Faculty Accomplishments
Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies Alison Bates has coauthored a paper with former students Makaylah Cowan '22 (an environmental computation major) and Julia Cantor '23 (a biology major) that appeared in the journal Energy Research & Social Science. Based on a multi-year community-based participatory research project (CBPR) to examine energy injustices in a New England city led by Bates, the study, "Whose low-carbon future? Community perceptions and expectations on the renewable energy transition in a post-industrial city," explores the intersection of systemic marginalization of community members facing decarbonization policies. Building on community partnerships with NGOs, they worked closely with a previously defined “environmental justice” community to elicit the ways in which the energy transition is perceived to result in energy justice and injustice by energy system specialists and by community members. Findings suggest that community members in particular fear getting “priced out” of their community as energy system upgrades are implemented, and they also feel that systemic injustices such as racialized governance structures would be exacerbated. They also identify the ways that energy justice is conceptualized whereby community members identify co-benefits such as improved housing, lower pollution, and an opportunity for energy democracy as possible outcomes of the energy transition.
The poetry journal Diode published two poems by Adrian Blevins, professor of English and creative writing. The poems are "Cool for You1 Interrupted Cento" and "Poem Beginning with Two Lines Ending a Poem by Bob Hicok" appeared in the journal's volume 18 number 1 issue.
Upcoming festivals will be screening films by Assistant Professor of Art, Digital Media Taka Suzuki, including The Hungry Ghost & The Earthshaker, which features the voice of Gary Green, professor of art, and performances by AB Brown, assistant professor of performance, theater, and dance; Arisa White, associate professor of English, creative writing; and Audrey Shakespear, former visiting assistant professor of art. It will screen at the Big Muddy Film Festival in Carbondale, Ill., which runs March 27-29 and at the Athens International Film & Video Festival in Athens, Ohio, which runs April 7-13. Additionally, Suzuki's film the shape of an unlit horizon will screen at the Portland Panorama Film Festival in Portland, Ore., which runs April 10-20.
Associate Professor of English Megan Cook has won a New England Humanities Consortium Seed Grant for her project titled "A Mid-career Medievalist Working Group." This grant will support the creation of a biannual working group of mid-career medievalists at NEHC member institutions. Cook's plan is to provide an opportunity for mid-career literary scholars focusing on the Middle Ages to meet and share scholarly work in progress. The goal is to strengthen community and facilitate intellectual exchange and collaboration among medievalists in New England.
The School of Art + Art History + Design of the University of Washington selected Tanya Sheehan, the Ellerton M. and Edith K. Jetté Professor of Art, as the 2025 Kollar Lecturer in American Art. Sheehan's lecture, titled "Public Art, Public Health: Jacob Lawrence and the Murals of Harlem Hospital,” took place Feb. 27, 2025, on the UW Seattle campus. This talk explored the significant connections between the federally funded murals painted in Harlem Hospital in the late 1930s and the images of health and medicine in Harlem created by artist Jacob Lawrence. It considered how and why a commitment to the publicness of Black care took shape more fully in Lawrence’s private images than on the walls of the municipal hospital.
The contemporary poetry magazine Plume published the poem "Domestic" by Adrian Blevin, professor of English and director of the Creative Writing Program. The poem begins, "Another word for kid is it. You always love but do not always like it. / The fathers throw up their hands like weeds in a brawny wind to forsake it. / Even in your mind when it’s middle-aged with a belly it is it." Blevins is the author of four collections of poetry.
Professor of Art Véronique Plesch has been elected as a member of the Nominating Committee of the International Center of Medieval Art, or ICMA. The ICMA is based at the Cloisters, the medieval branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Its mission "is to promote and support the study, understanding, and preservation of visual and material cultures produced primarily between ca. 300 CE and ca. 1500 CE in every corner of the medieval world. To this end the ICMA facilitates scholarship and education and sponsors public lectures, conferences, publications, and exhibitions."
Assistant Professor of English Onnesha Roychoudhuri performed live a story on a recent episode of The Moth Radio Hour. Her story, "Strangers on a Train," was part of the episode titled "Saving Graces" and will air on Maine Public Feb. 9, 2025, at 2 p.m. The story is about "the joy that comes from speaking up during fearful times," said Roychoudhuri. More specifically, it's about "how to shut down a bigot by singing 'Row Row Row Your Boat' and the most awkward high-five of my life."
A 2006 book by Raffael Scheck, the John J. and Cornelia V. Gibson Chair in History, was mentioned in the recent The Guardian article "Israel and the delusions of Germany’s ‘memory culture.’" The article states that in Scheck's book Hitler’s African Victims, he describes "how the killing sprees of the Einsatzgruppen in the bloodlands of the east – shooting people by the edge of mass graves which the victims themselves had been forced to dig – was prefigured by the massacres in May and June 1940 of thousands of French African soldiers."
A solo exhibition of work by Assistant Professor of Art Amanda Lilleston opens Jan. 30 at the University of Maine Farmington's Emery Community Arts Center. Launching the center's spring exhibition season, her show, titled Holobiont, is a series of woodcut collages and sculptures exploring her relationship to place (Maine) and connects tightly with the Monumental Woodcut & Maine course she taught for Jan Plan. The arts center calls her work "visually stunning."