External Posts

Neil Gross, the Charles A. Dana Professor of Sociology, reviewed Biased, a new book by Jennifer Eberhardt, in the Sunday New York Times. Gross called the book an "unexpectedly poignant overview of the research on cognitive biases and stereotypes, especially racial bias in criminal justice."

Associate Professor of English Adrian Blevins has a poem in Bounty Everlasting, a new collection of poetry by Southern Cultures. "Semantic Relations" comes from Blevins's collection of poems Live from the Homesick Jamboree. “My people are not killers—they are romantics—they like to sit around on porches and tell false stories…,” the poem begins.

Scott Taylor, associate professor of mathematics, cowrote the paper "Two More Proofs that the Kinoshita Graph is Knotted" published in the American Mathematical Monthly. According to the abstract, "The Kinoshita graph is a particular embedding in the 3-sphere of a graph with three edges, two vertices, and no loops. It has the remarkable property that although the removal of any edge results in an unknotted loop, the Kinoshita graph is itself knotted. We use two classical theorems from knot theory to give two particularly simple proofs that the Kinoshita graph is knotted."

Zeitschrift für Pädagogik, the leading education journal in Germany, published an article by Professor of Education Adam Howard titled "Enduring Privilege: Schooling and Elite Formation in the United States." The abstract, translated from German, says, "Drawing on two studies of American elite schools, the author explores the ways in which both private and publicly funded elite schools engage in contemporary class-making and remaking through teaching students particular lessons about themselves, others, and world around them that cultivate privilege as a collective identity. In this exploration, the author moves beyond commodified conceptions of privilege to provide a more useful framework for investigating the role that privilege plays in the production of elites. The article concludes by arguing that the processes of social reproduction seem to be well in place within elite schools despite the shifting social and economic landscapes of the United States."

An essay by Assistant Professor of English Aaron Hanlon, titled "The University Is a Ticking Time Bomb" appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education April 19. The essay highlights the large number of adjunct professors at colleges and universities and what Hanlon calls "the cruelty of adjunctification," where professors work year-to-year without the prospect of tenure. "We need to fundamentally reconceptualize the battle against adjunctification, shifting away from pity or outrage and toward arguments that universities themselves deny at their own peril," he argued.

Associate Professor of Art Tanya Sheehan has been elected to the membership of the American Antiquarian Society. AAS members—who currently number over one thousand individuals around the world—are elected by their colleagues in recognition of their eminent works of scholarship, artistic endeavors, or public engagement in pre-20th-century American history and culture. Members include scholars, educators, publishers, collectors, cultural administrators, civic leaders, journalists, writers, and filmmakers, as well as lay persons with an interest in American history. Sheehan previously held a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship at the AAS in 2010 and led the 2017 summer seminar organized by the AAS’s Center for Historic American Visual Culture.

Colby's annual spring day of service, Colby Cares Day, was covered in the Morning Sentinel April 20. The article, "Colby students lend a hand at Waterville area organizations for Colby Cares Day," focused on just two of the numerous sites where Colby students lent a hand: the L.C. Bates Museum and the Waterville Public Library. "This is a day where it’s not about us. It’s about realizing how fortunate we are to be Colby students and all the advantages we have in the Maine community,” senior Kallie Hutchinson told the Sentinel.

Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies Gail Carlson was in Augusta, Maine, April 17 testifying at the State House and urging "legislators to ban certain food-packaging that contain synthetic chemicals known as PFAS and phthalates," Maine Public reported. Carlson and some of her students testified in favor of a new bill that would ban these chemicals in Maine. "The chemicals actually leach from the food-packaging material or the food contact material into the food, and we ingest it,” Carlson said. “And ingestion is a major source of exposure." The Portland Press Herald also reported on the hearing and quoted Carlson: "The chemicals actually leach from the food-packaging material or the food contact material into the food, and we ingest it,” she said. “And ingestion is a major source of exposure." CentralMaine.com also ran the story online

Professor of Government Anthony Corrado, a campaign-finance expert, was quoted in an April 16 CNN article titled "2020 fundraising: Top takeaways from the first quarter." The fact that only half of the 16 Democratic candidates running for president in 2020 have raised $3 million or less is "a sign that Democratic donors haven't yet coalesced behind the contenders," Corrado told CNN. "It's a huge field of not very well-known candidates." Corrado also conducted an interview with McClatchy about the South Carolina Senate race and out-of-state money in U.S. Senate races. “But the fact that Senate candidates are now receiving more than half of their money from outside of the state rather than inside of the state is not atypical, particularly when you have a senator who is as visible and been so prominently featured in the national news as Sen. Graham.” In a March 20 Agence France-Presse article titled "2020 Democrats Build Campaign War Chests," Corrado said, “The race for money in the Democratic Party is really going to be a race for small dollars. What Bernie Sanders proved in 2016 was that you can finance a campaign largely depending on small-dollar contributions—if you can generate the excitement amongst the grass roots faithful.”  

Natasha Zelensky, associate professor of music, gave a multi-media presentation titled “Franco Memory Through Song” at the University of Maine's Lewiston-Auburn Campus on April 11. Zelensky, an ethnomusicologist who studies the role of music in immigrant communities, discussed her project, undertaken with her students, "to collect and preserve some of Lewiston's most unique—and treasured—Franco-American chanson," the Lewiston Sun-Journal reported.  Watch a short video about Zelensky's class "Maine's Musical Soundscapes: Ethnography of Maine" here.