphic Forms on  (2), by Hervé Jacquet and Robert P. Langlands.

Professor of Art Véronique Plesch organized and chaired the session “Beyond the Mirror: Specularity and Its Uses” at the 107th College Art Association Annual Conference, New York City, Feb. 15. The session was sponsored by the International Association of Word and Image Studies, and Plesch also presented a response to the four papers in the panel.

Katherine Hollander, faculty fellow in the History Department, has been awarded the Anthony Hecht Prize from Waywiser Press. Hollander won the prize for her collection of poems My German Dictionary, forthcoming this fall from Waywiser Press. The book grows "directly out of my experiences as a historian of Central Europe and is, I think, a reflection of my integrated identity as both a historian and poet," Hollander said. She will read from the book along with the contest's judge, Charles Wright, at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., this fall.

Loren McClenachan, the Elizabeth and Lee Ainslie Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies, has published an article in Ambio, a peer-reviewed scientific journal of the human environment. "Views from the dock: Warming waters, adaptation, and the future of Maine’s lobster fishery" discusses how Maine fishermen perceive and prepare for climate-related threats. "Those with adaptation plans demonstrated fundamentally different views of human agency in this system, observing greater anthropogenic threats, but also a greater ability to control the fishery through their own actions on the water and fisheries management processes," she wrote. Data collection for this paper was done with Colby students over the past four years as part of the Environmental Studies Domestic Policy capstone. Students listed in the paper's acknowledgements are Ryan Clemens '17, Katie Chicojay '16, Clea Harrelson '16, Robin Lewis, Sara LoTemplio '16, Ella McDonald '19, Juila Nelson '19, Barlow Peelle '18, Tucker Plante '18, Joshua Reed '17, Kaya Williams '18, Emma Wood '16, and Olivia Wright '19.