External Posts
Michael Burke, professor of English and creative writing, emeritus, has a new essay that appeared in Panorama: The Journal of Travel, Place, and Nature. Titled "Weapon Station," the essay involves rattlesnakes, military weapon depots, and rivers. Among others, said Burke. The essay recounts memories of Burke's childhood, in a housing development built among almond trees outside of San Francisco. "The eastern edge of the town was signified by a sturdy barbed wire fence, where the Concord Naval Weapons Station began. The Weapons Station was strictly off limits, of course, that side patrolled every day by stern-looking men in pickup trucks who did not banter with those of us on the other side of the fence," Burke wrote in the essay's opening paragraph.
In March, pianist and Associate Professor of Music Yuri "Lily" Funahashi and composer, percussionist, and Assistant Professor of Music José Martínez visited two music conservatories in Italy, at the Conservatory of Music Luisa D'Annunzio in Pescara and the Conservatory of Music Benedetto Marcello in Venice. At both conservatories, Martínez held a masterclass about his compositions, including Guajeos (2018), a piece for four hands that draws on the energy and rhythmic vitality of salsa traditions. Funahashi's piano duo, with Steve Pane, gave concerts in both cities, featuring Martínez's Guajeos, among other American works. Before the Italian tour, Funahashi and Pane gave a preview of the program at the University of Maine Farmington, covered by the Daily Bulldog.
Assistant Professor of French Studies Flavien Falantin and Alex Firkusny '25 have coauthored a journal article recently released in The French Review. Written in French, the paper, "Le syndrome de Mishima: Psychologie du corps martyrial dans l’œuvre d’Amélie Nothomb" examines the Belgian-Francophone novelist Amélie Nothomb’s development of a new literary pathology—the “Mishima syndrome”—through the lens of the writer’s complex relationship with the sublime, the body, and art as it unfolds across her novels.
An upcoming book of short stories by Sarah Braunstein, associate professor of creative writing, received a starred review from Kirkus Reviews. The book, Baby in a Box (Norton, June 2026), contains 11 short stories, many of which have appeared in The New Yorker. "The short story form turns out to be the ideal platform for Braunstein’s talents," wrote Kirkus. "Her best work to date."
James M. Gillespie Professor of Art Véronique Plesch edited the spring issue of Maine Arts Journal. As usual, she wrote the introduction in which she discusses the theme of “The Shape of Time,” the debt the title owes to George Kubler’s 1962 book by the same title, and the issue’s contents.
Celebrating the retirement of Professor of Art Gary Green from Colby, Plesch wrote an essay (“The Passenger: Five Decades of Gary Green Following the Light”) in which she recaps Green’s five decades of photographic practice and the ways in which his work engages with the notion of time. From early photos capturing the “now” of the punk scene in the New York City of the ’70s and ’80s, to the timelessness of the Missouri Prairie and Maine trees, to the Long Island of his childhood, Green’s “quiet photos” explore the marks of passing time in elegiac meditations on time and memory—a “past that cannot be regained.” There is also a forward-looking dimension to his work as he documents the fate of a post-industrial town he now calls home.
Her essay for her "Art Historical Musings" column is titled “Picturing Time” and examines how time is grasped by artists and art historians, beginning with the limitations of “periodization” and “master narratives” that overlook history’s varying speeds. She explores how artists represent the spans of human life, civilizations, and sacred history, noting how anachronistic details “blend temporalities” and how visual strategies control the beholder’s gaze and the time spent taking in the work. After discussing how sequential moments capture the passage of time, she concludes with the modernist shift toward “simultaneity,” where measurable units give way to a subjective, ever-changing “duration.”
An essay by Véronique Plesch, the James M. Gillespie Professor of Art, appears as a chapter in the recently released book "Scripta in itinere”: Discursos, prácticas y apropiaciones del escrito en el espacio público (siglos XVI–XXI) (Ed. Antonio Castillo Gómez and VerónicaSierra Blas. Gijón: Trea, 2026. 627–40). The essay is based on a 2019 conference Plesch attended at the University of Alcalá in Alcalá de Henares, Spain, and it is her first publication in one of her mother tongues, Spanish. Titled "Grafitis y comunidades emocionales (siglos XVI–XVIII)," the essay asks, "How can repeated inscriptions over time contribute to constituting an emotional community? Considering the graffiti that appear on the frescoes of a small rural chapel (San Sebastiano, Arborio), this paper addresses the forms and functions of this public inscriptional practice. At once devotional act (the graffiti are on the bodies of saints), history writing, commemoration, coping mechanism—a scriptotherapeutic process of sorts—in the face of an overwhelmingly majority of traumatic events, this village chronicle contradicts usual conception of graffiti as illicit, popular, informal, hasty and ephemeral. Other instances come to help grasping how these marks made over time eventually bear witness of a community and also work towards constituting it," according to the translated abstract.
An article in The Nation featured the work of Nicholas Jacobs, Goldfarb Family Distinguished Associate Professor of American Government, and his two-year study on partisan polarization in rural counties, including how focusing more on local experience and less on national partisan narratives reduces polarization.
An article in the spring issue of Northern Woodlands magazine featured Amanda Gallinat, lecturer in environmental studies, and a museum exhibition and research project she worked on with her ES335 Phenology class last year. Gallinat and her students partnered with the Fairbanks Museum in Vermont to analyze over a century of volunteer-collected records of plant flowering and bird arrival times, showing shifts with climate change that could put some species at risk of becoming mismatched in time. The article highlights Colby students’ work digitizing handwritten ledgers, analyzing shifts in seasonal timing, and developing independent projects that expand an understanding of changes in the spring timing of birds, plants, and bees in Vermont.
An investigative article by the New York Times on Jeffrey Epstein and his access to elite private institutions included commentary from Adam Howard, the Charles A. Dana Professor of Education, who has studied prestigious private schools.
Adam Howard, the Charles A. Dana Professor of Education, Lawrence Martin '26, and Declan Greene '24 coauthored a paper recently published in the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education. Titled "Brotherhoods of power: whiteness, masculinity, and elite identity in all-boys schools," the article "examines the intricate and interwoven relationship between whiteness, masculinity, and elite status within U.S. secondary elite all-boys schools. Drawing on a study of 127 recent alumni from these institutions, the authors explore how brotherhoods within these schools act as a relational infrastructure for the production and reinforcement of eliteness."