Director, Center for the Arts and Humanities
Associate Professor Spanish
SSW 126
207.859.4673
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Dean Allbritton, a first-generation college graduate and Latino scholar, became Director of the Center for the Arts and Humanities in Fall 2021. His research explores representations of health, sexuality, and gender in contemporary Spanish culture, with a particular focus on the ongoing HIV/AIDS epidemic. As Director, he has launched faculty fellowship programs in environmental and digital humanities that emphasize public humanities and community engagement while also fostering initiatives around race, identity, and sexuality across campus and in the community. Committed to expanding the reach of the arts and humanities, he fosters interdisciplinary collaboration and meaningful connections between Colby and the broader community.
Faculty Associate Director, Center for the Arts and Humanities
Associate Professor of History
Miller 248
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Sarah Duff is an Assistant Professor in History at Colby College in Maine. An historian of age and gender in South Africa and the British Empire, she is the author of Changing Childhoods in the Cape Colony: Dutch Reformed Church Evangelicalism and Colonial Childhood, 1860-1895 (Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), and Childhood and Youth in African History (Palgrave, 2022).
Sarah has published in the Journal of Southern African Studies, the South African Historical Journal, Kronos, the Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, and the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth as well as in several edited collections.
Faculty Associate Director, Environmental Humanities
Assistant Professor of English
Miller 233
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Christopher Allen Walker joined the Colby faculty in 2017 as the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Environmental Humanities and joined the English Department as an Assistant Professor in 2020. Chris holds a JD from Columbia University and a PhD in English with a certificate in Environment and Society from the University of California, Santa Barbara. In his time at Colby, Chris has played a crucial role in inspiring students and faculty alike to engage with the Environmental Humanities. It is a mark of his success as a teacher that many of his students first learned about and fell in love with EH in his classes, and now form the greater part of the EH Student Advisory Board. Chris has also played a key role in developing the EH faculty seminar and the Colby Summer Institute in Environmental Humanities. His research is centrally concerned with how literature, art, and film afford new understandings of environmental change. In his current book project, Narratives of Decay: Environmental Change and Speculative Form, Chris explores an archive of 20th-century of literature, art, and science to argue that the discovery new types of material decay–from radioactive half-life to ozone depletion–prompted the development of new methods for speculative about environmental futures.
Associate Director, Center for the Arts and Humanities
SSW 128
207.859.4165
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Megan Fossa joined the Center for the Arts and Humanities in 2014 and serves as Associate Director. In this role, she provides strategic leadership and operational oversight for the Center, coordinating and supporting faculty programs and courses connected to the Annual Humanities Theme. She oversees all aspects of program implementation, including pre-event planning, on-site execution, and post-event assessment for social, co-curricular, and community initiatives.
Megan manages the Center’s financial operations, including oversight of budgets for the Public Humanities Inquiry Labs, Margaret T. McFadden Grants, and the Summer Institute in Environmental Humanities. She also supervises student interns and supports the Center’s broader administrative and programmatic functions.
Megan holds a Bachelor of Arts in Communications with a focus in Marketing and Public Relations from Thomas College, and a Master of Business Administration.
Program Coordinator, Center for the Arts and Humanities
SSW 130
207.859.4167
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Portia Hardy has served as the Program Coordinator for the Colby Center for the Arts and Humanities since the Fall of 2022. She manages the Center’s communications and social media, blending administrative and creative work. In her role she supports the Colby Summer Institute in Environmental Humanities as the staff coordinator on the Organizing Committee and ensures the program’s smooth operation during the summer. During the academic year, she works closely with the CAH Student Advisory Board, serving as Staff Editor of Fauna, a student-run Environmental Humanities literary and art magazine. She also contributes as a staff writer for Canvas and Page, the Center’s annual year-in-review publication.
Portia holds a Bachelor of Science in Earth and Environmental Science with a minor in Editing and Publishing from the University of Maine at Farmington.