External Posts

Morehouse College has nominated Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of Sociology and African-American Studies, for induction in its Martin Luther King Jr. International College of Ministers and Laity.

Mainebiz covered this week's announcement that Verna's All Day will be opening in downtown Waterville later this year. Their article, "Colby completes 'food triangle' with lease to Portland restaurant owners," reports not only that Briana and Andrew Volk plan to open a chop house as well as a food market at the Bill & Joan Alfond Main Street Commons, but that Colby had been searching for the right tenant. "Colby was looking for a 'high-level, quality destination' tenant to fill the space," Brian Clark, vice president of planning, told Mainebiz, "and people in the area had made it clear they wanted a Maine business, not a chain." The article also updates readers on other Colby initiatives downtown: a recent gift to the planned Paul J. Schupf Art Center, on-schedule progress on the Lockwood Hotel, and "exciting news" expected soon on plans for the space at 14-20 Main St. Mainebiz also reports on the athletic center under construction on campus and that the College has "filed a notice of intent with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to begin work on a new performing arts center that it's been planning for several years. Work on the Gordon Center for Creative and Performing Arts is expected to begin this summer, and the center will open in 2022," Clark said.

Mainebiz covered this week's announcement that Verna's All Day will be opening in downtown Waterville later this year. Their article, "Colby completes 'food triangle' with lease to Portland restaurant owners," reports not only that Briana and Andrew Volk plan to open a chop house as well as a food market at the Bill & Joan Alfond Main Street Commons, but that Colby had been searching for the right tenant. "Colby was looking for a 'high-level, quality destination' tenant to fill the space," Brian Clark, vice president of planning, told Mainebiz, "and people in the area had made it clear they wanted a Maine business, not a chain." The article also updates readers on other Colby initiatives downtown: a recent gift to the planned Paul J. Schupf Art Center, on-schedule progress on the Lockwood Hotel, and "exciting news" expected soon on plans for the space at 14-20 Main St. Mainebiz also reports on the athletic center under construction on campus and that the College has "filed a notice of intent with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to begin work on a new performing arts center that it's been planning for several years. Work on the Gordon Center for Creative and Performing Arts is expected to begin this summer, and the center will open in 2022," Clark said.

Leticia Mercado, assistant professor of Spanish, has a new article published in the double-blind peer-reviewed journal Imago: Revista de Emblemática y Cultural Visual. Titled “Bocángel's Silva 'El Retrato': A Textual Trojan Horse?” the article studies the dialogue of emblematic and poetic image in Spanish Baroque poet Gabriel Bocángel’s silva "El retrato" (c. 1638), framed within the context of the war for poetic patronage at the early modern court and the tradition of the descriptio puellae. This study, the author notes, proposes a re-examination of the text as a defense of the role of poetry and a commentary on the nature of the true leader built on the symbolic and emblematic meanings of three plants: the laurel, the olive, and the ivy.

A new book by Lindsay Mayka, assistant professor of government, was the topic of an episode of the podcast New Books in Political Science. Mayka spoke with host Lilly Goren about her book, Building Participatory Institutions in Latin America: Reform Coalitions and Institutional Change (Cambridge University Press, 2019), which "examines the idea and implementation of participatory institutions, asking the question about when they actually work, and when they do not work, and why this is the case, especially in Latin America," New Books reported.

A new book by Lindsay Mayka, assistant professor of government, was the topic of an episode of the podcast New Books in Political Science. Mayka spoke with host Lilly Goren about her book, Building Participatory Institutions in Latin America: Reform Coalitions and Institutional Change (Cambridge University Press, 2019), which "examines the idea and implementation of participatory institutions, asking the question about when they actually work, and when they do not work, and why this is the case, especially in Latin America," New Books reported.

Through the Boston Medical Library, the Center for the History of Medicine at Harvard Medical School offers annual fellowships to support research in the history of medicine. Tanya Sheehan, William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Art, has been awarded a 2019-20 fellowship to conduct research for her new book on African-American artists and their engagement with medicine and public health. The book focuses on the 1930s through the 1960s, when the Harlem-based artistic circle of Charles Alston, Henry Bannarn, Jacob Lawrence, Georgette Seabrooke Powell, and others painted hospital murals, collaborated with medical doctors, experienced their own health crises, and practiced art therapy. Sheehan will spend one month digging into the rich resources of Harvard’s Countway Library of Medicine.

Professor of Education Adam Howard has coauthored the article "Preparing Democratic Leaders Within a Middle Eastern Context" recently published in the Kappa Delta Pi Record. Cowritten by his colleague Claire Maxwell from the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, the article focuses on the global citizenship education (GCE) initiative at Olive Grove Academy, an elite coeducational boarding school in Jordan. The authors have been "examining Olive Grove and other elite schools in various parts of the world to determine whether school leaders see GCE as problematic in any way and whether they adapt a commitment to GCE that is contextually located."

An essay by Associate Professor of English Elizabeth Sagaser was published in 2019 in the Bulletin, the publication of the Emily Dickinson International Society. The essay, titled "’Tis Centuries - and yet’: Teaching Dickinson and the Presence of the Past," describes Sagaser's approach to helping her students become more analytical readers and thinkers by teaching them to learn poems by heart in step-by-step analytical, hands-on ways. "Learning poems by heart enables well-crafted language and ideas to play a role in everyday thought," Sagaser wrote, "sometimes in unexpected and important ways," Click here for a PDF of Sagaser's essay.    

An article by Steve Simon, professor of the practice of international relations, appears in the upcoming Feb. 13, 2020, issue of the New York Review of Books. Titled "The Middle East: Trump Blunders In," Simon writes that the assassination of Qassim Suleimani "perpetuated the inconsistency of US policy toward the Middle East and its tendency to overreach. As the United States under Trump lurches between withdrawal of its troops from Iraq and Syria and sending more, between reasonable restraint in its use of force and then suddenly assassinating a regional leader, it has worsened the anarchic conditions that have waxed and waned in the region since the Iran–Iraq War of 1980–1988, Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, and the Gulf War that followed six months later."