External Posts

Colby's announcement of the Davis Institute for Artificial Intelligence was covered by the Portland Press Herald. "The institute is believed by the administration to be the first and only of its nature at a small U.S. liberal arts school," the PPH reported. President David A. Greene said that people educated in liberal arts have tools to understand the ethics of AI, and can help “develop AI in a way that could be for the good.”

Cinda Jones '90, president of the W. D. Cowls, Inc., Land Company and developer of the Mill District in North Amherst, Mass., won Business West’s Massachusetts' Top Entrepreneur Award for her work envisioning and creating a new town center in North Amherst. Jones was cited in the news magazine’s top ten change-making events of the past decade!

Cinda Jones '90, president of the W. D. Cowls, Inc., Land Company and developer of the Mill District in North Amherst, Mass., won Business West’s Massachusetts' Top Entrepreneur Award for her work envisioning and creating a new town center in North Amherst. Jones was cited in the news magazine’s top ten change-making events of the past decade!

Tanya Sheehan, the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Art, has contributed an essay to the book The Colors of Photography (De Gruyter, 2020), edited by University of Zurich professor Bettina Gockel. Sheehan’s essay, “Color Matters: Rethinking Photography and Race,” examines the assumptions about and expressions of racialized power that she argues are built into the material and technological foundations of photography. Since the 19th century, photographers around the world have imagined nonwhite bodies as posing technical difficulties, particularly when it comes to lighting. Sheehan demonstrates the persistence of this idea, with recent examples from popular culture, while turning to international contemporary art to critique the sociopolitical roots of photography’s race problem. Several essays in The Colors of Photography, including Sheehan’s, originated as invited papers at an international conference in Zurich, Switzerland, organized by Gockel in October 2015.

The first interview with Associate Professor of Art Gary Green by Brad Feuerhelm from the Nearest Truth is now online. Feuerhelm, a respected photography critic whose writing and interviews are seminal to the contemporary dialogue on photography, calls Green's work "multi-layered and incredibly interesting." Feurehelm's essays, published by the Nearest Truth, Ordinary Light (Instagram), and American Suburb X (ASX), are read by tens of thousands of people around the world. The second interview, addressing Green's ongoing work has been recorded and will be online soon.

An essay by Catherine Besteman, the Francis F. Bartlett and Ruth K. Bartlett Professor of Anthropology, appeared in Artforum, an international magazine focusing on contemporary art. The article, "Profiteer Motive," looks at an international militarization system that is the subject of Besteman's newest book, Militarized Global Apartheid. "Militarism—the ongoing investment of massive sums in technology and personnel ready to perpetrate violence—is the support structure for capitalism, facilitating the relentless search for profit through dispossession, labor exploitation, and resource extraction," she writes.

Associate Professor of French Audrey Brunetaux was nominated and elected to the Academic Council of the Holocaust Educational Foundation of Northwestern University. Brunetaux's research focuses on 20th- and 21st-century French literature, culture, and cinema with an emphasis on Holocaust narratives, including that of Holocaust writer and survivor Charlotte Delbo, and films.

Rabbi Rachel Isaacs, speaking at Waterville's annual Martin Luther King Jr. event, encouraged attendees to acknowledge King’s "unfinished work in addressing what he called the 'triple evils'—poverty, racism and militarism—that prevent us from being a truly beloved community," the Morning Sentinel reported. “In order to reach the promised land, economic justice and racial justice must be achieved, and the nation must disavow and dismantle the military-industrial complex that glorifies and financially incentivizes violence,” Isaacs said.

Luis Millones, the Allen Family Professor of Latin American Literature, has been named the associate editor of Colonial Latin American Review (CLAR), the leading academic journal in his field. Prior to this role, he was the book review editor of CLAR. Millones's research interests include pre-Columbian and colonial studies with an emphasis on the Andes, early modern science and natural histories of the New World, and Jesuits writings from a transatlantic perspective.

Assistant Professor of Psychology Derek Huffman has coauthored a new paper, which will appear in the February issue of the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. "In our paper, we review recent research that has studied how body-based cues contribute to how we learn and remember the locations of landmarks within large-scale environments, such as cities," Huffman explained. The article also discussed limitations of the most commonly used laboratory tasks (rats in a small environment with limited behavioral demands) to study the neuroscience of navigation, furthering the understanding of spatial memory in humans and non-human animals. "Specifically, we argue that we should develop behavioral tasks and measures of the brain that allow us to study navigation under more naturalistic conditions."