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Professor of Mathematics Scott Taylor and Qidong He ’21 have published the paper "Links, bridge number, and width trees" in the January 2023 issue of the Journal of Mathematical Society of Japan. The authors study how the properties of abstract networks can encode information about knots in three dimensions. They are particularly interested in the relationship to a quantity called “bridge number,” which measures how many maxima or minima a particular knot must have. Taylor and He began working on this study while He was student at Colby.

One final review of the Colby Museum's very popular Alex Katz: Theater and Dance exhibition was published in the national media. The piece notes how the museum "boasts an impressive collection of Katz’s art and is always finding new ways to showcase it.”

A new book by David Freidenreich, the Pulver Family Associate Professor of Jewish Studies, has been released by the University of California Press. Jewish Muslims: How Christians Imagined Islam as the Enemy uncovers the "hidden history of Islamophobia and its surprising connections to the long-standing hatred of Jews" through an examination of "anti-Muslim sentiment in texts and images produced across Europe and the Middle East over a thousand years."

A very nice piece by a local columnist recognized Paul J. Schupf’s contributions to Waterville, and how pleased he would have been with the new arts center on Main Street that bears his name.

Assistant Professor of History Kelly Brignac was one of 204 recent recipients of a prestigious National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grant. Brignac's project, "Defining Slavery in the Era of Abolition: The Forced Indenture of Africans in the French Empire, 1817–1861," was awarded a $35,000 grant, which will allow her to begin researching and writing her first book. Brignac's work focuses on how French administrators used to force Africans to continue working in the plantation economy after the abolition of slavery in the French Atlantic (1817–1861).

Professor of Art Véronique Plesch contributed the essay “Making Absence Visible” in her "Art Historical Musings" column for the 2023 winter issue of the Maine Arts Journal: UMVA Quarterly. Plesch also wrote the introduction to this issue, "Absence/Presence?” In her introduction, Plesch poses such questions as, "Can presence exist in absence and absence in presence?" asking the reader to "take, for instance, how what is absent comes back: memories, flash-backs of repressed traumas, or ghosts (we call them in French, revenants—those who return)." The issue also contains an essay by Associate Professor of Art Garry Mitchell.

Assistant Professor of Biology Suegene Noh published a paper titled "Reduced and Nonreduced Genomes in Paraburkholderia Symbionts of Social Amoebas" through the National Library of Medicine's National Center for Biotechnology Information. Benjamin Capodanno '21, Song Xu '22, and Marisa Hamilton '19 contributed to the paper. As part of the team's research, they built a web-based genome browser to facilitate research of the symbiotic relationship based on the genomes of Paraburkholderia symbionts of D. discoideum.  

As essay by Professor of English and Creative Writing Michael Burke is included in the winter issue of Lowestoft Chronicle, an online literary journal. "A Sort of Pilgrimage Up St. Patrick’s Mountain" retells of a short trek on the west coast of Ireland Burke undertook with his wife. Does "pilgrimage" imply suffering? he asked. "Was one obliged to complete a pilgrimage, or could one, perhaps, just sort of stop when one got tired and get a cup of hot chocolate instead?" Despite encountering inclement weather and rough terrain, Burke made it up and back. "I couldn’t say that ours counted as a pilgrimage," his essay concludes, "but it had some of that quality: a combination of suffering, struggle, and, eventually, humility."

Tiffany Creegan Miller, assistant professor of Spanish and Latin American studies, has published the book The Maya Art of Speaking Writing: Remediating Indigenous Orality in the Digital Age (University of Arizona Press, 2022). The result of nearly 10 years of fieldwork, the book "draws from Maya concepts of tz’ib’ (recorded knowledge) and tzij, choloj, and ch’owen (orality) to look at expressive work across media and languages."  

Recently, Miller has been invited to give presentations on her book at institutions such as Williams College, California State University-Northridge, and the University of Maine. On Nov. 21, she engaged in a conversation about the book on Contacto Ancestral, a Spanish- and Kaqchikel-language radio show based in Los Angeles.