External Posts

One of the more popular shows from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation interviewed Professor of History Larissa Taylor about her book The Virgin Warrior: The Life and Death of Joan of Arc. Listen to the episode here.

Michael Burke, professor of English and creative writing, emeritus, published an essay titled "You Move to Maine" in an anthology called Alive to This from Littoral Press. The anthology includes essays by 20 writers from all parts of Maine who share their experiences of living fully. Burke is one of two memoirists who contributed to the publication.

Assistant Professor of Geology Evan Dethier won the Kirk Bryan Award for Research Excellence from the Geological Society of America's Geomorphology and Quaternary Geology Division. The award recognizes a publication (within past five years) of distinction advancing the science of geomorphology or Quaternary geology. Detheir was recognized for being the lead author of the paper "Rapid changes to global river suspended flux by humans," which appeared in the journal Science in 2022.

Assistant Professor of Performance, Theater, and Dance AB Brown won a $10,000 award from the Ellis-Beauregard Foundation in support of their research project The Garden of Trans Care. Brown is one of five Maine artists to win the award. The Rockland, Maine-based foundation supports "bold, compelling, risk-taking work in and outside of the standard exhibition venue," according to a press release. “The support of the Ellis-Beauregard Project Grant will allow me to materialize The Garden of Trans Care, a space for staging collective mourning and care for transgender people and for more broadly gathering and celebrating trans community in Maine and beyond,” said Brown, who will teach a class around it in the spring 2025 semester. 

For the fall issue of the Maine Arts Journal, Professor of Art Véronique Plesch wrote the introduction to the issue. She also wrote an essay for her "Art Historical Musings" column titled "Who's There," in which she discusses portraiture, the issue's theme. Plesch notes that "fundamental tensions underlie portraiture," and goes on to quote the great German art historian Erwin Panofsky: "A portrait aims by definition at two essential and, in a sense, contradictory qualities: individuality, or uniqueness; and totality, or wholeness." 

The New York Times popular political podcast The Run-Up, which focuses on the 2024 election, interviewed Assistant Professor of Government Nicholas Jacobs about JD Vance, Tim Walz, and the fight for rural America.

In a sterling review, the Portland Press Herald featured the exhibition Martha Diamond: Deep Time, on view at the Colby Museum through Oct. 13, calling it an "opportunity to see a true revolutionary and idiosyncratic voice that was not sufficiently heard in its time." The exhibit includes rarely seen pieces by the late artist and is the first major survey of Diamond's work in decades.

A Central Maine News photo essay highlighted the performance of “The Black Azaleas Song Cycle” by Arisa White, associate professor of english (creative writing), for Post Pardon: The Opera.

Dasan Thamattoor, the J. Warren Merrill Professor in Chemistry and Natural History, is co-lead author in a paper recently published in the journal Nature Communications. Titled "Probing the alkylidene carbene–strained alkyne equilibrium in polycyclic systems via the Fritsch–Buttenberg–Wiechell rearrangement," the paper's significance lies in the fact that this is the first instance in which both an exocyclic alkylidene carbene and its cycloalkyne Fritsch–Buttenberg–Wiechell rearrangement product have been "trapped." Strained cycloalkynes are valuable building blocks in synthetic chemistry because of their high degree of reactivity and ability to form structurally complex scaffolds, common features of many pharmaceuticals and natural products.