Colby Announces Recent Faculty Promotions
Five faculty members are promoted to full professor, one associate professor is awarded tenure
On the recommendation of President David A. Greene, five faculty members have been promoted to full professors, and one associate professor has been granted tenure.
Those promoted from associate professor to professor are Jennifer Coane, psychology; Timothy Hubbard, economics; Maple Razsa, global studies; Winifred Tate, anthropology; and Stephanie Taylor, computer science. Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, an untenured associate professor of English, was awarded tenure and named a Haynesville Project Fellow.
“This is a truly remarkable group of faculty members, each of whom has contributed in deeply meaningful ways to the mission of the College,” said Provost and Dean of Faculty Margaret McFadden. “They are all excellent teachers and advisors, accomplished and influential scholars, and dedicated and generous members of the Colby community. I know that the future of the College is limitless with such gifted faculty members leading our collective work.”
Jennifer Coane—Psychology
Cognitive psychologist Jennifer Coane studies how people acquire and cognitively organize knowledge and how it influences subsequent behavior, processing of new information, performance on cognitive tasks, and methods used to improve long-term knowledge bases. In this work, she takes a lifespan perspective, testing both college-aged and 60-plus adults.
After tenure, Coane continued her investigation of priming and false memory while also starting new experiments on the phenomenology of memory, exploring how people experience their own memories and memory failures. She has also authored 19 peer-reviewed papers in top-tier scholarly journals since 2016. Her service to the College reflects her interests and expertise, including serving on Colby’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee, Academic Integrity Committee, and Pulver Scholar Selection Committee. She is also beginning her final year of a three-year term as Colby’s academic integrity coordinator.
At the professional level, Coane has served as a peer reviewer for more than two dozen scientific journals. Notably, she joined the editorial board of Memory & Cognition in 2016 and since 2020 has served as an associate editor, a prominent role for a liberal arts college faculty member that reflects her stature in the field.
Coane joined the Colby faculty in 2008 and was promoted to associate professor in 2016. She holds a Ph.D. in experimental psychology from Washington University in St. Louis and a B.S. and an M.S. in psychology from Illinois State University.
Timothy Hubbard—Economics
Microeconomist Timothy Hubbard specializes in the structural analysis of auctions, a technical and complex field with significant policy implications. He has made substantial methodological and theoretical contributions and has taken on important, difficult problems in the field. He is nationally recognized for the sophistication of his empirical work and his use of state-of-the-art econometric and numerical methods.
Since earning tenure in 2017, he has published five papers, one book-length, in leading journals and completed five well-received working papers in various stages of the lengthy publication process. He sustains productive collaborations with influential scholars in the field, essential to publishing in leading journals, and is sought after as a collaborator by colleagues at major research universities.
His service to Colby includes serving on multiple committees, as liaison for the women’s hockey team, as associate chair and chair of the Economics Department, and as chair of the Social Sciences Division. Hubbard and his students teach game theory to Waterville elementary and high school students and have organized a charity auction benefiting Waterville School Department students for multiple years.
Joining the Colby faculty in 2012, Hubbard was promoted to associate professor in 2017. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Iowa and a B.A. in economics from the University of New Hampshire.
Maple Razsa—Global Studies
Anthropologist Maple Razsa studies European social movements and political activism. An accomplished and internationally known ethnographer and ethnographic filmmaker, he has earned a reputation for groundbreaking analyses and innovative documentary filmmaking. His first book, Bastards of Utopia: Living Radical Politics after Socialism, is widely recognized as influential and field-leading. It won the 2016 William A. Douglass Prize in Europeanist Anthropology.
Razsa received tenure in 2015 and since then has completed a prize-winning, feature-length interactive documentary tracing street-level events of a major protest movement, another short film, and many articles and book chapters. Much of his current work is part of an ambitious collaborative project about migrants and refugees attempting to travel to Europe through Eastern European countries titled Insurgent Mobilities: An Ethnography of the Balkan Route as Movement.
Razsa is committed to creating and sustaining an inclusive and vibrant intellectual community, has done extensive committee service, and served as chair of both the Global Studies and Cinema Studies departments. He also actively contributes to the Oak Institute for Human Rights, the Goldfarb Center for Public Affairs, and the American Studies and Cinema Studies departments.
He holds a Ph.D. in social anthropology with media from Harvard University and a B.A. in international studies from Vassar College. He joined the Colby faculty in 2007 and was promoted to associate professor in 2015.
Winifred Tate—Anthropology
Political anthropologist Winifred Tate focuses on drug policy in Latin America, but more recently she has studied drug policy in Maine. An accomplished and internationally known scholar, she has established a reputation among Latin Americanists and as a pioneering contributor to the anthropology of policy. Her most recent work is in public anthropology, scholarship that aims to shape not just disciplinary debates but to produce knowledge of direct and substantive use for addressing immediate social issues.
Tate earned tenure in 2016. Her post-tenure scholarship comprises six peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters, two major policy reports, and nine published public commentaries. She also has two book projects nearing completion. She also founded and is director of the Maine Drug Policy Lab at Colby, where she uses her experience as a policy analyst and advocate to research drug policy and access to treatment in Maine.
Her service to Colby includes serving on and, in several cases, chairing an array of search, personnel review, and other College committees such as the Civic Engagement Task Force and the Public Policy Major Working Group. She supports interdisciplinary initiatives like the Medical Humanities Public Inquiry Lab and a wide variety of diversity, equity, and inclusion projects. She is currently serving as the chair of the Anthropology Department.
Tate joined the Colby faculty in 2008 and was promoted to associate professor in 2016.
She holds an M.A. and a Ph.D. in anthropology from New York University and a B.A. in Latin American studies from Wesleyan University.
Stephanie Taylor—Computer Science
Stephanie Taylor works in the growing field of chronobiology with a focus on understanding circadian rhythms. She is one of the few researchers worldwide who focuses on mathematical approaches to understanding the complex genetic networks that underlie circadian rhythms. Her scholarship seeks to understand how cellular clocks in neurons deep in the brain are synchronized and how cellular clocks in peripheral tissues outside the brain are regulated.
Since earning tenure in 2016, her eight peer-reviewed papers have been published in leading journals in several different fields, and her single-authored paper on jetlag was described as “a landmark contribution to fundamental theory in the field.” She has won external funding from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation to continue collaborations with experimentalists and her contributions to the scholarly literature on computer science education, an area in which she is a leading voice.
Her service to Colby includes leadership as chair of the Computer Science Department, which has grown from a faculty of four to 11, incorporated courses from the Davis Institute for Artificial Intelligence into its curriculum, and experienced a rapidly increasing enrollment. At the College level, she has served on the Task Force on Free Expression and Free Inquiry, the Task Force on Distribution Requirements, and the Independent Major Committee.
Taylor arrived at Colby in 2008 and was promoted to associate professor in 2016. She holds a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California at Santa Barbara and a B.A. in mathematics and computer science from Gordon College.
Matthew Schneider-Mayerson—English
Environmental humanities scholar Matthew Schneider-Mayerson combines the study of literature, sociology, and environmental studies. Internationally known as one of the creators of the emerging field of empirical ecocriticism, his research topics include the influence of environmental literature on readers, eco-reproductive concerns and choices, and apocalyptic energy subcultures. He has recently gained national attention for co-developing with students the Climate Reality Check, a method for analyzing Hollywood films to determine whether climate change is present as a theme.
Schneider-Mayerson was hired as an associate professor without tenure in 2022 to help build Colby’s new concentration in English: Literature and the Environment (ENLE) and to contribute to the College’s thriving environmental humanities initiative. Previously, he taught for seven years at Yale-NUS College, where he received tenure in 2021. After a brief probationary period, he has received tenure at Colby.
In his short time at Colby, he has taken on co-directing the ENLE concentration, joined the Environmental Advisory Group, and volunteered for the Faculty Coordinating Committee of the Center for the Arts and Humanities. He contributes to the new First-Year Journey Program and is a faculty-in-residence in the first-year residence halls, inviting students into his home for meals, snacks, and relaxation with his family and pets.
Schneider-Mayerson earned his Ph.D. in American studies from the University of Minnesota and his B.A. from Yale University.
