Media love for the upcoming �ֲ���ý Dance Festival from The Boston Globe, Portland Press Herald, and WBUR 

From July 10 through 31, campus will be buzzing with activity from the �ֲ���ý Dance Festival — a yearly dance experience that offers dance training and performances from renowned artists and draws audiences from Maine and beyond. 

In May, as a “not-to-miss” cultural event happening in Maine this summer. Also that month, The Boston Globe featured BDF on their list of

Then in June, WBUR sang BDF’s praises — “bracing for a bold program” — in a piece headlined . They highlighted “The Marthaodyssey,” which former Martha Graham Dance Company member Jesse Factor will present on the Schaeffer Theatre stage. The mishmash of drag performance and Graham technique imagines what might have happened if Graham had choreographed Madonna’s 1990 Blond Ambition tour. “A trip to Maine may be in order for those who enjoy contemporary dance,” writes WBUR’s Shira Laucharoen.

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Members of the �ֲ���ý College Youth Community Action and Transformation Lab urge adults to talk politics with young people in the Portland Press Herald

Nathaniel Zuckerberg ’26 and Linnaea Herring, a senior at Yarmouth High School, authored a piece for the Portland Press Herald Both Herring and Zuckerberg are members of the Youth Community Action and Transformation Lab led by �ֲ���ý Assistant Professor of Psychology Elena Maker Castro. This lab conducts research for the Can We? Project — an initiative that provides Maine high schoolers with the communication tools needed to participate as engaged citizens in a democracy. Zuckerberg and Herring “ask every adult with a young person in their life to start that political conversation you may have avoided” because they have found that teenagers are “ready and eager to practice dialogue.”

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�ֲ���ý Film Festival covered by News Center Maine, WGME

News Center Maine and students Shelter Gimbel-Sherr ’27 of Seattle and Nate Shore ’27 of Kennebunkport, Maine, about the 2026 �ֲ���ý Film Festival. The festival, which ran from May 12 to 17 and was entirely organized by �ֲ���ý students, featured over 45 films as well as panels of filmmakers, professors, and students.

Gimbel-Sherr and Shore highlighted how the festival has a special interest in promoting work from filmmakers and actors from Maine, including a Maine filmmakers panel that featured distinguished guests such as screenwriter Desi Van Til, and actors Dustin Tucker, Matthew Delamater, and Xander Berkeley. Shore talked about focusing on bringing together student filmmakers from Maine schools such as Southern Maine Community College, Colby College, and �ֲ���ý College. He said, “it should make a really great collaboration between the colleges.”

On WGME, students how the festival hopes to bring film to the larger Maine community. One way they do this is by making the festival completely free and open to the public. Manogue said that the festival board wants to “make film more accessible to all of our community members,” and Benningfield added that accessibility is “one of the driving factors in our mission.”  

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The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education covers appointment of Victoria Neason Wallace 

In a story headlined , The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education features Victoria Neason Wallace, who was just named vice president for enrollment and dean of admission and financial aid.

“She comes to her new role from Colby College in Waterville, Maine, where she has been serving as executive director of strategic initiatives within the Office of Admissions and Financial Aid,” the paper writes. “Before Colby, Neason Wallace was senior assistant director for student volunteers in the Office of Undergraduate Admissions at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri.”

Neason Wallace will join �ֲ���ý on July 1.

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Portland Press Herald and Maine Public highlight Phyllis Graber Jensen’s career retrospective at the �ֲ���ý College Museum of Art

Phyllis Graber Jensen — director of photography and video for the college — is the subject of a career retrospective on display at the �ֲ���ý College Museum of Art from June 12 to Sept. 19 called Phyllis Graber Jensen: Picture Stories.

The Portland Press Herald on display at Maine art museums this summer. This retrospective features photos from throughout Jensen’s career, and the Herald notes that “throughout, what emerges is her commitment to the medium as a critical mode of communication and historical preservation.”

Maine Public’s State of the Art featured Graber Jensen in a . Titled “Picture Stories,” host Heather McDougall leads Graber Jensen through a 28-minute interview about her life (including her groundbreaking advocacy for women in sport as a teenager) and her career. McDougall asked about Graber Jensen’s transition in 1995 from a hard news environment in Boston, working for the Boston Herald and shooting breaking news and icons such as Leonard Bernstein, to communications and marketing work at �ֲ���ý in 1995: “Was it something you were seeking out or did it just sort of happen and then you just leaned into it?” 

“I was skeptical that I could make the transition from being a journalist to being a marketing photographer,” Graber Jensen said. “But in the end I think the people that I work with, some of whom had journalism backgrounds, and the place that �ֲ���ý is, allowed us to realize that we’re not journalists, but we use the tools of journalism in terms of storytelling. And I think that’s where the exhibition title came from in terms of ‘Picture Stories.’

“I also believe that �ֲ���ý understood the value of using images to tell the story of �ֲ���ý. And at one point I worked with a colleague who was also a talented photographer, Mark Glass. And so we were producing a lot of photography and that became part of the storytelling tradition and we had an editorial director who was very supportive — Jay Burns — of visual storytelling. It became easier and easier for me to be who I was and pursue my interests and way of telling the story.”

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Commencement in the Sun Journal: Regalia and reveling

In a , photographer Russ Dillingham captured moments of joy, hilarity, bystanders playing hacky sack, and the classic moment of “check the mirror” before walking across the stage at Coram to receive a diploma. Not to mention speakers Sebenele G. Lukhele ’26 and bestselling author and honorand Deborah E. Harkness. 

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Mara Tieken talks about the challenges faced by rural students once they land at elite colleges, to Inside Higher Education and Education Week.

In an article, headlined “,” Inside Higher Education Editor-in-Chief Sara Custer draws on Professor of Education Mara Tieken’s work as inspiration for an opinion piece. 

Custer references a conversation Tieken had on IHE’s podcast The Key throughout her piece, including the way Tieken advocates for colleges to rethink how they support rural students once they arrive on campuses far from their homes, not just in terms of miles, but in cultural markers. 

Tieken argues that colleges need a vocabulary around the rural experience, not unlike the way they approach the influence of race and class on students’ access and experience of higher ed. “We don’t have that vocabulary for how geography matters,” Tieken told The Key on 

Through her research, Tieken also found that identifying as rural can help students see the benefits of their background that may be hidden by negative stereotypes about rural communities in pop culture and the media. “Whether or not it’s a part of your identity, you’re still facing the same barriers that are tied to those identity markers. And so, if you don’t see it as such you internalize it [and think], ‘It’s about me. It’s my fault. I’m not right. I’m just not good enough,’” she said. “They need to hear these messages where their rurality is actually celebrated and they can see how it is an asset in their life.”

Tieken was also quoted in a June 11 story in Education Week headlined Tieken is an expert on the pitfalls of school closures, which are often perceived as a way to save money.

“The assumption is just so baked into the logic of closure decisions that it’s assumed closures will save money, so it can be really hard for leaders to combat that thinking,” Tieken told Education Week. “This is a really important piece of evidence as districts navigate these conversations and decisions.”

Throughout his time at �ֲ���ý, biochemistry major Sebenele Lukhele ’26 of Manzini, Eswatini, has been a researcher. But he’s also been a dancer. And a club volleyball player. And a track and field athlete. And a tutor, and a tour guide, and a member of student government. To sum it up, he was able to be “whatever I wanted to be.”

As he will explain when he delivers the Senior Address at Commencement, Lukhele believes this was possible because of the environment that �ֲ���ý cultivates — one that encourages exploration and discourages judgement. It is an environment that follows through on the college’s promise to be defined by inclusivity, community, and support, coupled with academic rigor. 

This promise, outlined in the �ֲ���ý mission statement and emphasized by Admission representatives, resonated so deeply with Lukhele that he enrolled at �ֲ���ý having never visited campus. He had a feeling he would love the place — and he was right.

�ֲ���ý’ belief in “the transformative power of our differences” is not just about helping students thrive on campus, Lukhele will explain, but also teaching them to be unabatedly curious members of a global society. 

Alexandra DeMarco of �ֲ���ý Communications and Marketing spoke recently with Lukhele. The following is a condensed and edited version of their conversation.

Students who are interested in delivering the Senior Address submit a speech and are selected by a committee. Why did you want to give the Senior Address?

As an international student and a person of color, I came to �ֲ���ý because it promised a community, a place where I can be myself without needing to assimilate or be someone different. I wanted to present a speech on Commencement as a way to show my gratitude for �ֲ���ý giving me that space to explore. I’ve grown so much as a person, and I feel like the community here has been supportive of me in many ways, and I’ve also contributed my support in different ways.

What is the theme of your speech?

Difference and diversity. I have perspectives, or lived experiences, that are very different from my colleagues here. We all have traits that make us different. My speech is highlighting that those differences are our strengths rather than our weaknesses because those are the things that bring us together as a community, if we celebrate them and appreciate them.

At �ֲ���ý, I feel like I was able to be whatever I wanted to be and express myself in whatever way I wanted without needing to be someone different. The speech does try to address a very complex issue of diversity and differences amongst people and how you can approach being a global community that accepts or appreciates each other — coexistence, in a sense.

Could you share an example of a time where you felt like differences were really being celebrated at �ֲ���ý?

Dancing in the 2026 Cultural Showcase, “Here to Stay: Rhythms that Raised Us.” I prepared a piece with one of my friends, Mohamed Al-jabry ’28 from Shinyanga, Tanzania, and we wanted to showcase an African style of dancing. We didn’t feel that we had to do something that was going to be “accepted” by the community, but we felt like we could do something to express ourselves as we are. The crowd was very, very excited. 

People here at �ֲ���ý take anything as long as it’s good and it’s full of energy. No one is looking like, “Oh, this is not something that I’m used to, so I’m going to criticize or judge.” People accept or appreciate those kinds of expressions. That was a very heartwarming moment, and those very small moments are the things that accumulate to make this community what it is. 

I’ve experienced a lot of these moments where people will sit down and listen to you when you have something to say. It also gives you the responsibility to listen to others because when people appreciate and accept you like that, you have a natural instinct to be appreciative of others. 

In my major, biochemistry, professors are able to build a space for differences as things that don’t really affect the way you are viewed in the major. The differences themselves are something that makes it even more interesting, in a sense, because it allows for different perspectives that push research forward. 

You have completed a lot of research during your time at �ֲ���ý, both on campus and during an internship in the summer of 2025 at the Mount Desert Island Biological Laboratory. How has research shaped your career plans?

It actually has shaped my career so much because I came here as a pre-med student from a typical African household. When I was young, I was talented in the sciences. With that came a lot of pressure to become a doctor, and that propelled me toward a medical career. I wanted to come to liberal arts school because I wanted to really discover myself and make sure that I’m in a career that gives me purpose.

Being a biochemistry major gave me a very different perspective into what I can do with my passion for science. As time went on, I felt like I would have a greater impact being a researcher. I felt like that would be, at least for me, an approach to science that serves a greater community.

I really like the fact that �ֲ���ý changed my perspective on what my career could be and provided me with options that I didn’t know existed. There were people who were also able to talk to me through that — the Center for Purposeful Work, advisors, research supervisors. 

You did a senior thesis project. What was it about and how did you choose your subject?

I’m very curious about the impact of changes in cells at the molecular level and how those things drive how cells behave and how everything ends up working in the body of a person. This kind of research, even though it sounds very abstract and not very applicable to the real world, drives a lot of the efforts that end up being very impactful to society itself because they end up making new treatments for very threatening diseases. 

I was very interested in the overarching topic of the research, which was manipulation of sphingolipid metabolism in cells by common cold coronaviruses. That basically is analyzing how viruses affect the structure of a cell, specifically the membrane of the cell. My experience involved a lot of method development, which was very different from the research experiences that I’ve had before. My advisor, Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry Scotty Farley, was also there to support me. Other students were doing similar projects, and we were able to talk about different things and discuss how our data is working and help each other through the process.

What on-campus support have you found as you’ve balanced your various interests — biochemistry, dance, global engagement?

�ֲ���ý is very academically rigorous, and, at the same time, there’s a lot of effort by the institution to support students to make sure that they are succeeding both as people and also as students. I have really explored that and took advantage of those support systems. 

The relationships that professors build with students at �ֲ���ý was something that was very substantial to me in balancing things. I also used to be on the track and field team, and I appreciated Curtis Johnson, head coach of men’s and women’s track and field, so much. He’s a very great guy who goes beyond viewing students just as athletes and is concerned about what is going on in your academic life and your personal life, if you so wish to talk about that. 

I want to give a shout out to James Reese, who was the dean of international students and is now the associate dean of students. People say he’s the “father of international students” because he’s supportive in many different ways. 

Also, being part of student government and working with Campus Life on many things, like organizing TEDx�ֲ���ý last fall, opened a window where I could know a lot of the support systems that existed — from major advisors to student advisors and the deans who are waiting for you to talk to them about anything that you need.

How have those experiences and campus activities helped you build community, especially a diverse and inclusive one, at �ֲ���ý? 

TEDx�ֲ���ý started off with a conversation in Commons with my friends about how diverse communities can be truly diverse and what kinds of things are never talked about that make communities less practically diverse than they should be. You can have statistics, but what we want really with diversity is people to interact and be part of an active community — talk to each other and collaborate, which is what the �ֲ���ý mission statement is all about. 

Our motivation was to bring the topic of diversity to a place where a lot of people can interact with it and not at a professional level, but at a very lowkey, chill level. We called Tedx�ֲ���ý “Unasked Questions,” which basically speaks to the questions that we never ask as communities and the things that we don’t really talk about that would have a great impact in making us a strong community.

I wanted a team full of leaders who think in diverse perspectives and see things that I didn’t see myself. Something I learned being part of leadership roles is that you don’t know everything. Being able to see who can help you in different ways is a great skill. 

I was involved in the Africana Club this past semester, as a community liaison on the executive board. I was not just making a community for myself but also building a community for a lot of people and showcasing my identity as an African person. This allowed me to meet new people that I never thought I would interact with on campus. I was able to have conversations with people and have discussions, which were eye-opening in different ways.

I participated in club volleyball, and that was a way to meet new people through a very different platform, and enjoy the sport.

I was also an officer with student government’s Funding and Activities Board. That perspective made me appreciate the efforts and resources that are put into making sure that clubs thrive, there is equity being achieved, and every club has the chance to express their interest and identities in campus life. 

�ֲ���ý students are very intentional people who care about the things that they do, who care about the work that they do. They don’t just do it for the sake of doing it. That’s something that I’ve really, really appreciated about the people here. 

That’s built by the community that exists at �ֲ���ý — the support and the size of the community and the way the place is structured. We have one dining hall, for example, and that allows people to interact and be part of a community every day. That creates a space where people get more and more comfortable to step out of their comfort zone and become the most purposeful and genuine, happy versions of what they could be. 

What are your post-graduate plans?

I’m going to be a research associate at the UMass Chan Medical School in a lab that researches autoimmunity. There are two �ֲ���ý alumni (Olivia Dekker ’24 and Aurora Beaumont ’24) that also work there. They were really excited to see me come into the interview, and I had a lot of �ֲ���ýie conversations with them. 

I’m very excited about that both at the professional level —  it’s going to give me a chance to explore my research career even more and refine topics I really want to get into — and also being able to embody the characteristics that �ֲ���ý has built in me and taking that in the world out there. That’s my next chapter.

Short Term, a �ֲ���ý “minimester” of three-and-a-half weeks during which students take only one course, is here. Course offerings run the gamut, touching on everything from pop culture, to business to test preparation, and give students the opportunity to deeply engage with a single topic.

During Short Term (which starts May 4 and ends May 27) students get the chance to extend their learning beyond what they usually find on campus. Through �ֲ���ý’ practitioner-taught courses, which invite professionals across disciplines to share their work and career pathways with students as visiting instructors, students explore subjects outside of the core liberal arts curriculum. During off-campus Short Term courses, students conduct fieldwork, research, and culture in places like Arizona, Zambia, Hungary, Poland, Italy and more.

Below, explore 10 of the 100-plus Short Term courses offered this spring.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Biology Brecia Despard is teaching “Biological Skills: Field Ecology,” a course specifically designed for students interested in pursuing internships and careers in the biological sciences. This course will introduce ecological principles and research methods across major coastal marine biomes, and help students develop field skills specifically geared toward these kinds of ecosystems. Additionally, students will learn how to analyze and create visualizations using data they collect in the programming language R.

Professor of French and Francophone Studies Mary T. Rice-DeFosse will teach students about the representation of French culinary traditions in her course “Cooking Up French Culture.” By observing how French food is prepared and eaten in film and literature, students will come to understand how the French identity has changed in the modern era. Plus, students will get the opportunity to prepare and serve dishes of their own creation.

With her course “Feminist Political Theory (Taylor’s Version),” Assistant Professor of Politics Lucy Britt will merge pop culture with political theory. The course examines Taylor Swift, the moment’s most popular female musical artist, and her larger-than-life persona and cultural impact in terms of how they interact with or expand upon feminist theory. Covering everything from celebrity politics to intersectionality and queer counter-readings to norms of motherhood, this course dives beyond online discourse to offer students vocabulary and knowledge for discussing “Miss Americana” and pop culture feminism more broadly. Students will end the course with their very own — or, as Swift would say, “Taylor’s Version” — research product comprising original data collection.

Visiting Assistant Professor of History Frances Bell will be teaching “Lewiston: A History of a Place,” a course that combines in-class learning and site visits to gain a more comprehensive understanding of Lewiston — the beloved home of �ֲ���ý College — and its rich history. Through in-class learning, field trips, and creative projects, students will gain a holistic understanding of how the spatial history of Lewiston has changed from the times of Indigenous settlement to the post-industrial period. 

In “Maine’s Marine Resources,” Assistant Professor of Economics Amanda Lindsay will be teaching students about the health and management of marine resources in Maine. On day trips along the Maine coast, students will be able to see firsthand the challenges marine management systems face. This course is aimed at students who are interested in natural resource economics, a field that Lindsay specializes in.

While �ֲ���ý ceramics students usually use a gas reduction kiln to fire their clay projects, this Short Term, Lecturer in Art and Visual Culture Susan Dewsnap is teaching “Pit Firing Ceramics: Contemporary Approaches to an Ancient Process of Firing Ceramic Objects.” Pit firing is an ancient approach to firing ceramic objects that uses an actual fire pit to transform raw clay pots into finished work. In this course, students will use organic materials that they gather to decorate their work and see how firing in a pit results in surprising outcomes. 

Faculty members and alumni from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College are coming to �ֲ���ý this Short Term to teach “Practicum in Business Consulting: �ֲ���ý-Tuck Business Consulting Essentials” — a course that teaches foundational business skills through a client-focused project management framework. Students will learn through a case study that simulates real-world business challenges and gain confidence in decision-making processes. This is the second year that �ֲ���ý has offered a business course led by Tuck alumni and faculty as part of its Short Term practitioner-taught courses. Peter Friedman ’92, P ’24, P ’26, who earned an MBA from Tuck in 2003, and is a �ֲ���ý trustee, will serve as practitioner-in-residence for this course, with additional Tuck-associated instructors Aram Donigian, Amy Florentino, Patroklos Karantinos, and Conwell Worthington III.

“Practicum in Mediation and Restorative Practices” is a practitioner-taught course that functions as a conflict resolution skills workshop. Through techniques used by restorative justice practitioners such as circle facilitation and restorative language and problem-solving approaches to resolving disputes used by meditators, students will acquire tools to improve communication and facilitate cooperation and collaboration. Practitioners-in-residence for this course are Margaret Micolichek, Jamar Williams, Karen Groat, and Leah Boyd.

“Practicum in Public Health” is a practitioner-taught course taught by Leah Elsmore ’12, a senior healthcare consultant with consultancy firm North Highland, that teaches students how to apply qualitative methods to public health challenges in a mix of traditional and experiential academic settings. In the classroom, students will learn about public health foundations and various qualitative research techniques. In the community, students will have a chance to apply what they learned in the classroom, working to solve a concrete health challenge in Lewiston. 

For juniors and seniors planning to attend law school, the course “Short Term 2026 LSAT Prep” is an opportunity to get ready for a crucial part of the application process. Ben Paris, who holds a JD and has for 30 years worked in test prep and education design, will lead the three-week practitioner-taught course. This course is made possible by a generous �ֲ���ý donor, meaning there is no cost to �ֲ���ý students.

Reporting by Charlotte Comrack ’27 of Washington, D.C., and Ramona McNish ’28 of Palo Alto, Calif.

At �ֲ���ý, student researchers are empowered to ask and answer big questions across numerous fields of study. They tackle everything from human biology and marine ecology, to literature reviews of legal movements and the politics of memory, to media analysis of film, literature, and television.

On April 10, more than 200 of these student researchers presented their work to the �ֲ���ý community and their family and friends during the annual Mount David Summit in Pettengill Hall. 

“Mount David is not just a harbinger of spring and the nearing conclusion of the winter semester, though it is those things,” �ֲ���ý President Garry W. Jenkins said during the day’s opening remarks. “It’s also a chance for our community to come together to celebrate the academic heart of our mission. And it’s an extraordinary opportunity for �ֲ���ý students to show off their research, their brilliant and insightful analysis, and their dazzling creativity.”

In between attending student-led talks and panels, attendees weaved through rows of posters on display in Pettengill’s Perry Atrium. The room was buzzing with questions, and students were eager to answer, discussing their research methods, their main takeaways, and why they were motivated to pursue their projects.

Most of the student researchers were presenting their senior thesis work, representing the culmination of their �ֲ���ý academic careers. Mount David Summit is a day to celebrate student achievement and the people who supported the students along the way, said Joanne Roberts, vice president for academic affairs and dean of the faculty.

“It takes a village to bring an idea from its first spark through its final expression, and we owe a huge thank you to everyone involved, from our committed faculty, to our stellar academic staff, and our invaluable research librarians,” Roberts said.

Learn more about a few of the 200-plus student projects from across disciplines:

STEM

Biology major Zoe Ash ’26 of New York City presented a poster on bottle-nose dolphins’ social behavior as it corresponds to how often they do or don’t follow boats. She conducted research while studying abroad in Croatia, where a day in the lab looked like spending hours on a boat sailing over the Adriatic Sea, snapping photos of dolphins.

“My favorite discovery from this project was that we see higher social associations in dolphins that follow boats less frequently than we do in dolphins that follow boats more frequently or not at all. … It tells you that discreet communities are forming,” Ash said.

Also presenting a poster was Enathe Muhawenimana ’26 of Rusizi, Rwanda, a double major in biology and French and Francophone studies, whose project investigated why skin infections are often more severe in patients with diabetes. Her research determined that high glucose level in a diabetic patient was correlated with a higher severity of skin infection. She hopes that her work could be used to advance antibiotic or other therapeutic treatment for diabetes patients.

“Learning about this is so rewarding to me, but it can help people out there as well,” Muhawenimana said.

During an afternoon presentation by members of the Harward Center for Community Partnerships’ Community-Engaged Research Fellowship Program, seven students shared their senior thesis projects. Mathematics major Hope Stafford ’26 of Mountain View, Calif., shared her research on flooding patterns in Providence, R.I. Using a community flood-reporting app called MyCoast, Stafford discovered that floods were likely caused not only by rainfall but also by infrastructure varying across the city.

“The reason I was using this [app] is to emphasize community voice,” Stafford said. “We really want to focus on floods that community members are pointing out.”

During that same panel, neuroscience major Ariya Tayal ’26 of Pittsburgh, Penn., shared her research on how women who are experiencing homelessness access reproductive health resources, a project inspired by Tayal’s experience working as an emergency room technician and noticing that many women she had met through volunteering in the Lewiston-Auburn community were coming to the ER to access primary care.

“That’s such a sad thing to see in our healthcare system,” Tayal said. “People should not be finding out if they’re pregnant or not at the ER. That’s not appropriate.” 

For her research, Tayal interviewed 19 local women experiencing homelessness and distributed disposable cameras among them for a research method called photovoice, during which participants document their lived experiences and narratives by taking photographs.

In a panel on STEM research, James Hillers ’26 of De Witt, N.Y., presented his research, entitled “Agent-Based Modeling of Sponge and Algae Endosymbioses.” Looking closely at the relationship between sponge and algae, Hillers used simulations to determine that even though these two symbionts are “comparatively unfit,” they thrive together. 

“I really like making the visualizations,” Hillers said. “Whenever you’re doing computational work, you produce a lot of data, and it’s kind of a pain to do individual visualization. So getting to create robust scripts that can take a ton of data and visualize it into super nice experimental stuff is super fun.”

In the same panel, Gemma DeCarolis ’26 of Santa Monica, Calif., presented research drawn from her summer internship at Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota, Fla. The 2024 hurricane season resulted in significant vegetation loss, and DeCarolis studied the impact on sea turtle nesting.

“I was able to take nesting data, disorientation data, and aerial imagery from Sarasota County GIS,” DeCarolis said. “After I’d done all of this quantification and worked with the data, I did statistical analysis in R, using generalized linear models and beta regressions.” She hopes to continue parts of this research as she moves forward with her studies. 

Social Sciences

Economics major Willa Laski ’26 of Bellevue, Idaho, presented a poster on her senior thesis research investigating the relationship between the reintroduction of the gray wolf to the western U.S. and the livestock ranching industry in that region. Laski’s research found that lethal control of wolf populations did not have a statistically significant effect on livestock depredation — meaning that controlling wolf populations with lethal measures did not meaningfully impact, positively or negatively, livestock populations.

During a panel called “What’s Law Got To Do With It?” three senior politics students shared thesis research that explored the law and legal questions. Their presentations covered centuries of U.S. court precedent and legal writing — from research by Matthew Peeler of New York City exploring intricacies of legal language dating as far back as the 1700s, to research by Sammy Freeman of Dallas exploring how religious exercise arguments from a Jewish standpoint could be used to advocate for abortion access, to a literature review by Reese Hillman of Wayne, Penn., investigating division in the conservative legal movement during President Donald J. Trump’s second term in office.

“My thesis comes out of my desire to make sense of some of Donald Trump’s more puzzling legal actions this year,” Hillman said. 

And as psychology major and community-engaged research fellow Katie Heumann ’26 of Ann Arbor, Mich., shared during the Harward Center’s presentation, civic engagement can begin long before adulthood. Heumann researched how students experience civic engagement in elementary school classrooms in Lewiston through collective participation and norms like classroom jobs, development of individual agency, and socialization.

“A lot of these classrooms really fostered pro- social behaviors,” Heumann said. “These were things like respect and kindness, but more importantly, inclusivity. Being a friend to all, celebrating one another, being inclusive, being friends to boys and girls were some of the key things that students talked about.

Arts and Humanities

Lining the walls of Perry Atrium, on the edge of the bustling crowds at the poster presentation, were more than 50 photos from the Barlow Off-Campus Study Photography exhibition featuring countries like Nepal, Chile, Hungary, France, Japan, China, and the Netherlands. 

Some students, like religious studies major Shay Campolongo ’26 of Midlothian, Va., found ways to incorporate visual art into their thesis projects on other subjects. For her thesis research on how people understand and memorialize the United States’ Japanese-American internment camps during World War II, with particular attention to memorialization of Buddhists in the camps, Campolongo invited �ֲ���ý faculty, staff, and students to two listening sessions prior to Mount David Summit where she presented her research, led discussions, and invited attendees to fold paper cranes. These cranes, made in every color of the rainbow and with intricate patterns, lined her poster during Mount David Summit.

“Japanese-American internment is a piece of history that is often forgotten, but especially the Buddhist lens, and the way that it was not only racially but religiously motivated,” Campolongo said.

Catalina Passino ’26 of Leesburg, Va., a community-engaged research fellow who presented during the Harward Center’s panel, connected her psychology thesis research to visual art, inspired by her experience taking ceramics classes at �ֲ���ý.

“I was just amazed about how clay affected me and the restorative effects that I felt personally,” Passino said. “I thought, ‘Man, we should study this beyond just me.’”

Passino organized an eight-week clay workshop for children in the Lewiston-Auburn immigrant and refugee community and observed how the children experienced mindfulness, resilience, belonging, and emotional regulation throughout the workshop. For their final project, Passino asked the children to create a clay pot that represented each of them, resulting in a collection of unique pieces that Passino displayed in Olin Arts Center. 

Connor Gerraughty ’26 of Hartsdale, N.Y., presented work on synoptic surveillance in The Truman Show, a project which emerged after a patient process of selecting just the right film and finding just the right lens through which to read the film. Though he certainly learned about Foucault and film along the way, his biggest takeaway was about the writing process. “There is no perfect, is what I realized,” Gerraughty said. “It’s basically just improving and improving. You could work on it forever and you could still make it better.” 

In response, his advisor, Professor of Rhetoric, Film, and Screen Studies Stephanie Kelley-Romano said, “I’m so heartened to hear that it wasn’t going to be perfect and you’re okay with that. I love it. My job here is done.”

How can we connect when we find ourselves locked in disagreement? How can we engage in dialogue if we come from different perspectives? These are among the questions that Shankar Vedantam asked when he was the speaker during the second installment of the new program �ֲ���ý Open Network on Dialogue. Vedantam, journalist, author, and host of the Hidden Brain podcast, had visited �ֲ���ý before in 2023 when he was a recipient of a Doctor of Letters honorary degree. 

Facilitated by Charles Nero, Benjamin E. Mays ’20 Distinguished Professor of Rhetoric, Film, and Screen Studies, and Elena Maker Castro, assistant professor of psychology, the conversation built upon Vedantam’s focus on human behavior from a behavioral and psychological perspective. In his podcast and in his talk on April 2 in Olin Arts Center, Vedantam emphasized the ways that our brains work, pointing out that most anger has its basis in fear. 

“It’s a useful thing to keep in mind,” Vedantam said, “because I think so often when we have conflict, it’s very easy to see ourselves in a position of vulnerability. And it’s very difficult for us to acknowledge that our opponents might be coming at a discussion from a place of fear, from a place of vulnerability.”

Vedantam moved beyond understanding and framing toward action, when Nero asked him for strategies to call upon in difficult conversations across differences.  

“One technique that is useful is to start with saying, ‘This is actually what I’m afraid of,’” Vedantam said. “And you will find that if you actually are able to articulate what it is that you’re afraid of, the thing that you are worried about is something that the other person can relate to.”

According to Vedantam, we communicate across differences constantly, and often manage it well. But when it comes to issues that we deem controversial, we have set up the wrong model. Most of us learn debate in high school, where the goal is to win — even if your assigned perspective doesn’t align with your values. 

“There’s a difference between debate and dialogue,” Vedantam said. 

This idea is at the very heart of �ֲ���ý Open Network on Dialogue (BOND). Leana Amaez, vice president for equity and inclusion, described BOND as “a two-part program that promotes dialogue across differences, creating opportunities for meaningful discussions outside of the classroom, where students, staff, and faculty can discuss relevant, timely topics while building empathy, challenging assumptions, and deepening our understanding of one another.” 

Following the discussion in Olin Arts Center, which included robust Q&A (where every question was posed by a �ֲ���ý student), guests were invited to come together in Commons for a dinner and dialogue facilitated by Nate Menifield, equity and inclusion program manager. 

A group composed of students, staff, faculty, and community members gathered to talk more about the ideas that Vedantam had stirred as he spoke about understanding “the complexity of how our minds work and the errors and the filters that are embedded inside our heads” as we strive toward dialogue. Menifield began by outlining the structure for the evening’s small group discussions, taking place at each table. Leading the groups through three brief rounds of discussion, Menifield framed the approach for each round from a new angle. Participants were encouraged to “take space and make space,” with attention to the engagement of everyone at the table. This awareness shifted some tendencies in how we interact and aimed to invite more voices into the conversation.

Kika Stump, assistant director of Institutional Research, Analysis & Planning, attended the talk and the dinner, drawn by “concepts of dialogue and community” at the heart of the BOND programming. At her table, Stump talked with three students, two community members and three other staff members, following Menifield’s guidance. 

“As someone who often speaks and feels obligated to keep dialogue ‘going,’ it was welcome to have a practice that encouraged more voices to be heard and put time limits on my own,” Stump said. 

One idea that came up at the dialogue following Vedantam’s talk was the tension between the optimism that dialogue can bring us together and a distrust in our potential to connect in such divided times. Consensus was not necessarily the goal of the BOND session; instead Menifield led the group to focus on empathizing with and deeply listening to other perspectives.

Colleges can play a critical role in connecting across differences, and programs like BOND offer a research-driven approach to a facilitated dialogue with the goal of expanding understanding. 

“One of the great values of college is that you’re coming into contact with people who are different from you and you’re forming bonds with them,” Vedantam said. “And hopefully some of those bonds will persist as you go through your life, and you might become a Republican, they might become a Democrat, but down the road you’re remembering back to the time that you are freshman year roommates and you ask yourself, ‘Can that bond hold you together when you have these things pulling you apart?’” 

Yun Garrison, assistant professor of psychology, was honored on March 8 with the Lee Young Leadership Award from the YWCA of Central Maine. The award, given for excellence in professional, community, civic, or artistic leadership, was awarded to Garrison in recognition for her community-engaged work, including the Ka Bogso initiative and her community art installation,

Ka Bogso, which Garrison co-leads with Fowsia Musse, executive director of Maine Community Integration, uses storytelling and visual arts toward healing from traumatic events that impact refugee women. The resulting work was shown on campus at Olin Arts Center in 2024 and in Lewiston at Munka Studio.

The Lewiston is Our Hope project is a community art installation involving 400 small wood circles on which community members created art that represents hope — individual and communal. Participants ranged from age 2 to 92.

Garrison, who joined �ֲ���ý in 2020, was granted tenure this year, and received the Award for Outstanding Community Project from the Harward Center for Community Partnerships in 2025. Garrison’s work in and out of the classroom centers on psychological well-being and vocational outcomes among people of color and immigrant and refugee communities. 

Garrison and Musse continue to team up for public speaking engagements, including on March 26 at the Great Falls Forum at the Lewiston Public Library. Their presentation was titled “Be Healed (Ka Bogso): Posttraumatic Healing and Growth for Somali Refugee Women.” 

Nine members of the faculty have received promotions, including seven tenure awards, effective Feb. 6. The promotions were recommended by the Faculty Personnel Committee and approved by the �ֲ���ý College Board of Trustees. 

Brett A. Huggett, who joined �ֲ���ý in 2014, has been promoted to professor of biology. Huggett, in addition to teaching courses on dendrology — or tree science — also serves the faculty liaison for women’s cross country and is the chair of the department. Huggett is often found taking his students out of the classroom in order to understand what can be learned about responses among tree species to long-term or seasonal stress factors. 

Huggett initially set out to be a jazz guitarist, earning a B.A. from Temple University in music. But when he hiked the Appalachian Trail after college graduation, he emerged with new ideas about his career. A circuitous route brought him to �ֲ���ý. After working as a teacher and naturalist for the Massachusetts Audubon Society; a ranger and land manager for the town of Lincoln, Mass.; and a curatorial and lab assistant at the Harvard University Herbaria, Huggett eventually earned a master’s degree in forest biology from the University of Vermont, and a doctorate in organismic and evolutionary biology from Harvard.

Jakub Kazecki, who joined the �ֲ���ý faculty in 2012, has been promoted to professor of German. Kazecki teaches a range of courses from introductory language courses to seminars like “Weimar and Berlin: German Culture in European Context.” In his recent First-Year Seminar, “Humor and Laughter in Literature and Visual Media,” Kazecki led students to consider the uses of humor not only in texts, but also in relationships. 

His foundational research focuses on World War I military literature and the intersection of humor with serious literary genres. This work is found in his monograph Laughter in the Trenches: Humour and Front Experience in German First World War Narratives (2012). His upcoming monograph, Framing Neighbors: Poland in German Cinema after 1989, analyzes the depictions of Poland in German film, documenting the evolution from colonially-coded spaces to sites of creative hybridity. Kazecki is currently the chair of the Department of German and Russian Studies

Yunkyoung L. Garrison, who joined �ֲ���ý in 2020, was granted tenure and promoted to associate professor of psychology. Garrison’s work in and out of the classroom centers on psychological well-being and vocational outcomes among people of color and immigrant and refugee communities. Garrison is a licensed psychologist, providing clinical services in the community.

In addition to her work directly linked to psychology, Garrison has worked with , a Somali woman-led organization serving Somali girls, women, and families, and other refugees in Lewiston. Along with �ֲ���ý students, Garrison and Somali community leader Fowsia Musse have created written and visual artworks, weaving in fabrics that symbolize resilience across generations and continents. This project, “Ka Bogso,” received the Award for Outstanding Community Project from the Harward Center in 2025. A scholar-activist, Garrison wants her research to be a “catalyst for individual and societal change.”

Lisa R. Gilson joined the �ֲ���ý faculty in 2020 and was tenured and promoted to associate professor of politics. Gilson teaches courses on social movements, Black political thought, literature and politics, and democratic theory. Her work focuses on political reaction that rejects institutional paths toward change, from abolitionist movements to contemporary far-right groups.

A political theorist, she is working on a book about the relationship between such social movements and social critics, including artists and writers, and the idea that the various political actors involved in a movement “are each doing particular kinds of things. Each has strengths that are particular to what kind of organizing they’re doing and what kind of protest they are doing.” Gilson has been published in the American Political Science Review, Political Research Quarterly, American Political Thought, and Perspectives on Politics. She received her Ph.D. in political science from Yale University, and prior to her arrival at �ֲ���ý, was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard. 

Seulgie Claire Lim, who specializes in comparative politics and international relations, was granted tenure and promoted to associate professor of politics. Her research focuses on gender equality; women’s political movement and participation in West Africa, specifically in Senegal; and African feminism and the interactions between politics and Islam. Lim grew up in Mauritania in West Africa, where her family moved from South Korea.

Lim received her Ph.D. in political science from Boston University with a certificate in African studies in May 2020 and began working at �ֲ���ý that fall. She has been the representative of the Emerging Scholars Network for the since 2024. Lim’s courses include “Politics of Sub-Saharan Africa” and “Gender, Power, and Politics.” 

Zhenzhen Lu, scholar of Chinese literature and culture, was tenured and promoted to associate professor of Chinese. Lu’s work focuses on the practices of reading, writing, publishing, and performance in the 16th to 19th centuries. Her book, (Brill, 2025), examines a diverse body of local writings in the manuscripts of village scholars from Shandong in northern China. 

Before coming to �ֲ���ý, Lu was a researcher at the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures at the University of Hamburg in Germany, a visiting scholar at New York University, and a lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania, where she received her Ph.D. At �ֲ���ý, Lu teaches a wide range of courses in Chinese language, literature, and culture.

Sarah B. Lynch, who teaches courses in classical and medieval studies and history, was tenured and promoted to associate professor. Lynch’s work focuses on the social and cultural history of the Middle Ages, particularly through the lens of medieval education, tracing the lived experiences of teachers and pupils and the impact of education on society. Lynch has published two books on this research, Elementary and Grammar Education in Late Medieval France: Lyon, 1285–1530 (Amsterdam University Press, 2017) and Medieval Pedagogical Writings: An Epitome (Kismet Press, 2018).

Currently, Lynch is researching how seasonal festivals and rituals helped create, maintain, and remake communities in western Europe between the 12th and 15th centuries. Lynch joined �ֲ���ý in 2022 and teaches introductory classes on the Middle Ages, as well as classes on medieval education, magic and the supernatural in the Middle Ages, and the medieval year. 

Courtney P. Smith, who joined the faculty at �ֲ���ý in 2024, was granted tenure as an associate professor. Smith is a lighting and production manager and digital media designer, whose work spans many genres and media including live theater, dance, television, film, and events. Smith’s designs have received several awards from the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival. Additionally, his work received a “Distinguished Achievement Award in Design” from the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. Smith’s work has been seen in theaters from coast to coast and internationally, and some of his notable projects include work for Victoria’s Secret, Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week, and window display design and fabrication for Saks Fifth Avenue.

Smith brought this experience to �ֲ���ý last fall when his course, “Introduction to Digital Media,” cross-listed between theater and digital and computational studies, created a digital portrait of Lisbon Street dating back to the days of electric trolley cars. Fifteen students looked at the street’s rich history, diving deep into archival material at the Edmund S. Muskie Archives and the Androscoggin Historical Society. Smith was also essential in the Fall 2025 production of Metamorphoses, which was a technical feat involving filling a pool in Schaeffer Theatre. Smith is a member of the United States Institute for Theatre Technology and has an MFA in design and technology from the University of Idaho.

Mark L. Tizzoni has been awarded tenure and promotion to associate professor of classical and medieval studies and history. Tizzoni earned an M.A. and a Ph.D. in medieval studies at the University of Leeds, specializing in late antique and medieval studies. Tizzoni’s teaching focuses on the history of a broader, more globally-defined Middle Ages that centers Africa in wider Mediterranean and Afro-Eurasian worlds. His course offerings consider the Mediterranean world broadly, but give particular attention to the Maghreb, the Horn of Africa, West Africa, and the Iberian peninsula.

Tizzoni’s research focuses on the transformation of the Roman world in the fifth through seventh centuries C.E. He is particularly interested in questions of identity, social cohesion, and how cultural production can be used to help understand and navigate times of drastic social change (such as those witnessed in the aftermath of the Roman Empire in North Africa). As an interdisciplinary cultural historian, Tizzoni employs late antique Latin poetry to engage with these questions, focusing on the collections that have survived from sixth-century North Africa and seventh-century Iberia. He is currently writing an open-access book with Kısmet Press entitled The Maghreb in Late Antiquity.

Before coming to �ֲ���ý in 2020, he taught pre-modern African, Iberian, and United States history at Angelo State University in San Angelo, Texas, and worked as a professional horticulturalist in Northeastern Pennsylvania.

Hadley Blodgett ’26 of Buckfield, Maine, spends a lot of time thinking about just that — time.

In a laboratory in Carnegie Science Hall, as she conducts research for her senior thesis, Blodgett gazes over 7,000 years of history condensed into a sediment core extracted from a lake in northern Greenland. As a double major in earth and climate sciences and music, with a minor in religious studies, Blodgett enjoys reflecting on the way that time has constructed and altered her fields of study. Sometimes, when the immensity of the sediment sample’s past hits her, she thinks, “How am I holding this?”

“To think about the scale of what’s in front of me is just kind of crazy,” Blodgett says.

How exactly did sediment buried deep beneath Arctic waters find its way to the surface, then to �ֲ���ý? The story crosses oceans and icebergs, tundras and deserts, but connects to �ֲ���ý through Blodgett’s thesis advisor, Associate Professor of Earth and Climate Sciences Nick Balascio.

As a paleoclimatologist, Balascio studies how Earth’s climate system has changed across millennia, primarily through analyzing lake sediment cores, which are layers of mud, dirt, and organic material extracted from the bottom of lakes in long tubes.

“Those lakes are natural history books that record what’s going on around the watershed of the lake as well as within the lake itself,” Balascio says. 

In 2022, Balascio helped launch the Wandel Dal Project, a multi-national scientific effort investigating climate conditions of ancient Greenland, with support from a National Science Foundation grant. The project is studying Wandel Dal — a remote, uninhabited arctic desert valley less than 500 miles from the North Pole in Greenland’s Peary Land. Beneath its icy facade, Peary Land is a wealth of Greenlandic history, the one-time home of the island’s first people who crossed into the region from northern Canada. 

Over the past 4,500 years, Peary Land was inhabited and then abandoned by three different groups of indigenous people. The Wandel Dal scientists hypothesize that migration in and out of the region corresponded with climate fluctuations — people occupied the area in warmer climate periods, then left when the climate began to cool again and the area became more difficult to live in because of dwindling natural resources. 

“These are people with stone tool technology living in a pretty harsh and foreboding environment,” Balascio says.

By understanding Peary Land’s past climate contexts, scientists will gain a better overall understanding of how changing climate conditions affect the Arctic, which is already warming about four times faster than average global warming rates under anthropogenic, or human-caused, climate change.

“There is very little coverage of this high Arctic region in terms of what we know about the past climate history,” Balascio says. “It’s right at the margins of the Greenland ice sheet, so understanding the sensitivity to climate change is really important.” 

In the summer of 2024, Balascio and colleagues traveled to Peary Land to collect lake sediment cores. They flew to Svalbard, Norway, then chartered a plane to eastern Greenland, flew in a prop plane to Wandel Dal, and finally rode in a helicopter to their research site, where stone tools and tent sites made by ancient humans still littered the barren landscape.

“Working in these extremely remote and remarkable landscapes is inspiring as an earth scientist, to see the natural beauty that the earth has,” Balascio says.

It was the end of July, the beginning of the brief and only time of year when Wandel Dal’s lakes are not frozen, a necessity for obtaining lake sediment cores. Balascio and colleagues set up coring platforms on inflatable rafts and guided large, heavy tubes called corers overboard into the 200-foot-deep lakes to collect six-meter long sediment samples.

The sediment cores, several of which are now stored in �ֲ���ý’ core storage facility in Carnegie’s basement, have been a fantastic resource for students, Balascio says. In addition to Blodgett, Fletcher Libre ’26 of Alta, Utah, and Zach Van Dusen ’25 also used the cores for their senior theses in earth and climate sciences. The samples “are very precious,” Balascio says. “I feel fortunate that we have those here at �ֲ���ý and that �ֲ���ý students can literally put their hands on these really remarkable records and learn about an environment that they might never travel to but can experience in some way.” 

While Blodgett hasn’t been to the Wandel Dal region, she did have the opportunity to visit Greenland during a trip with Balascio to Nuuk, Greenland’s capital, for Greenland Science Week in November 2025. The trip was funded by Balascio’s NSF grant, which includes funds for supporting student research and mentorship. Blodgett was so excited by the opportunity that she hardly allowed herself to believe it was real until she was on the way to Greenland. 

“This is just too cool to happen,” Blodgett thought to herself. “And then, I was on a plane.”

Presenting her thesis research during the conference and at a community outreach event, Blodgett contributed new scientific discoveries that could have implications far beyond her own project. 

When she began her thesis research on the sediment cores in the summer of 2025, Blodgett was surprised by how clearly she could tell time from changes in the sample’s composition. The sediment follows a fairly consistent pattern — denser sediment for what were likely warmer climate periods, less dense sediment for cooler periods — until the top four centimeters.

Blodgett initially thought she was doing something wrong when she began analyzing that top section and had trouble pulling out a “plug,” a sample of sediment removed for detailed analysis. She took a closer look and observed thick, laminated layers of sediment building up the top and newest portion, strikingly different from the millimeter-sized, less dense layers of sediment that comprised the rest of the sample.

“Something in the climate is causing the environment to react in such a way that it makes this sediment deposit in a different way than it has for the entire rest of the record,” Blodgett says. 

She’s hypothesizing that this top portion of the sample is reflecting changes caused by anthropogenic climate change.

“I don’t know why [sediment cores] fascinate me, but I just really enjoy working with them,” Blodgett says. “Before I started all this, I had no clue what they were. I’m always open to doing new things.”

Trying new things has defined Blodgett’s �ֲ���ý career. She arrived on campus planning to major in history but pivoted to earth and climate sciences after taking the Short Term course “Soil Geography of New England” and realizing how much she enjoyed working with soil — and the way that this work allowed her to discover more about the Maine land she grew up exploring.

“I definitely have an appreciation for just how important [the land] can be culturally and the need to treat it with respect,” Blodgett says. 

This idea of respect for the land and awareness of its value to its inhabitants, past and present, is a central tenet of the Wandel Dal Project. As a cradle of the country’s civilization, Peary Land is of great cultural significance to the Greenlandic people. The Wandel Dal scientists are supporting a Greenland National Museum initiative to rename the region — currently named for American explorer Robert Peary — to “Inutoqqat Nunaat,” meaning “land of the ancient people” in Greenlandic. A team of archaeologists are also a part of the Wandel Dal Project and investigating the human history of northern Greenland. 

When he began his career as a paleoclimatologist, Balascio wasn’t particularly focused on the human aspect of the landscapes he was studying. But, over time, as he began collaborating with archaeologists to study Viking settlements in Norway or the Rapa Nui people of Easter Island, where human impact on the land is undeniable, Balascio became more and more interested in understanding how human history is interlaced with climate history. Working with the archaeologists in Wandel Dal in particular “became a very enriching experience and gave me a new perspective on this field of study that I had been working on previously for a decade,” Balascio says.

During Greenland Science Week, while chatting with scientists and archaeologists, and showing eager kids artifacts from Wandel Dal, Blodgett, too, was reminded of the key role that people and culture play in her field.

“You get so disconnected from the ‘people part’ sometimes in climate science, even though people are such an important part of it,” Blodgett says.

The trip to Nuuk was also an opportunity for Blodgett to field advice from scientists about graduate school and research as she prepares for life after �ֲ���ý. Balascio has been an attentive mentor in that sense as well, Blodgett says. While guiding her through her thesis research, he’s helped her explore opportunities at �ֲ���ý and beyond. 

“No matter where I end up after May,” Blodgett says, “I know for certain that the trajectory of my career has been changed because of the guidance shown to me by Professor Balascio and so many essential people in the �ֲ���ý community.”

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Award Numbers 2524995 to �ֲ���ý College and 2126047 to College of William & Mary. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

Charles A. Dana Professor Emeritus of Theater Martin E. Andrucki, a beloved and brilliant teacher and scholar who secured a seat at the liberal arts table for �ֲ���ý theater, died Feb. 8, 2026, at age 80. A faculty member for 47 years, Andrucki was among the longest-serving �ֲ���ý professors in the college’s history.

Raised in the Bronx, N.Y., Andrucki earned a bachelor’s degree in English, magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, from Columbia University and a doctoral degree in English from Harvard University. 

Andrucki’s arrival at �ֲ���ý for the 1974–75 academic year coincided with theater becoming a major for the first time. Yet the department, which at the time housed both theater and rhetoric, was at a low point due to retirements and departures. “It was on the verge of expiring,” recalled Andrucki in 2021. Some at the college were openly questioning the legitimacy of theater as a liberal arts discipline. 

As with other young professors who joined �ֲ���ý in the 1970s and 1980s and helped to build academic programs, Andrucki arrived brimming with gusto; an early student described him as bringing “a fierce intellect and a wise-ass New York City sense of humor” to �ֲ���ý.

The task before him 50 years ago, Andrucki recalled, was to “create a curriculum that emphasized literature and theory and producing serious drama on our stages. We wanted our majors to be broadly educated in theater and drama and to see theater as one of the liberal arts.”

During retirement events in 2021, proof of his success resounded in the words of theater alumni. Theater at �ֲ���ý “equipped me with hands-on experiences I apply nearly every day in life,” recalled Bobbi Bell Birkemeier ’78. “Time management and making deadlines, thinking quickly on one’s feet, improvisation, how to take criticism and direction in a positive fashion, how to direct and delegate, and how to ‘play nicely with others’ in working collaboratively.”

And from his first days on campus, his students felt Andrucki’s intellect and generosity, his lofty standards coupled with a belief in their potential for success. “Marty was completely invested in our work in the classroom and onstage,” Sarah Pearson ’75 said in 2021. “Marty made me believe that anything was possible, and his confidence in me — in all of us — was invaluable and gave me the boost I needed to face the next stage of life.”

“He always seemed to focus on the big picture, the big idea, if you will. Plot. Character. Thought. Diction. Music and spectacle,” said James Lapan ’86. For Amanda San Roman ’17, Andrucki was a “steady and grounding force in my �ֲ���ý experience. His subtle humor, wealth of intelligence, and supportive nature never went unnoticed by anyone he interacted with.”

Andrucki rose swiftly through the academic ranks. In 1975, he was promoted to assistant professor and that year began his decades-long service as department chair. He earned tenure in 1983, was promoted to full professor in 1990, and in 2001 was appointed to a Dana Professorship, one of the most prestigious faculty honors at �ֲ���ý.

Though �ֲ���ý theater was ripe for renewal in the mid-1970s, Andrucki was building on a firm foundation. Two years before his arrival, �ֲ���ý had named its theater on College Street in honor of Lavinia Miriam Schaeffer, who retired in 1972 after leading the �ֲ���ý theater program since 1938.

As Andrucki noted in 2021, Schaeffer was a champion of the Little Theater Movement that emerged in the early 1900s in the U.S., which emphasized authenticity over grandiosity, “aiming to produce challenging drama in an intimate atmosphere,” he said. The vibe always resonated with Andrucki. “Let’s remember Lavinia and those values as we move ahead,” he said in 2021.

At �ֲ���ý, he taught courses on theater history, dramatic literature, directing, and playwriting. He directed more than 50 theatrical productions at �ֲ���ý, in the U.S., and abroad. His directing ranged widely: classical and Shakespearean works such as Antigone, Hamlet, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream; European modern and political theater including Three Sisters, Endgame, and The Caucasian Chalk Circle; American and contemporary plays such as Bus Stop, The Skin of Our Teeth, Eurydice, and Love/Sick; as well as original and experimental projects including his own Marie and the Nutcracker and the radio-play production Radio Waves. 

His can-do spirit inspired his students. In 1981, he scoured local junkyards to find the right prop for a production of Sam Shepard’s The Unseen Hand: a busted-up 1957 Ford sedan, hauled straight into the Schaeffer Theatre carpentry shop, where Andrucki chose to stage the avant-garde play.

Every other Short Term from 1999 to 2019, Andrucki and Kati Vecsey, senior lecturer in theater, led students to Budapest and Prague for the course “Central European Theater and Film,” the college’s longest-running off-campus Short Term program. “And yes, Marty learned to speak and read Hungarian,” said Vecsey, a Hungarian herself, noting the difficulty that English speakers have with the language.

“Marty and I watched many great, and many boring, theater productions together over the years,” Vecsey said. “When we would go to the theater, Marty always made sure to get an aisle seat, to make sure he had a quick way to escape if the show was unbearable.”

Learning Hungarian was just another example of Andrucki’s smarts, streetwise and otherwise. “There was this mysterious skill that fired his intellectual life,” Vecsey said, “a capacity to explore new territories without forgetting the old ones.” Andrucki brought “profound knowledge, wisdom, and humor into every room [he] entered, both as a director and as a professor,” said Maddy Shmalo ’19.

While he could be the smartest person in the room, Andrucki was often the most welcoming. “He seemed an untouchable mad genius to me at times, but at the same time a friend to sit and shoot the breeze with,” Chuck Richardson ’86 said during the 2021 retirement celebration.

A course with Andrucki, recalled writer Elizabeth Strout ’77 during a 2019 visit to campus, was not only one of her favorites, but also influenced her writing as a Pulitzer Prize-winning author of fiction. In the course, Andrucki guided his students through plays by classic American playwrights like Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams. “He loved those people so much that I loved them,” Strout said. 

From reading the plays, Strout learned a valuable lesson about writing authentic dialogue. 

“When you write dialogue in a story or a novel, there has to be a translation between what people are actually saying to the page. You can’t write what people are actually saying, because it’s too boring. You’ve got to translate it to the page in a way that sounds authentic.”

In 1979, Andrucki was named a Mellon Fellow to conduct research into the teaching of theater. In 1987 he joined a directors’ forum at Columbia University, doing advanced studies with Liviu Ciulei, Lee Breuer, Adrian Hall, and others. He was a professor of English at the Harvard Summer School from 1993 to 1996. In 2002, he earned a Fulbright Scholar award for research in Hungary.

He wrote four plays, including Manny’s War. Staged at �ֲ���ý in 2000 in collaboration with The Public Theatre of Lewiston, the play helped a local man, Murray Schwartz, reconcile his feelings of failure as a World War II soldier.

Schwartz, like Andrucki, was a New Yorker transplanted to Maine. He had headed to war with pride as an avenging Jew, and earned a Combat Infantry Badge, a Bronze Star, and three Purple Hearts, but then felt shame when, as a prisoner of war captured during the Battle of the Bulge, he resorted to stealing a fellow prisoner’s bread. “The play caught the inner struggle,” Schwartz said. “Not the generals’ strategies, but the betrayal of the will.” 

As Andrucki wrote in �ֲ���ý Magazine, the play’s opening night at Schaeffer Theatre saw Murray Schwartz “watching his wartime pain, psychological and physical, played out on stage. He was surrounded by family and friends, �ֲ���ý people and Lewiston–Auburn citizens, a full house serving witness to a fellow American’s story.” The play was nominated for the New Play Award of the American Theatre Critics Association. 

Andrucki was a prolific writer. He wrote a series of 15 critical essays published by the Portland Stage Company on topics ranging from love and lying in Sam Shepard’s Fool for Love to the handicap of virtue in Ted Tally’s Terra Nova. Among his hundreds of essays were 108 audience guides as a humanities scholar and dramaturge for two of Maine’s professional theaters, Portland Stage Company and The Public Theatre.

His writing appeared in Modern Philology, Theatre Journal, Text and Performance Quarterly, and The Columbia Encyclopedia of Modern Drama. In the early 1990s, he was host and writer of Wide Angle, a weekly television show on Maine Public focused on Maine filmmakers. 

Not all his writing was theater-focused. In January 1981, he wrote a nostalgic essay recalling his childhood in the Bronx, and the memories of heating a home with coal, a fuel that made a resurgence during that historically cold winter. “It’s the childhood I really had,” he wrote. “For me, the rattling chute and dusty bin, the gritty ashcans and the pungent smell, are all redolent of New York in the last days of its unruffled pre-eminence, when televisions had round screens and no one had heard of the Sun Belt.” 

Heating with coal in his Maine home created a connection with his son, Max, then 3 years old, the young boy being dazzled by the heat that poured forth from a pile of black rocks, “a moment of connection between my childhood and his, a New York memory for my son from Maine.”

When he retired in 2021, Andrucki had served �ֲ���ý for 47 years, a tenure matched only by the late Karl Woodcock, professor of physics. To honor his career, the college’s black box theater was then named the Martin Andrucki Black Box Theater. 

Andrucki treated theater, and his teaching of theater, as both an intellectual discipline and a lived experience. “I teach because I like working in a profession and at a place where intellectual and aesthetic values prevail, where telling the truth, as one understands it, is the objective,” he said, during a retirement event. Drawing on the thinking of the late Princeton scholar and poet Michael Goldman, he went on to explain theater’s power to deliver “total education.”

For students, that meant discovering their “entire being rather than the intellect alone.” Theater, Andrucki said, “engages the whole self,” whether as actor, director, designer, or playwright, in the deepest sense of education: the Latin educare, to lead forth, to draw out what is already present and waiting to be revealed. “Which is what college is supposed to be all about.”

�ֲ���ý has welcomed a large group of new faculty this year. Seventeen tenured or tenure-track professors joined the college during the 2025-2026 academic year. �ֲ���ý News has been introducing them in groups over this semester. This fifth and final installment introduces you to the last of our new faculty hires at �ֲ���ý this year. 

Wesley Gillis, assistant professor of physics

Focus of teaching and scholarship:

Collaboration is at the heart of both my teaching and my scholarship. In the classroom, I am focused on implementing team-based learning across the physics curriculum. This approach helps students build effective team dynamics, develop collaborative problem-solving skills, and engage deeply with complex, real-world problems through shared inquiry and discussion.

My research similarly centers on collaborative engagement within a large, international scientific community. As a member of the nEXO collaboration — comprising approximately 200 scientists worldwide — I contribute to the research and development of a next-generation, underground experiment designed to investigate the fundamental nature of the neutrino. Specifically, my lab studies the detection mechanisms, hardware design, and data analysis of vacuum ultraviolet light in liquid xenon. Together, our work aims to answer one of physics’ most profound questions: Is the neutrino its own antiparticle?

What is most exciting in your first year at �ֲ���ý? 

I was excited to play Dvorak’s 9th symphony, the New World Symphony, with the �ֲ���ý College Orchestra in November.

What is your favorite part of teaching?

When a class full of teams has been given a challenging problem, the volume ramps from a dull rumble to a clamorous cacophony of engagement. This is when I know good learning is happening.

Eugene Choo, professor of economics

Focus of teaching and scholarship:

I specialize in empirical industrial organization and econometrics, with a research focus on marriage matching and the economics of household formation. My work combines structural modeling and econometric identification to study matching markets. Before joining �ֲ���ý College, I taught econometrics, industrial organization, mathematical economics, and intermediate microeconomics. 

What is most exciting in your first year at �ֲ���ý? 

I am excited about joining the vibrant liberal arts community and engaging with �ֲ���ý students. I am also looking forward to exploring the beautiful state of Maine.

What is your favorite part of teaching?

My favorite part of teaching is watching students discover economics and how it is used to look at everyday life.

Charlotte Connop, assistant professor of earth and climate sciences

Focus of teaching and scholarship:

I’m a metamorphic petrologist and geochronologist. These are fancy words to say that I date the formation of (usually pretty old) metamorphic rocks and try to figure out how these rocks formed. These rocks can help us figure out the driving mechanisms behind processes that happen deep within the Earth that we are unable to directly observe. I’m especially interested in investigating processes that lead to the movement of elements within the Earth, including things like partial melting — where temperatures increase enough to melt rock, with the molten rock able to migrate through the Earth, leading to the transportation of material to a new location.

My teaching focuses reflect these research interests — in my classes, students learn about the rocks that make up our planet and the land we live on, and the different processes that formed and modified these rocks over time. Students learn how elements join together on the atomic scale to make minerals and how those minerals are combined in different proportions to produce different rocks. We focus on connecting these different rocks to tectonic environments to disentangle Earth processes that we are unable to observe ourselves. 

What is most exciting in your first year at �ֲ���ý? 

I’m most excited about getting to know everyone in the �ֲ���ý community! Whether it’s students in class, swinging by office hours or completing a senior thesis with me, or seeing my fellow faculty and staff around campus or in the Den grabbing lunch, everyone has been so welcoming so far. I’m looking forward to getting to know everyone more and becoming part of the �ֲ���ý community.

What is your favorite part of teaching?

My favorite part of teaching is watching students pull together information from across the semester (and across their courses) to grapple with complex scientific questions. We think about a lot of different time and length scales in earth and climate sciences and to have students be able to think from the nano scale to the macro scale and beyond requires integrating a lot of different concepts, which can be hard to grapple with at times, but so rewarding when put together correctly.