While the word “island” might conjure an image of isolation—the castaway on a pile of sand with a single palm tree—long, global histories of insularity and archipelagic thinking complicate such an image. Islands have been sites of dynamic cultural exchange for centuries. Today, islands carry an outsized burden in terms of environmental catastrophes, historical legacies of colonization, and the continued subjugation of marginalized people. De-centering continental landmasses, our theme surfaces these complex tensions and invites our communities to think through pressing contemporary issues. Island residents and their diasporas offer generative ideas for responding to the climate crisis through solidarities, rather than extractive technologies. Islands—as both place and theoretical framework—open myriad transdisciplinary possibilities. At its heart, archipelagic thinking enables endless fluid connections that illuminate relational power dynamics.
Jessamine Batario is the Linde Family Foundation Curator of Academic Engagement at the Colby College Museum of Art, where she helps shape the Colby curriculum through faculty partnerships, exhibition development, and teaching. She is the curator of Imagining an Archipelago: Art of Cuba, Guam, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Their Diasporas, a forthcoming exhibition at the Colby Museum on view across AY 2025-26. As an art historian, curator, and museum educator, her research and curatorial projects have been supported by grants and fellowships from the Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Teiger Foundation, and Dedalus Foundation, among others. Her writing has appeared in ASAP/Journal, Different Visions, Journal of Art Historiography, The Brooklyn Rail, and elsewhere. In 2020, she co-founded Kababayan: Filipinx American Art History Working Group. She received her PhD in Art History from The University of Texas at Austin.
Nicolás Ramos Flores is an Assistant Professor of Spanish at Colby College, where he teaches courses in Caribbean and Latinx studies. His research focuses on the intersections of racial discourse, memory, and masculinity in Latinx and Caribbean cultural production. His work has appeared in Hispanic Issues Online, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, Chiricú, Latin American Research Review, and Latino Studies. He is the co-editor of Hemispheric Blackness and the Exigencies of Accountability (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022), a volume that explores the resistances of Black lives across the Americas. His forthcoming book, Archipelagoes of Longing: Puerto Ricans, Memory, and Resistance (SUNY Press, April 2026), examines the interwoven nature of longing in contemporary Puerto Rican and Puerto Rican-American art, film, and literature. Currently, Ramos Flores is working on a second book project that investigates Latinx communities in London, Madrid, and Paris. He earned his Ph.D. in Hispanic Studies from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, in 2019.
Islands Course Unit
Four credit hours. O’Neill.
The Greeks, the Romans, the Irish: peoples around the globe have produced their own unique heroes appropriate to the needs and desires of their particular cultures. Nevertheless, these heroes share a variety of traits and experiences. We will examine the similarities and differences of the heroes of Ireland, Greece, Rome, and other cultures and explore why we crave heroes and how that craving has shaped us all.
Islands Course Unit
Four credit hours. Chowdury.
This course will discuss fundamental concepts about making computers see the world, including edge detection, feature detection, and feature matching. We will then apply these concepts to build intelligent models for vision tasks such as object detection, image classification, segmentation, etc. The class will require some understanding of probability, calculus, and linear algebra. The expectations include mini-projects, reading assignments, quizzes, and a final presentation/project. We will use PyTorch, openCV, pandas, numpy, scikit-learn, and a few other programming libraries to build vision-based solutions to practical problems.
Islands Course Unit Four-credit hours. Nyhus.
An introduction to the multi study of the relationship between humans and the world around us. Through an examination of the most pressing environmental problems–such as climate change, biodiversity loss, and environmental racism–students will be introduced to methods and key concepts of Environmental Studies. Through lectures, case studies, and collaborative work, students will assess the strengths and weaknesses of approaching environmental problems from the sciences, social sciences, and humanities, and gain tools to work toward a more just environmental future.
Islands Course Unit Four credit hours. Nyhus.
Humanities Lab.
Four credit hours. Koch.
Islands Course Unit
Four-credit hours. Diederich.
Islands Course Unit
Four-credit hours. Urich.
This course is an introduction to the study of religion. Students will survey the methodologies and modes of inquiry scholars have used to examine religions, explore how these approaches have been employed in analyses and discussions of religion (in scholarly communities and beyond), and develop the theoretical skills and vocabulary to contribute their own analyses. This is the core gateway course for the study of religion at Colby, geared toward (but not limited to) students interested in majoring and minoring in religious studies. Previously offered as Religious Studies 228 (Spring 2023).
Islands Course Unit
Four-credit hours. Welden.
Colby Theater Company Fall 2025 will engage with two short plays in full production – Far Away by Caryl Churchill and At World’s End by Nora Sørena Casey. The plays explore themes of fear, violence, and precarity under authoritarian power and environmental degradation through human and animal relationships, masterfully crafted language, and unexpected moments of humor. Students will rehearse and collaborate with faculty and professional guest artist directors and designers to create a fully-supported production running for three performances October 31 and November 1. Students may enroll by audition only and can earn 1-3 credits depending on level of participation.
Islands Course Unit
Four-credit hours. Klepach.
This course is designed for students with no science background to be able to understand the science of consciousness studies. Our goal is to evaluate the various scientific models that try to explain how physical matter can manifest conscious subjective experience. It includes a qualitative exploration of the potential biomolecular and quantum mechanical underpinnings of first-person conscious experience and their implications in artificial quantum computing systems. The “hard problem” of consciousness is discussed along with phenomenological and physical models accounting for the requirements of consciousness. In addition to lectures and weekly readings, there will be a project related to the potential for artificial sentience and the concept of post-humanism.
Islands Course Unit
Four-credit hours. Wesner.
This seminar explores the latest scholarship across a wide range of topics in the social study of science and technology. Throughout the semester, students execute an original research project, developed through the synthesis of advanced readings, seminar discussions, thorough literature search and review, and final written work and presentation. Students develop confidence in their voice as a contributing scholar to the field of STS and culminate their interdisciplinary, liberal arts training with advanced inquiry founded in STS methods and frameworks.
What does it mean to be free, to imagine freedom? Conversely, why are logics of control and capture adopted? How and to what ends is it possible to resist these strictures? How is the body implicated in freedom and in capture?
Play is a term that spans a gamut of endeavors in the liberal arts without resolving the tensions. Bounding and bouncing across diverse histories and geographies, play connects action and rest, pleasure and exhaustion, young and old, human and nonhuman, and intellect and whimsy. This two-year theme (23-24 and 24-25) invites the campus and its community partners to explore, embody, and enact the complications of the theme. Engaging playful paradoxes as well as the inequalities that surround the theme, we ask: Is it work to intellectualize play? How and when is playing around seen as a subversive and even dangerous act? Who gets to play, and who doesn’t? Play, as practice and concept, challenges the demands of intellectual rigor, offering possibilities for haptic engagement, queer curiosities, happenings and actions, and fun.
Theme Sponsors
Dean Allbritton, Spanish
Phillip Fang, Sociology
Nazli Konya, Global Studies
Chris Walker, English
Keynote Speaker
John Green
“Food for Thought’ seeks to problematize and critically assess the complex social, cultural, environmental, political relationships that we have with food.
Food sustains all living beings (humans and non-humans) as it punctuates our daily lives and helps us survive and grow. It also embraces different realities of lived experiences across time and space, connecting the past with our present through the passing of ancestral traditions. And yet, it also reveals the fragility and the impermanence of bodies and organisms; it reinforces or challenges our privilege(s) (or lack thereof) to access food sources; it becomes instrumentalized and weaponized in warfare; it questions our complex relationship to nature, land, and sovereignty; it mirrors systemic inequalities entrenched in contemporary societies. Food highlights a living paradox: it represents the key ingredient that binds us together, and yet divides us when power dynamics and privilege are at play. By shedding light on these intricate realities, “Food for Thought’ seeks to problematize and critically assess the complex social, cultural, environmental, political relationships that we have with food.
Theme Sponsors
Audrey Brunetaux, French department
Danila Cannamela, Italian studies
Nikky-Guninder Kaur Singh, Religious Studies
Keynote Speaker
Bryant Terry
What does it mean to be free, to imagine freedom? Conversely, why are logics of control and capture adopted? How and to what ends is it possible to resist these strictures? How is the body implicated in freedom and in capture?
By enlisting the power of the humanities to translate experience, promote critical reflection, and offer fresh perspectives on challenging issues, Freedom and Captivity aims to incubate, amplify, and expand creative breakthroughs in these questions and in the relationship between freedom and captivity. Freedom and Captivity engages these larger ideas through three specific sub-themes: “Carcerality,” “Imagination and the Contained Body,” and “Freedoms.” While we welcome broad interpretations of the theme, our investment in freedom and captivity begins with two of the most pressing issues of our era: mass incarceration and displacement. These conditions are central to understanding the material and prescient stakes of freedom and captivity. While distinct, both incarceration and displacement draw together notions of subjectivity, embodiment, and space, asking us to consider the importance of space, geography, and the body in notions of freedom and capture. Why do we believe that the freedom of some depends on the captivity of others? “Carcerality” centers these pressing issues, which span social, political, economic, ecological, and geopolitical considerations, asking us to challenge the social constructs and material conditions of global captivity.
Theme Sponsors
Catherine Besteman, Anthropology
Chandra Bhimull, Anthropology and African American Studies
Gwynn Shanks, Performance, Theater, and Dance
Keynote Speaker
Nikole Hannah-Jones
Boundaries highlight or fix limits for people, places, objects, and events. But beyond this, boundaries mark relational sites where meaning, value, and belonging are made, reworked, and contested.
Should we approach boundaries as restrictive forces that constrict us within walls, borders, and lines, be they real or metaphorical, or as creative forces that overlap, move, and encourage us to rupture our own definitions of limits? Boundaries produce and attempt to manage marginal areas. They allow for a liminal space, a space “in-between” that is transitory, transient, unexpected and uncertain to erupt. This theme will allow us to interrogate the margins, those spaces in which subversive, often oppressed, knowledges and life ways take shape. If boundaries attempt to codify and construct worlds, what new worlds can emerge through the pursuit of this theme’s inquiry?
Theme Sponsors
AB Brown, Theater and Dance
Audrey Brunetaux, French and Francophone Studies
Keynote Speaker
Baratunde Thurston
Energy and its limits shape our lives, connecting artistic and technological innovations, local communities and oppressive structures of power, political activism and affective fatigue, histories of environmental change and societal collapse, and the origin of life and entropic fate of the universe.
This theme will bring together the arts, humanities, and social and natural sciences to investigate the space between energy and exhaustion as a metaphorical realm and lived reality. Together we will explore the endless potentiality of energy and limiting effects of exhaustion as they impact aesthetic innovation, literary imagination, political anxieties, environmental limits, and activist movements—all touching upon our shared past, current political realities, and collective futures.
Theme Sponsors
Dale Kocevski, Physics and Astronomy
Chris Walker, English and Environmental Humanities
Keynote Speaker
Naomi Klein
The Presence of the Past is everywhere: in our daily lives and activities, our natural, engineered, and social environments, our political commitments, our biasses and prejudices, our religious and spiritual convictions, our scientific and technological accomplishments and ambitions, and more.
What happens when competing versions of the past come into conflict? How is knowledge about the past produced? How do structures of power and prestige operating in the present shape our current knowledge of the across the disciplines?
Theme Sponsors
Elizabeth D. Leonard, History
Megan Cook, English
Keynote Speaker
Roxane Gay
Energy and its limits shape our lives, connecting artistic and technological innovations, local communities and oppressive structures of power, political activism and affective fatigue, histories of environmental change and societal collapse, and the origin of life and entropic fate of the universe.
Origins encourages a detailed and critical reflection of the social, historical, political, and cultural contexts that inform our understanding of who we are as humans, where we come from, and the trajectory we choose to follow in an increasingly interconnected global landscape.
Theme Sponsors
Shalini Le Gall, Museum of Art
Gianluca Rizzo, Studies
Arnout van der Meer, History
Keynote Speaker
Cornel West
