Faculty Accomplishments

The summer 2025 issue of the Maine Arts Journal is out with contributions from Professor of Art Véronique Plesch. In this issue, with the theme of Encounters, she wrote the introduction along with her "Art Historical Musings" column with an essay titled "Encounters Across Time." The essay, dedicated to Janet Hansen '75 and Bruce Drouin '74, discusses three paintings in the Colby College Museum of Art. Plesch was delighted to invite her Colby colleague Christopher T. Richards, visiting professor of art, to contribute an article, "Encounter: Man Mirror, Medieval Modern," in which Richards writes about works in the Colby Museum.

Professor of Art Véronique Plesch juried and curated the annual Regional Artists: An Open, Juried Show organized by the Ogunquit Art Association, Maine's original artist's group, established in 1928. There were 259 works submitted, and 108 were retained. The exhibition, held at the Barn Gallery, runs from Wednesday, June 25 through Saturday July 26. There will be a gala reception on Saturday, June 28 from 4 to 7 p.m., at which Plesch will offer opening remarks.

Professor of Art Véronique Plesch  gave a lecture at the Norridgewock Historical Society titled “Cemeteries: Where History Is Alive," in which she considered the way cemeteries bear witness to history and what we can learn from them. Graveyards hold our memories, both personal and communal, and reveal trends in art, architecture, lettering, and how we want to be remembered. In the course of her talk, she had the occasion to discuss several graves in Norridgewock's Riverview Cemetery.

An essay by Zixiao "Max" Wang '26, titled "'We’d Stumbled Out the Door': Reclaiming Female Subjectivity in Diane Seuss's frank: sonnets," was published in the Bangalore Review. Wang, who is majoring in English with a concentration in creative writing, analyzes the Pulitzer Prize-winning poetry collection and says, "In frank: sonnets, Seuss reshapes female subjectivity through candid exploration of power dynamics, gender, and sexuality, combined with confessions of vulnerability." Wang writes in both English and French and is particularly interested in experimental forms and cross-cultural narratives.

Assistant Professor of Science, Technology, and Society Ashton Wesner published a research article in Osiris, the flagship journal of the History of Science Society. Titled “Making Sturgeon Count: Settler Colonial (De)mobilizations of Fish in the Columbia River,” the article is truly interdisciplinary and deeply critical. Wesner’s work "uses ethnographic data, hatchery archives, scientific reports, and the published testimonies of Yakama and other Indigenous fishers to reveal the relationship between settler colonial cultural and empirical practices of measuring, monitoring, and monetizing sturgeon and their movements from the late 1800s to the present,” according to the paper's abstract. 

Associate Professor of Global Studies Nadia El-Shaarawi has had her first book published. Collateral Damages:
Tracing the Debts and Displacements of the Iraq War (University of California Press, 2025) "brings Iraqi stories—which have been systematically excluded from dominant Western narratives of the war—to the fore," more than 20 years after the "U.S.-led invasion and occupation of Iraq," according to the publisher. The book draws on a decade of El-Shaarawi's fieldwork in which she "traces Iraqis' experiences of the 2003 invasion and the violence and displacement that followed."

Debra Spark, the Zacamy Professor of English, penned two recent pieces for her alma mater's alumni magazine. Her feature story, "The go-to guy for CEOs," profiles Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, Yale's senior associate dean for leadership studies and Lester Crown Professor at the School of Management, who was the host and facilitator of the "150th, invitation-only CEO Summit, one of six annual leadership forums run by the Yale School of Management’s Chief Executive Leadership Institute," she wrote. The story includes a quote from Colby's Life Trustee Bob Diamond '73, former CEO of Barclays and current CEO of Atlas Merchant Capital. Diamond "has been to 30-plus summits and notes Sonnenfeld’s gift for 'creating a platform where people are comfortable saying what they believe as opposed to what they’re supposed to say.'" Spark also wrote a book review of How the Light Gets In by Yale alumnus Joyce Maynard ’75.

Debra Spark, the Zacamy Professor of English, wrote a review of the book Gabriële for Frenchly, a Francophile arts and culture news magazine. Written by sisters Claire and Anne Berest, Gabriële "describes the life of their long-lost great-grandmother," the mother of their maternal grandfather. "Before her marriage," Spark wrote, "Gabriële was a composer and later the intellectual sparring partner, not only of her husband, but of many other leading modernists, including Marcel Duchamp and Igor Stravinsky. But not only did the Berest sisters never meet their grandfather—he died by suicide before they were born—they never knew anyone from his branch of the family. With their new book, Gabriële, the sisters set themselves to the task of trying to discover who their great-grandmother was."

Herb Wilson, the Leslie Brainerd Arey Professor of Biosciences, Emeritus, has received the 2025 Award of Recognition from the Maine Chapter of the Wildlife Society. This award recognizes individuals, groups, organizations, businesses, and industries in Maine who have made noteworthy contributions to wildlife management or conservation, or to education of the public about wildlife. Wilson has been recognized for his long-standing contributions to the understanding and conservation of Maine’s wildlife through education and community science. Wilson, an ornithologist, writes a regular column for the Portland Press Herald on birds.

Associate Professor of Spanish Dean Allbritton is one of seven new members on Wiki Education's 2025 Humanities & Social Justice Advisory Committee. The multidisciplinary group will advise and collaborate on Wiki Education's ongoing work to improve Wikipedia’s coverage of historically underrepresented subjects and people. “My students light up when they realize their class work on invisibilized or silenced communities can have real-world impact,” said Allbritton, who is also director of the Center for the Arts and Humanities at Colby. “The knowledge that they are actively making space for others feels timely and important in a way that scholarly work often may not. I joined this committee because Wikipedia still has so much room to grow and so many opportunities still to make space in this world for those who have not yet been afforded it.”