Faculty Accomplishments
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."
Debra Spark, the Zacamy Professor of English, won the Editor's Choice Award for Nonfiction from Scoundrel Time for her essay "I Think I Know You." The essay is part of a book Spark is currently working on concerning coincidence stories.
The winter 2025 issue of the Maine Arts Journal is out with contributions by Professor of Art Véronique Plesch. This issue's topic is "Stuck!" Plesch wrote the introduction along with her "Art Historical Musings" column with an essay titled "Where to Go from Here?" in which she discusses a painting in the Colby College Museum of Art collection, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's Laburnum Tree (1912). She also includes a photo of Professor of Art Gary Green leading crits with Colby's studio art seniors during the fall semester capstone course.
Debra Spark, the Zacamy Professor of English, wrote a roundup book review of several books by former Radcliffe fellows for the Radcliffe Quarterly titled "Who Is a Real Indian?" The review covers books by Rahul Bhatia, Anthony Abraham Jack, and Liz Chiarello.
Debra Spark, the Zacamy Professor of English, recently published two pieces, an essay in Rustica and another in Dwell in its series titled "How They Pulled It Off." Spark's piece is "Converting a Medieval Barn Into a Home—Without Breaking Preservation Code" and tells the story of a couple in France who make a "nearly windowless space feel like a loft while steering clear of its thick limestone walls."