础产产辞迟迟鈥檚 series of still-lifes of vases of dried sunflowers evolved last semester from the sketches of the flowers she completed every day for a month. Over time she introduced new variables to the subject 鈥� different vases, tables, backgrounds, and lighting. “With every painting I finished, I was able to see elements I could not see before,” Abbott says.

As she experimented with the elements of her paintings through the academic year, the resulting changes 鈥渙ffer a unique visual representation of my struggle and progress over time.鈥� And, Abbott notes, she found herself 鈥渕oving towards abstraction organically, without consciously deciding to.鈥�

叠补测别谤鈥檚 paintings are physically large to emphasize the confidence, strength, and pain that many women carry with them. Inspired by the energetic physicality of art by Oskar Kokoschka, Ernst Kirchner, and Egon Schiele, Bayer makes work that asks to be connected with and questioned at an intense emotional level.

鈥淲omen’s bodies and minds are often separated by politicians, the media, and businesses,鈥� Bayer says. 鈥淭he body is seen as a marketable and malleable object, and the mind, emotion, and humanity are discarded. By creating disjointed panels where the body and the head are not united, I hope to create an obvious tension that speaks to some of that.鈥�

Dole wanted to make photographs of people and followed that interest to documentary photography and the work of artists like Dorothea Lange and Ansel Adams. After a few months of photographing diverse people in different Lewiston neighborhoods, Dole realized she needed to focus her approach. Inspired by an image she made of a Somali shopkeeper, she decided to concentrate on the shops on Lisbon Street and their owners.

“Although I heard many interesting stories throughout this process, I decided that I would like my photographs to stand by themselves rather than be accompanied by text,” Dole says. “I hope that my images can tell a story on their own.”

Garone has always gravitated to drawing, finding that the act of drawing “allows me to clear my mind and take some time for myself.” His preferred medium is charcoal, in part because it’s versatile and easy to revise 鈥� while allowing viewers access to the history of his revisions, in the form of previous marks that couldn’t be completely erased.

Garone maintains a looseness in his work that, he says, “reminds me to never take myself too seriously….I am not afraid to be critical about the work that I am doing.” Drawing 鈥渞equires a lot of prior thinking, analysis, and a willingness to start over,” he says, “and by leaving evidence of my process it allows the viewers to see my struggle…making art.鈥�

Hall shoots with an analog camera using black-and-white film. He says, “I want to return to photography鈥檚 roots, showing it as a physical process, something more than just a simple image.” His subject is utility cables, the telephone, television, and electrical wiring that’s ubiquitous in the streetscape.

Hall looks for “beauty and different forms in something that has become mundane in today鈥檚 world. There is something special about the graphic qualities of these tangled and sporadic wires.” While he conceives of his images as abstractions, Hall composes for the full frame and doesn’t apply any digital manipulation to his images. 鈥淚 want to be intentional with each photograph I take and each print I make,” he says.

Hedlund made graphic-novel panels that both evoke and reconcile the deterioration and cultural vibrancy that defined New York City in the 1970s. Her protagonist is a stranger whose reactions to New York swing between extremes of infatuation and disgust. The graphic-novel medium, she believes, provides “an ideal marriage between visual and written communication,” Hedlund says. “I wanted to experiment with a medium that emphasized expression, body language, and backgrounds as integral to storytelling.鈥�

She adds, “Working in stages of rough sketch to detailed sketch and then to inked page afforded me a sense of freedom to experiment and let the process of making marks inform the product.”

Herrera “came to art from a potter鈥檚 background: plates, cups, teapots, vases, and pitchers,” he says. In 2015, feeling constrained by the expressive conventions of functional pottery, he turned to making sculpture, adopting a minimalist approach.

More recently, he says, sculpture “has taught me that we understand the world through our bodies and as a result we usually bring bodily references to art. Making pieces that are “silent, sensual, active, united, and monumental,” Herrera embraces contradictions within the work. 鈥淪ome of my pieces evoke stillness, while others evoke action, some share both qualities,鈥� he says. 鈥淪ome pieces are rough, while others appear to have a skin stretched over them. But they all are part of the same body of work.鈥�

惭辞濒濒别谤鈥檚 frustration with the representational nature of photography inspired his thesis project. “Unlike in painting where you can construct non-referentially,” he says, “photography is limited to repurposing that which is already present in the world.鈥�

Moller experimented with different approaches to making abstract photography until he recalled that 鈥渁t its very essence, a photograph is simply a record of light鈥�; unlike painting, where trying to represent light is a primary challenge, photography 鈥渆nables the direct rendering of light.鈥� Using a single source of light and various types of glass in stacked sequences, Moller created abstract compositions that he photographed.

Neufeld’s film photography turns away from today’s 鈥渆nhanced, airbrushed, and heavily edited images鈥� to emulate the “natural analog images of the past,鈥� he says. 鈥淧hotos without heavy manipulation are powerful because they are authentic and pure.鈥� At the same time, though, Neufeld’s work “focuses on altering perception and creating the illusion of depth in a two-dimensional medium through the use of reflections.”

He adds, “I am inspired by Lee Friedlander. His images are full of information and demand the full attention of the viewer in order to understand what is going on in the photograph….Friedlander has shown me how an image can make people stop what they are doing and think.”

Oates says that color “is the driving factor in my current work. The complex relationships between different colors, shapes, and surfaces truly engage me.” She incorporates multiple canvases into a single piece and works quickly, applying large streaks of bright color with a palette knife. She typically works directly, reacting to the marks that she makes on the canvas, and often reworks her pieces intensively.

鈥淚 leave the work rough, exposed, and sometimes warped,鈥� says Oates, who claims artists Gerhard Richter and especially Clyfford Still as inspirations. 鈥淏ut that is me inviting the viewer to see the physical work and, I hope, to experience some of the emotion I put into the paintings.鈥�

Peoples makes functional porcelain whose colors, he explains, “are either pale and subtle or bright and bold.” His ceramics are inspired and influenced by the elegant, sophisticated, and timeless beauty of Chinese Song, Yuan and Qing Dynasty porcelains. Peoples believes that curves are essential to his art, explaining that curves 鈥渞elate to how I see myself physically, and at its best, a beautiful pot with round, continuous curves is an extension of me.鈥�

He adds, “I’m also interested in juxtaposing blocks of intense colors to create mosaic surfaces on my pots. When I use bright colors and non-traditional surface treatments, I’m trying to marry this source material to a more contemporary commercial ceramic industry.”

Pollack made collages from original photographs, inkjet-printed on transfer film 鈥� chosen for its “flexibility, color retention, and subtle but noticeable reflectivity,” she says 鈥� then she disassembled and reassembled them, and presented them on mounts including transparent acrylic sheets.

Working with flowers allowed her to explore a “dichotomy between a beauty informed by delicacy and the freakish quality that I associate strongly with orchids, but see in all flowers,” Pollack says. “When looking at my work, you are, invariably, also looking at yourself because of the reflectivity. I hope that this encourages viewers to have a personal and emotional response to their relationships with abstract ideas about the body, beauty and aversion.鈥�

Reedy received his first camera, a Polaroid, at the age of 5 as a gift from his father. “With that camera,” he says, “I grew up learning how to communicate through imagery.”

The purpose of this body of photographs, he explains, is 鈥渢o counter America鈥檚 narrative about black men 鈥� a narrative that is hyper-masculine and untrue 鈥� and to also counter the images that dehumanize and perpetuate violence against the black body. My vision for this body of work is to re-contextualize, re-frame, and re-present notions of black masculinity.鈥� Reedy seeks to rewrite the mainstream narrative of black masculinity through his depictions of 鈥渇riendship, brotherhood, intimacy, and love.鈥�

Schwalbe makes paintings and drawings that explore and challenge historical portrayals of beauty and womanhood. “Women are expected to suffer separately from men 鈥� and in silence,” she says. She employs bright, caustic colors and medical images 鈥� based on medical stock photos and slides of tissue samples or bacteria听 鈥� to reveal the beauty in “what might initially be grotesque or horrifying.”

In short, Schwalbe wants to deepen her viewers’ conceptions of what “beautiful” may entail. 鈥淏eauty can often be aesthetic but it permeates deeply through the surface of its subject eliciting a feeling of both awe and fear,” she says. “To me, beauty is terrifying, powerful, and far beyond our control.鈥�

Shea paints portraits that seek to challenge the carefully curated, polished personas that people project on social media such as Facebook. “While people often display themselves in an idealistic way, that is not what is happening here,” she says. Using herself and her peers as subjects, she isolates 鈥渆ach individual from the outside world, trying to make very physical paintings that read as emotional objects.鈥�

She transforms the two-dimensionality of a photograph into a physical three-dimensional object, and converts her subjects’ 鈥渇aces and surface expressions so that they are no longer recognizable as individuals鈥� 鈥� hoping to uncover the individual’s raw emotions and personality.

Tardie constructs sculptures that have a formal connection to the body. These connections that are established are due in large part to the materials that she uses such as women鈥檚 socks and tights. “I’m curious about the interaction between gender performance and body parts, and the connotation of body parts as gendered,” she says.

Tardie implies strictures of gender by manipulating or distorting her materials “to produce objects that read as exaggerated and even mutilated bodies.鈥� She adds, “the success of the sculpture will be entirely dependent on viewers’ own bodily interactions with it . . . I want people to be aware of their bodies in space when they view the work.”

Whitehouse uses his body to make prints directly onto on paper. He prints with media such as charcoal powder and black skin-safe paint, as well as with vegetable oil, which changes the light-transmitting quality of the paper in affecting ways.

The prints are “my fear, my vulnerability, my body, and my shame, all represented outside myself,” he says. “The most successful prints look as if they were made effortlessly, and almost as if they occurred naturally on the paper, but the process of making them is always physically challenging,” he explains. “Since there is nearly no erasing the marks I make, the act of printing is high-stakes; one slip or accidental graze of my paint-covered hand and I have to start over from scratch.”

Name: Wesley B. Chaney

Position: Assistant Professor of History

Where he studied: Stanford University
Davidson College

His work: In his graduate work, Chaney focused on legal, social, and environmental issues in northwest China in the 18th and 19th centuries. His dissertation examined the impacts of the advent of regular civilian administration, specifically disputes over land and trade. At 乐播传媒, he teaches Chinese history from various eras and perspectives 鈥� and he’d like to introduce a course reflecting his current research into sports, gender, and the body in modern China. “It’s important to show undergrads the research that we鈥檙e doing and have them see how exciting that is.”

A teaching goal: Chaney based his dissertation research on archival material that included legal records involving homicides. Because of political or administrative concerns, he says, “creating these narratives was, in a lot of ways, more about creating a seamless narrative when, actually, what was on the ground was probably far messier. Historians need to be critical of the assumptions that went into the production of these records. We always keep in mind who鈥檚 the author, who鈥檚 the audience, why might this have been written, what is silenced in this source?”

These kids today: “It鈥檚 striking how many students today have studied Chinese language in high school, and have even been to China. So this is a big change. And even if they haven鈥檛 taken Chinese language, there鈥檚 far more knowledge about China now. But I give the historical context to understand the China of today 鈥� as well, I hope, as sparking a curiosity in a different way of being human.”

Name: Aleksandar M. Diamond-Stanic

Position: Assistant Professor of Physics

Where he studied: University of Arizona
Carleton College

Before 乐播传媒: Postdoctoral fellow, University of Wisconsin鈥揗adison

His work: Virtually a vacuum, outer space does contain very diffuse matter 鈥� primarily hydrogen gas. This gas can coalesce to form stars, but the number of stars thus generated falls short of the potential. An astrophysicist, Diamond-Stanic seeks to understand that inefficiency in star creation. Specifically, he studies interactions between galaxies and the supermassive black holes at their centers, and how those interactions relate to gas and star formation. This work, for which Diamond-Stanic and 乐播传媒 students are working with Hubble Space Telescope imagery, is supported by funds from the Space Telescope Science Institute.

A teaching goal: “Physics has a little public relations problem: ‘That鈥檚 hard, I don鈥檛 want to do that, you have to be like Einstein.’ That myth is problematic because you lose very talented people as a result. It鈥檚 a social justice problem: People are being denied the right to pursue what they might be interested in. I want to push for ways to recognize that and improve it, to make teaching more welcoming and inclusive, so that people can pursue their interests and dreams in the field.”

Why 乐播传媒: Diamond-Stanic discovered astrophysics through a welcoming and supportive professor at Carleton. “I wanted to get back to that small-college environment. I see my colleagues at larger research-focused institutions being pulled away from my values and priorities: How do you mentor and teach undergraduate students? That鈥檚 really No. 1 at 乐播传媒. Given the importance of those priorities to my own identity development, my own decision to go into physics, that’s something I value highly.”

Name: Nathan C. Faries

Position: Assistant Professor of Asian Studies (joint appointment)

Where he studied: The Pennsylvania State University
Baylor University
Wheaton College

Before 乐播传媒: Associate Professor of English, University of Dubuque
(A tenured position; he left in good standing to join family at 乐播传媒.)

His work: Faries teaches Chinese language, literature, and culture. He is an authority on Christian narratives in China and has recently researched Catholicism, the official rehabilitation of Confucianism, and the important 20th-century writer and literary scholar Su Xuelin. Faries wrote The 鈥淚nscrutably Chinese鈥� Church: How Narratives and Nationalism Continue to Divide Christianity.

The appeal of his work: “I grew up in a kind of missionary culture where there was this idea of the fierce oppressive Chinese government, the underground church, and all this secret stuff going on. And I went there to live, and realized that is not the whole story. I wanted to know: What are the mechanisms of control and freedom? How does the government negotiate its relationship with people who have a loyalty outside of the borders? And how do those Christians negotiate their identity, because they’re through-and-through Chinese? I like to see how narratives help them walk this tightrope between different parts of themselves.”

Why 乐播传媒: “乐播传媒 students have an attitude about education that I appreciate. They have questions, they’re engaged in their studies. It’s not a sideline for them or a career move. It’s liberal arts studies: How can I enlarge my vision through this and serve society eventually? And the college has all this support for pedagogy, how to be a better teacher. It’s a great focus.”

Name: Carolina 骋辞苍锄谩濒别锄 Valencia听

Position: Lecturer in Art and Visual Culture
Mellon Diversity and Faculty Renewal Postdoctoral Fellow*

Where she studied: School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Broward College

Her work: 骋辞苍锄谩濒别锄 brings a studio art background to work in new media, film, and video, including animation. A native of Colombia, her projects include videos that combine diverse production methods to explore issues of family and personal history, migration and immigration, feminism, displacement, and labor. As a Mellon Diversity and Faculty Renewal Fellow in 2016鈥�17, she’s designing curricula for teaching animation and video in addition to teaching two courses.

Why she teaches: “Teaching allows me to connect with different ideas and to expand the conversation. I see the classroom as a circulation system, where we learn from and inspire each other. This exchange is refreshing and nurturing. Teaching also allows me to expand and question my research, to keep an active dialogue with my field 鈥� and at the same time, to facilitate a creative process for students where they can see themselves as makers of their own ideas.”

Why 乐播传媒: “Art by its nature is interdisciplinary, so teaching art to students who are studying different fields creates a rich exchange of ways of thinking, researching, and interests that’s unique to a liberal arts college like 乐播传媒. I’m eager to collaborate with other fields 鈥� Latin American studies, film studies, women and gender studies, social sciences, just to name a few. And I’m excited to see how my own art practice will develop within this context.”

*Mellon Diversity and Faculty Renewal Postdoctoral Fellows become tenure-track assistant professors in their second year at 乐播传媒.

Name: Andrew J. Kennedy

Position: Assistant Professor of Chemistry

Where he studied: University of Virginia
Providence College

Before 乐播传媒: Postdoctoral fellow, University of Alabama at Birmingham

His work: Kennedy studies phenomena involved in specific types of learning and memory, such as those that enable us to use language. Specifically, he looks at so-called epigenetic mechanisms, or chemical processes that control the organization of genes, as they relate to synaptic plasticity and long-term encoding of memory. Supported by the Pitt-Hopkins Research Foundation, he is conducting pioneering research into Pitt-Hopkins Syndrome, a rare disorder on the autism spectrum. In related research funded by the INBRE Investigator program, he’s also studying approaches to enhance cognition more generally.

What he loves about his work: “We鈥檙e in a position to ask really exciting questions about how the brain functions to facilitate learning and memory. A century ago, quantum physicists developed tools to start probing the fundamental aspects of matter, and it was a whirlwind of discovery. I think we鈥檙e entering a similar era in neuroscience. In this century, one of the big questions will be how the brain works to elicit complex human behavior. As long as there have been humans, we鈥檝e wondered what it means to be human, and we can now look into the brain at a molecular level and start to understand that in a physical way. So, it鈥檚 a very exciting time.”

Why 乐播传媒: “乐播传媒 is special because it bridges the gap between the educational excellence of an elite small college and a commitment to high-quality research. You have juniors and seniors who have gained a deeper understanding of the underlying principles in the classroom, and you can put them into research labs that are asking the kinds of questions that they may devote themselves to in graduate school and beyond.鈥�

Name: Yinxing (Mia) Liu

Position: Assistant Professor of Asian Studies (joint appointment). From 2014 to 2016, Liu was a lecturer in Asian studies and a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at 乐播传媒.

Where studied: University of Chicago
The Pennsylvania State University
Xiangtan University, China

Before 乐播传媒: Postdoctoral associate, East Asian Studies Center, Yale University

Her work: Liu is an art historian who studies modern and contemporary art, cinema, and visual culture in China and East Asia, focusing on the dynamics and cross-fertilization between different media. She has previously written on landscape aesthetics in Chinese cinema, while her recent work focuses on pictorialist photography in China during the mid-20th century, its social-political engagements, and its interaction with traditional art media such as ink painting.

Why study Chinese art? “If you want to engage with the world, Chinese culture is a huge part of the world. And Chinese art has a very strong presence in contemporary art now. Also, the beauty of art is that you can鈥檛 really pin it down. Art is a good way for us to challenge our preconceptions and jog our prejudices. It keeps our minds open, young, and fresh. That鈥檚 very fitting for a liberal arts education, too 鈥� that鈥檚 the point of us being here, really. In the case of Chinese art, especially, we can see different perspectives and hear different voices challenging one message from a single source, and also jolting our preconception of a culture and a tradition that keeps evolving with the time.”

Why 乐播传媒: “I like the liberal arts setting; I never had experience with it before I came to 乐播传媒. I like the freedom of my research 鈥� I can define my own research profile, within reasonable boundaries. I also like the fact that students are very engaged. They want to learn.”

Name: Andrew M. Mountcastle听

Position: Assistant Professor of Biology

Where he studied: University of Washington
Bowdoin College

Before 乐播传媒: Postdoctoral fellow, Harvard University

His work: Mountcastle studies mechanisms that animals employ for motion through environments that can be complex, dynamic, and often unpredictable. His current focus is insect flight. “Insects are ubiquitous, and yet there are so many aspects of insect life and locomotion patterns that we don鈥檛 fully understand. Wings have fascinated me for years: They are highly adapted and the focus of intense, often competing, selective pressures. In addition to flight, insect wings also have assorted other functions, including helping camouflage the insect or facilitating courtship activity.” Most recently, he has worked to incorporate a type of joint found in wasp wings into a flying microrobot.

The Maine connection: Mountcastle grew up in Orono, where his father recently retired from the University of Maine physics faculty. “Maine has been in my blood ever since. It鈥檚 great to be back.”

A teaching goal: As an undergraduate, Mountcastle took a physics course in which students were expected to develop and address their own research questions. (He developed a microphone array to locate birds by their calls.) “I was asking questions that, to my knowledge, hadn鈥檛 been explored, and was coming up with tools and techniques to answer them. It was thrilling. I really try, in my teaching, to bring my students to the frontiers of scientific knowledge. For me, that was the most rewarding part, as opposed to just sitting there and learning about what other people have already learned.”

Name: Jeffrey S. Oishi听

Position: Assistant Professor of Physics

Where he studied: University of Virginia
Columbia University

Before 乐播传媒: Assistant Professor of Physics, Farmingdale State College

His work: Oishi is a computational astrophysicist specializing in fluid dynamics. In a recent project, he developed relatively simple mathematical models to help understand instability in the rotation of magnetized fluids within stars 鈥� an analysis that otherwise, he says, demands “far more computational power than will exist in our lifetime.” Undertaken with research partners in Colorado and students at 乐播传媒, Oishi’s current project aims to adapt the behavior of solar magnetic fields as models for stars in general.

The appeal of his work: “It鈥檚 an intersection of a lot of different fields. I do a lot more math than the average astronomer, more programming than the average theorist, and more astronomy than the average fluid dynamics person. So what really appeals to me is that I can pull from a broad set of skills, which means I鈥檓 always learning something new.”

鈥淎sk an Astronomer鈥�: Oishi exemplifies a generation of scientists committed to engaging the public. He took part in the “Astronomy on Tap” barroom lecture series in Brooklyn and joined a friend who, with a sign reading “Ask an Astronomer,” answered questions about the field in the New York subway. “We got a lot of stories from people who liked science as a child, and then something happened and they lost interest or felt they could no longer pursue it 鈥� a teacher or experience in school made them feel science wasn鈥檛 for them. I鈥檝e been thinking a lot about how to reach those people and make science more inclusive.”

Name: Patrick W. Otim听

Position: Lecturer in History
Mellon Diversity and Faculty Renewal Postdoctoral Fellow*

Where studied: University of Wisconsin-Madison
University of Notre Dame
Gulu University, Gulu, Uganda
Makerere University, Kampala, Uganda

His work: As a Diversity and Faculty Renewal Fellow, Otim is designing courses on African history and African studies more broadly. His research has focused on his native Uganda, but he will teach the history of East Africa this fall, the history of health and healing in the winter, and a broad survey of African history next fall.

Why study Africa? “It is an important continent with a lot of rich and diverse histories and global connections. For example, you cannot study slavery without thinking about Africa. Even in the post-independence era, if you want to talk about things like the Cold War, Africa was greatly involved. So to study history without Africa is just telling only part of a story. Africa really has to be there.”

A teaching goal: Otim comes from a small town called Gulu in northern Uganda, which was the center of the Lord’s Resistance Army insurgency. From 2002 to 2008, he worked for an international NGO assisting people displaced by the insurgency. That work illustrated the clash between Western concepts of justice and local practices: In northern Uganda, victims of wrongdoing expect perpetrators to confess and show remorse publicly, rather than serving time. “It’s this different kind of understanding that I want my students to think about. When you鈥檙e in a different cultural context, you shouldn鈥檛 think, ‘This is how justice should be.’ It is never uniform. I feel I can contribute to peace by teaching students my understanding of peace.”

* Mellon Diversity and Faculty Renewal Postdoctoral Fellows become tenure-track assistant professors in their second year at 乐播传媒.