Faculty Accomplishments
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Work by Bradley Borthwick, assistant professor of art, will be included in the deCordova New England Biennial 2019 at the deCordova Sculptor Park and Museum in Lincoln, Mass. Borthwick, a sculptor, will represent Maine with three other Maine artists, along with the remainder of chosen artists from remaining New England states. A press release from the museum states that Borthwick "returns to ancient times by studying and simulating pre-industrial techniques and motifs." The exhibit is on view April 5-Sept. 15, 2019.
A Physics Today artcle titled "When condensed-matter physics became king" includes two Colby connections. Its author, Joseph Martin, was a faculty fellow in Science, Technology, and Society 2013-14. While at Colby, he became familiar with the Bern Porter Collection in the Special Collections Department. Porter, a 1932 Colby graduate, drew a Map of Physics in 1939, which was included in the January 2019 story. "The map aptly reflects prewar attitudes about how physics was organized—attitudes that solid-state physics flouted," Martin wrote.
An article by Leticia Mercado, assistant professor of Spanish, was recently published by Emblematica: Essays in Word and Image (volume 2, Fall 2018). Titled “Sepulchral Space in Villamediana and Vaenius,” the study reads the textual construction of the sepulchral space in two ekphrastic sonnets written c. 1629 by Spanish Baroque poet Juan de Tassis, Count of Villamediana, in the light of three emblems in Otto Vaenius’s Quinti Horatii Flacci Emblemata (1607). The article explores how text-monument and emblem represent the tomb as the boundary where poetic voice and implicit reader confront the limits of language.
A book by Melvin Croft, an instructor in the Department of Geology, was recently published in the University of Nebraska's Outward Odyssey: A People's History of Spaceflight Series. Come Fly With Us: NASA’s Payload Specialist Program details "an elite group of space travelers who flew as members of many space shuttle crews from pre-Challenger days to Columbia in 2003. Not part of the regular NASA astronaut corps, these professionals, known as 'payload specialists,' came from a wide variety of backgrounds and were chosen for an equally wide variety of scientific, political, and national security reasons," according to the University of Nebraska Press.
Croft is a retired geoscientist, having worked for Chevron around the globe, and joined Colby's ranks 10 years ago. An avid scientist, he has used his "retirement" to move from the terrestrial to the extraterrestrial and examine the history of U.S. spaceflight, culminating in the release of this book.
Professor of Education Adam Howard's article "Making Class: Children's Perceptions of Social Class Through Illustration" was published by Teachers College Record and was the topic of discussion on TCR's "The Voice" Jan. 23. Howard cowrote the article with his former student Karlyn Adler '11, now a lead kindergarten teacher at The School at Columbia University, and Katy Swalwell (Iowa State University).
New fiction by Sarah Braunstein, assistant professor of English, was recently published in Playboy magazine (Winter 2019, the 65th Anniversary issue). "The Modern Era," a short story set during future impeachment hearings, dramatizes a difficult break-up from the point of view of a young male comedy writer. Playboy describes it as "Fear and Loving in Los Angeles."
An article by Aaron Hanlon, assistant professor of English, was recently published by history blog Age of Revolutions. Titled “Finding Genres of Revolution in the Classroom,” the Jan. 21 article details a new course Hanlon created at Colby and the challenges he and his students faced discussing global revolutions “within a liberal framework.” Comparative exercises helped Hanlon and his students overcome this obstacle, allowing them to find “a history of revolution in forms, of voices, of proclamations, of concerns, of fears, and of legacies.” he wrote.
Dan Shea, professor of government, wrote an opinion piece in the Portland Press Herald titled "Can average citizens rise to the occasion in response to Mueller’s findings?" The Jan. 18 piece questions if average citizens are still able to see their role as fundamental in a democracy, or if they're swayed by partisan identification. "Can we break from our partisan filters to find pragmatic policy solutions, as was routine throughout much of our nation’s history?" Shea writes. "Can we set aside our partisan impulses, turn away from the talking heads on television and radio and steer clear of social media to objectively assess Mueller’s findings?"
"Bugs in our Backyard," a citizen science project by Associate Professor of Biology Dave Angelini and Biology Research Technician Josh Steele, was named one of the Top 18 projects for 2018 on the CitSci aggregator site SciStarter. The project encourages K-12 students to take surveys of bugs in their backyards, schoolyards, and neighborhoods; the surveys are then used to help find answers to biological questions. Bugs in our Backyard is part of an NSF-funded research program at Colby, which will also provide students with insight into the practice of science, according to the project's website.