Saying Adieu to Six Retiring Professors
Beloved faculty members depart Mayflower Hill after long and distinguished careers
The Colby community bids farewell to six well-known and engaged faculty members as they retire from classroom teaching.
Innovative, inclusive, and inspiring, each has contributed in important ways as influential teacher-scholars, mentors, and colleagues over the many years they have worked on Mayflower Hill.
Effective September 1, professors retiring and receiving emeritus status are Professor of East Asian Studies Hideko Abe, Clara C. Piper Professor of Psychology Martha Arterberry, Associate Professor of Classics James Barrett, Arthur Jeremiah Roberts Professor of Literature Mary Ellis Gibson, Charles A. Dana Professor of Anthropology Mary Beth Mills, and Associate Professor of Music Steven Nuss.
These senior faculty leave a legacy through the thousands of students whose lives they have impacted and the unique lenses through which they have explored topics and conducted groundbreaking research. The College wishes them well in this next phase of life.
Hideko Abe, professor of East Asian studies, specializes in linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics. She focuses much of her work on language, sexuality, and gender studies related to Japanese culture and its people.
She joined the Colby faculty in 1993 as a visiting assistant professor after earning her doctorate in anthropology from Arizona State University. Since her position was temporary, she stayed on Mayflower Hill for only two years. She continued teaching and researching at other institutions, including Vanderbilt University and Western Michigan University, where she earned tenure.
Her love of Colby brought her back to the College in 2006. She earned tenure here in 2011 and became a full professor in 2018.
A prolific scholar, she is the author of two books, Queer Japanese: Gender and Sexual Identities through Linguistic Practices (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) and Speaking of Power: Professional Japanese Women and Their Speeches (Germany, Lincom Europa, 2000). She also coauthored a Japanese textbook, wrote numerous book chapters and journal articles, and translated articles, films, and one book from Japanese to English. The book, Inscribing Intimacy: The Fading Writing Tradition of Nüshu, by Orie Endō, played a crucial role in understanding women’s language in China.
An important component of Abe’s scholarship is the numerous public lectures and talks given to various universities, colleges, and women’s groups around the world. Earlier this year, she was at Stanford University, and this month, she is giving a lecture to Duolingo employees for Pride Month titled “How Gender and Sexuality Interact with Japanese Language.”
Noteworthy is her service to the Associated Kyoto Program, a student-exchange program that Colby cofounded with eight other institutions in 1972. During her tenure at Colby, Abe has served on the program’s board and executive committee and as resident director while supporting Colby students who studied in Kyoto through this program.
Abe has taught various specialty courses at Colby as well as upper-level Japanese language courses to dozens of students, whose curiosity and intellect she appreciated.
“What I valued the most during my time at Colby were informal, sometimes very casual conversations with students, which sometimes led to an intense discussion on various issues, particularly racial and gender/sexuality concerns,” she said. “Having earnest and intense discussions with students both inside and outside of the classroom always gave me gratification in what I do as a scholar and teacher.”
Martha Arterberry, Clara C. Piper Professor of Psychology, is a developmental psychologist with research interests in infant and child cognition and development. She came to Colby as a full professor in 2007 with a mandate to help refocus the Department of Psychology. She achieved this by designing a top-notch psychology curriculum, hiring numerous talented young faculty members, and continuing her work in faculty development by mentoring her new colleagues.
“Looking back, I also achieved my personal goal of creating a place where I looked forward to coming to work every day,” Arterberry said. “We have a great department. We like each other, we disagree in a healthy way, and we lift each other up.”
Arterberry chaired Colby’s Psychology Department for three different terms, coordinated the department’s Colloquium Series for more than 10 years, and, since 2008, served as advisor to the national psychology honor society Psi Chi. She also oversaw the department during its 2013 move into the new Davis Science Center, a space that supports the program’s goals.
Her service to the College included coordinating the Presidential Scholars Program for four years, organizing the Colby Summer Research Retreat for two years, serving on the Tenure Committee for six years, and much more.
In addition to teaching, Arterberry was a collaborative investigator at the Child and Family Research Section of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development from 1998 to 2019. At Colby, she has continued her research through the Cognitive Development Lab, with grant support from Colby’s Social Science Division. She also developed partnerships with early education programs in the Waterville area, where her students volunteered with 3- to 5-year-old children. “This hands-on work deepened their learning significantly,” she said.
Arterberry earned a bachelor’s in psychology from Pomona College and her doctorate in child psychology from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. She began her teaching career at Gettysburg College, where she taught for 13 years and rose to a full professorship in the Department of Psychology. For three years, she served as Gettysburg’s assistant provost and interim vice-provost.
Her publications include coauthoring Infancy: The Basics (Routledge, 2023), Development in Infancy (Routledge, 2024), and Development of Perception in Infancy: The Cradle of Knowledge Revisited (Oxford University Press, 2016). Additionally, she has written numerous book chapters and professional articles. Arterberry is also editor-in-chief of Infant Behavior and Development, and she served as editor of the Lifespan Development Section of Acta Psychologica for three years as it transitioned to a fully open-access journal.
At her retirement reception, Arterberry said, “Working with Colby students has been a dream job—in class, in the lab, with the Quilting Club, and over the summer. I frequently say that I love going to class because I am never sure what is going to happen; the students bring so much to the educational experience.”
James Barrett, associate professor of classics, has devoted his scholarship principally to ancient Greek tragedy and philosophy. He came to Colby in 2000 after earning a B.A. from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a Ph.D. in classics from Cornell University. In addition to courses on ancient Greek and Latin languages, his teaching over the past 25 years has included courses on ancient Greek and Latin literature as well as ancient Greek myth, philosophy, and cultural history.
Barrett has written one monograph, Staged Narrative: Poetics and the Messenger in Greek Tragedy (University of California Press, 2002), as well as numerous essays, including “Performance and Memory in Athenian Drinking Songs,” currently in progress, and “Antisthenes on Tragedy” in Philosophers in the Tragic Age of the Greeks edited by Rose Cherubin and William Wians, currently under review.
Another recent publication is “Socrates’ Body and the Voice of Philosophy” in Hearing, Sound, and the Auditory in Ancient Greece (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2022, 334-368), edited by his former colleague Jill Gordon, Colby’s National Endowment for the Humanities/Class of 1940 Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, Emerita.
One of Barrett’s favorite courses was a Jan Plan class, Ancient Sites and their Visitors, team-taught with Mary Beth Mills, the Charles A. Dana Professor of Anthropology. Five times, between 2005 and 2015, Barrett and Mills took 15-20 students to Greece to study ancient archaeological sites (and associated museums) such as the Acropolis and Agora in Athens, Olympia, Delphi, Epidaurus, and Mycenae.
This course had a double focus, said Barrett. “We explored how the ancient Greeks used these sites and why they visited them, and we asked what the sites, as they exist today, can tell us about heritage tourism in our own time,” he said. Students gained firsthand experience at ancient sites and engaged in critical reflection on the long histories of those visiting these special places. “Each iteration of the course was intellectually and experientially rich: it was an extraordinary adventure for everyone involved, students and professors alike.”
Along with his colleagues in the Department of Classics, Barrett has recently been engaged in a reimagining of the department that has proved to be eye-opening and invigorating. New faculty members have joined the department, and the curriculum has been updated and expanded to put students at the center of activities.
“I am happy to say that the department is now stronger and more vibrant than it has been in many years. The new energies and forms of expertise brought by current faculty have attracted enthusiastic and capable students in numbers larger than we’ve seen in some time,” said Barrett.
“In other words, the department is now bubbling with excitement, as examples of student and faculty success abound. Needless to say, I find this renewal enormously gratifying.”
Mary Ellis Gibson, Arthur Jeremiah Roberts Professor of Literature, has a variety of literary interests that include 19th- and 20th-century poetry, India and the British Empire, print culture, and colonial poetics. She earned her bachelor’s in English from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, followed by a master’s and a doctorate, both in English language and literature, from the University of Chicago.
She is an award-winning critic who has won competitive residencies, including at the Wildacres Retreat, and numerous grants. These include two Fulbright Awards—one to lecture in Taipei, Taiwan, and another for research in India—a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, and a grant from the American Council of Learned Societies.
Gibson came to Colby in 2016 as a full professor and chair of the English Department after retiring as professor of English at Glasgow University and, earlier, as professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. During her career, she has written five books and edited three others with topics ranging from science fiction in colonial India to Robert Browning to stories by Southern women. Her list of scholarly papers, readings, invited lectures, and refereed articles spans pages of her CV.
At Colby, Gibson has taught courses in poetry, British literary history, journalism, and literary studies, among others. She has supervised student research, performance, independent studies, internships, and honors theses, and she has found her interactions with students most fulfilling.
“During my time at Colby, I’ve enjoyed seeing the growing accomplishment and diversity of our students from all over the world and all parts of the U.S. I’ve especially enjoyed working with first-generation students, who bring amazing curiosity, accomplishment, and an important critical perspective,” she said.
In her nine years at Colby, Gibson has witnessed and nurtured the growth of literary studies, creative writing, and environmental humanities in the English Department. “And I especially love,” she said, “the way these three areas are increasingly interwoven.”
As Gibson reflected on her leave-taking from Colby, she said the most fun she had was teaching a new course in her final semester, Sonnets: History, Theory, and Practice. Coincidentally, she had 14 “extraordinary” students to match the 14 lines in a sonnet.
“We read sonnets in circles one line at a time, with me ducking unless someone was absent. And we learned a lot together about how poems work and why they matter. We covered the ground—from Shakespeare to the contemporary Black poet Terence Hayes. I think each of us—me included, for sure—came away with new respect for the power of language and our own ability to make language powerful,” she said.
Gibson also feels grateful for her colleagues in the department.
“For me, I think my greatest satisfaction is seeing how many wonderful new people have joined the English Department in the past decade or so—terrific scholars, creative writers, and teachers, every one of them.”
Mary Beth Mills, Charles A. Dana Professor of Anthropology, is a cultural anthropologist with research interests in Southeast Asia and Thailand, migration and mobilities, rural-urban relations, commodification and consumption, and gender, globalization, and labor. She also researches and teaches on the anthropology of food and the anthropology of tourism.
Mills has spent her entire teaching career at Colby, arriving in 1992 while completing her doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley, where she also earned a master’s degree. She earned a bachelor’s degree from Huron College at the University of Western Ontario, Canada. She was granted tenure in 1999 and named the Charles A. Dana Endowed Chair in 2018.
For three years, 2000-03, she was director of Colby’s Oak Institute for the Study of International Human Rights, now the Oak Institute for Human Rights. She also served on the Oak Fellowship Selection Committee starting from the institute’s founding in 1997 until 2006. At the Oak Institute, Mills oversaw the tenure of three Oak Fellows, consolidated programming, and worked to establish the year-round staffing needed to allow the institute to flourish.
A dedicated scholar and experienced field researcher, Mills has written dozens of articles that have been published in top-tier journals. A career highlight was winning the Anthony Leeds Award for Urban Anthropology for her book Thai Women in the Global Labor Force: Consuming Desires, Contested Selves. Her research received broad support for more than 30 years, with grants from the National Science Foundation, Fulbright-Hays Program, Agrarian Studies Program at Yale University, and more.
Mills has enjoyed working with Colby students in various capacities. One of the most memorable of her courses was a Jan Plan titled Greece: Ancient Sites and Their Visitors, which she developed and co-taught with Associate Professor of Classics James Barrett.. Over five different January terms, they traveled to Greece with Colby students to explore the historical and contemporary significance of Greek archaeological sites.
While the Jan Plan course was a special experience, her appreciation for students is far-reaching.
“I have thoroughly enjoyed teaching and learning from Colby’s wonderful students,” said Mills. “What a privilege to share with them the transformative power of the liberal arts. This is something I will always cherish.”
In addition to serving for 11 years as chair of the Department of Anthropology, Mills contributed to Colby by sitting on the Global Studies Executive Board for all 33 of her years at the College, spending three terms on the Women’s Studies Coordinating Committee, as well as her elected service on a variety of faculty and college committees, including seven years on the Committee for Promotion and Tenure.
“I could not have asked for a better or more supportive community in which to spend my career than Colby College,” Mills said at the end of the school year. “I have loved working with amazing colleagues from across campus and especially in my home department, anthropology—brilliant scholars, who inspired me to keep pursuing new horizons, whether in the classroom or in my research.”
Steven Nuss is a music theorist with research interests that blend Western and non-Western analytical techniques and theoretical models of form and process. He harbors a special interest in the music of Morton Feldman, a 20th-century composer, and in the music and ritual in Rinzai Zen Buddhism.
Among his global and informative experiences are stints as an orchestral conducting fellow with the Aspen Music Festival and at the Seishin International School and University in Tokyo, where he was a faculty member for several years. Nuss is also a former student of famed Noh actor Tsuta Kazutada, a member of the Kanze Noh performing arts tradition in Japan.
Nuss started teaching at Colby in 1996 after receiving a doctorate in music theory from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where he was a Gilleece Fellow and a graduate instructor at Queens College. In addition to courses on music theory and composition, he has taught courses on world music, traditional Japanese music and culture, and interdisciplinary approaches to music composition and analysis.
In his nearly 30 years at Colby, the most important experiences for Nuss were two Jan Plan courses. He fondly recalls the “Lost With You” project—”a real Broadway experience,” he said—with Jim Thurston, associate professor of performance, theater, and dance. And, of course, the unforgettable Jan Plans in India with Gordon Jee and Anindyo Roy, associate professor of English, emeritus. Nuss, Jee, and Roy started the first Colby Jan Plans in India in 2004 at the internationally famous Gandhi Ashram School in Kalimpong.
“Going there was something important and incredible,” Nuss said in a 2024 Colby magazine story on the course. “It’s still a huge part of how a number of us who were fortunate enough to have spent quality time at the Gandhi Ashram have come to think about and engage with the world.”
In retirement, Nuss plans to continue the global engagement he knows so well.
“My post-Colby years will certainly feature returns to my old New York City haunts, as well as periods of renewed research and study in India and Bali, as well as in Japan, where I lived and taught for many memorable years.”
