External Posts

Dean of the College Karlene Burrell-McRae spoke of "lasting change and hope for the fall" after a year of the pandemic in a Morning Sentinel article. The article included highlights from a number of Maine schools that have seen improvements during this pandemic year. Burrell-McRae said that at Colby, this past year "showed the best of who we are."

Professor of Art Véronique Plesch contributed two essays to the 2021 spring issue of the Maine Arts Journal: UMVA Quarterly, titled “The Comforts of Domesticity" and "Leading with the Arts: A Conversation with Teresa McKinney and Jacqueline Terrassa.” She also wrote the introduction to this issue, "The New Normal: A Dialogue.”

A paper by Nicolas Jacobs, visiting assistant professor of government, titled "Economic Sectionalism, Executive-Centered Partisanship, and the Politics of the State and Local Tax Deduction," was published in Political Science Quarterly. The paper "examines the partisan implications of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and its reform of the state and local tax deduction. Jacobs concludes that fundamental changes in the geographic composition of the electorate and the centrality of presidential politics in the party system explains why the Republican Party reduced one of the most unequal features of the U.S. tax code, but chose not to emphasize its egalitarian consequences," according to a summary on the PSQ website.  

Assistant Professor of Performance Studies and Curatorial Practice Gwyneth Shanks has won a $25,000 grant from the MAP Fund, one of the largest funders for live and performance-based art. The grant will help support a new project, currently in the early stages of development, that draws upon research conducted with AB Brown, assistant professor of contemporary performance, and in conversation with May Joseph, a professor of global studies at the Pratt Institute, and Sarah Lewis-Cappellari, a research-based artist and curator. Shank's research focuses on how the historical and ongoing material effects of the colonial project reveal themselves with particular force in relationship to watery sites and spaces. Her project is specifically focused on how oceanic circulations of plant life during the long and ongoing colonial project are conditioned by racialized power, queer desire, and the body. The MAP Fund will support a series of site-specific performances in and along the Atlantic Coast of the Americas and, Covid travel restrictions allowing, the Caribbean.

Adam Howard, the Charles A. Dana Professor of Education, appears in the documentary The Boys in Red Hats, which was reviewed by Film Threat, a website that champions indie filmmakers. The second page of the review includes a screenshot of Howard, an expert on social class issues who plays a prominent role in the film by presenting one of the two sides in the January 2019 confrontation at the Lincoln Memorial between Native American activist Nathan Phillips and Nicholas Sandmann from Covington Catholic High School in Kentucky.  

Debra Spark, professor of English, was a guest speaker on Maine Public's Maine Calling, providing insight on how the use and meaning of punctuation have evolved over time. The show is part of an ongoing series exploring the use of language and how it reflects the changing world.  

Steven Simon, professor in the practice of international relations at Colby, authored an extensive article for The New York Review on how the Biden administration’s foreign policy will not focus on the Middle East. With the exception of Iran, that area of the world “poses no plausible serious challenge to U.S. interests,” states Simon.

Randi Arsenault, assistant vice president of admissions and financial aid and dean of admissions, discussed with NewsCenter Maine how admissions for the Class of 2025 had changed amid the pandemic. Arsenault shared that at Colby, there was a "13-percent increase from last year’s record-breaking applicant pool of 13,922 and a more than 200-percent growth since 2014."

Professor of Government Dan Shea weighed in on a piece for Maine Public’s series "Deep Dive: Coronavirus" by providing analysis of the political implications of the influx of new residents in Maine. Shea, an expert on American politics, provided expertise on where new residents may be moving to in the state based on "partisan ideology."

Visiting Assistant Professor of American Studies Amber Hickey contributed a chapter to the recently published Routledge Companion to Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Climate Change (eds. TJ Demos, Subhankar Banerjee, and Emily Eliza Scott). The chapter, titled “Remembering the Land: Art, Direct Action, and the Denial of Extractive Realities on Bougainville,” mobilizes the work of Bougainvillean artist Taloi Havini as a lens through which to learn from movements for environmental justice and decolonization in Bougainville. Hickey also contributed a chapter to the recently published volume Violence and Indigenous Communities: Confronting the Past, Engaging the Present (eds. Susan Sleeper-Smith, Patricia Marroquin-Norby, Jeff Ostler, and Josh Reid). The chapter, titled “Pathways toward Justice: Walking as Decolonial Resistance,” focuses on long-distance protest walks as a form of embodied decolonial resistance.