External Posts

The Oct. 6 announcement of a $500-million investment from the Harold Alfond Foundation drew wide media attention, including in the Portland Press Herald, and those stories included Colby, The College is grateful for the foundation's remarkable generosity in supporting Colby athletics and Waterville’s downtown revitalization.  

Professor of Art Véronique Plesch has recorded a conversation as part of the podcast series “Canto per Canto: Conversations with Dante in our time,” produced by members of the Dante Society of America in collaboration with the Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò and the Department of Italian Studies at New York University. Plesch's conversation with Binghamton University's Olivia Holmes is now available online. “Canto per Canto” was conceived during the 2020 COVID-19 lockdown in anticipation of the seventh centennial commemoration of Dante’s death in the year 2021. Members of the Dante Society have been recording conversations with friends and colleagues about their favorite cantos of the Divine Comedy, reflecting on what Dante has to say to us now, in our time.  All 100 will be published at a rate of two cantos per week, on Mondays and Wednesdays, over the course of a year.    

An ABC News story on Maine's ranked-choice voting included quotes from Professor of Government Dan Shea. "We're starting to get comfortable with it," he told ABC News. "There are still some who are confused, but they have seen it in action and are getting comfortable." Still, there are political issues surrounding the issue. "Not unlike a lot of issues in the world, the partisan divisions have been strong with this," he said.

Professor of Government Dan Shea was tapped to comment on the Portland Press Herald article "Can Susan Collins survive Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party?" Among the questions the article asks is if Senator Collins has changed or if politics have changed. “I think she has been caught up in what scholars are calling affect partisanship or negative partisanship,” explained Shea. “That’s when we don’t simply disagree with the other side, but see the other side as a threat to the nation. That’s happening on both sides. There is less tolerance for those who shift between parties. Less room for the moderates.”

The painting Étude, by Elizabeth Nourse, is the subject of a Washington Post story titled "Side by side yet worlds apart" as part of the paper's "Great Works, In Focus" series. The painting "hangs in the wonderful Colby College Museum of Art in Waterville, Maine," the author writes in his introductory paragraph. 

The Fall 2020 issue of the Maine Arts Journal, edited by Professor of Art Véronique Plesch, contains articles by two members of the Colby community. Plesch wrote the introduction to the issue—Where Are We? You Are Here/Now—as well as the article "Conversation with Abby Shahn."  Artist Maggie Libby '81, Colby's curator of digital discovery and engagement, also has an essay in the journal that includes images of her recent paintings.    

Colby and its testing program are included in an Oct. 2 New York Times story titled "Colleges Learn How to Suppress Coronavirus: Extensive Testing" about colleges that are "beating the pandemic." President Greene told the reporter how frequent testing allowed a positive case to be caught early, and that contract tracing limited the spread. “It could have been 150 people, and we kept it to one person,” President Greene told the Times. 

An extensive story by USA TODAY details Colby's successful COVID-19 testing program and in-person education approach in its article "Colleges are exploding with COVID and have lax testing. One school is keeping cases down." Reporter Chris Quintana spent a day on Mayflower Hill talking with students and faculty about their experiences with testing and life on campus during the pandemic. "Its leaders bet the institution's testing, preparation, and location in a relative haven from the coronavirus would keep students safe, perhaps even safer than they would be at home. So far, they have been right," Quintana writes.

Associate Professor of Psychology Jennifer Coane and Professor of Statistics Liam M. O’Brien coauthored the paper "Mapping the Time Course of Semantic Activation in Mediated False Memory: Immediate Classification, Naming, and Recognition," which was published in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology. "We evaluated the time course of persistent automatic spreading activation from a mediated list of indirect associates (e.g., meow, day, basement) that all converged upon a non-presented critical item (CI; e.g., black)," states the paper's abstract.

Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies Ben Neal has coauthored a paper recently published in the Journal of Marine Science and Engineering. The paper, "Coral Reef Community Changes in Karimunjawa National Park, Indonesia: Assessing the Efficacy of Management in the Face of Local and Global Stressors," discusses the study's exploration "of drivers of community change at the park level" and the analysis of coral cover decline in the park over the four-year study period.