This year’s humanities theme culminates with the residency of our Islands Distinguished Fellow, Craig Santos Perez. His residency will take place from April 1 – 2, and include a craft talk and public poetry reading.
Craig Santos Perez is an Indigenous Chamoru from the Pacific Island of Guåhan (Guam). He is the coeditor of six anthologies; the author of poetry collections, including Habitat Threshold and his ongoing “from unincorporated territory series”; and the author of the monograph, Navigating Chamoru Poetry: Indigeneity, Aesthetics, and Decolonization. Perez has received the National Book Award for Poetry, American Book Award, Pen Center USA/Poetry Society of America Literary Prize, Hawaiʻi Literary Arts Council Award, Nautilus Book Award, and the George Garrett Award for Outstanding Community Service in Literature from the Associated Writing Programs.
Craft Talk on Documentary Poetics
Wednesday, April 1, 4:00-5:30 pm | Greene Block + Studios
Poetry Reading
Thursday, April 2, 4:00-5:30 pm | Waterville Public Library
This event is co-sponsored by the departments of Science, Technology, and Society, Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, American Studies, Environmental Studies, Cinema Studies, Anthropology, and Performance, Theater, and Dance Studies, English and Global Studies. It is also sponsored by the Center for the Arts and Humanities and the Goldfarb Center for Public Affairs.
Stephens and Sprinkle, two ecosexuals in love, raise performance art hell in West Virginia to help save the region from mountaintop removal destruction. This film, chronicles their love, activism, and struggle to save their family home, climaxing with their wedding to the Appalachian Mountains.
Sponsored by the Center for the Arts and Humanities.
Defiant ducks, movie-star mules, and policed pets. These, among many others, are stories we bump into when asking: How has Colby been shaped by human-animal relations? How do we encounter animals in the archive?
Join the curators of “Bumping Into Animals: an exhibit on Mayflower Hill” for the opening of their spring exhibit in Colby’s Special Collections and Archives on Friday, April 3rd from 5:00-6:30pm. Find us in the Robinson Room in Miller Library to view the exhibit and hear brief presentations from curators, the students of ST398: Human-Animal Studies. Hors d’oeuvres and drinks will be served nearby in Wormser.
This event is co-sponsored by the departments of Science, Technology, and Society, Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, American Studies, Environmental Studies, Cinema Studies, Anthropology, and Performance, Theater, and Dance Studies, English and Global Studies. It is also sponsored by the Center for the Arts and Humanities and the Goldfarb Center for Public Affairs.
For decades, journalist Jep Gambardella has charmed and seduced his way through the glittering nightlife of Rome. Since the legendary success of his only novel, he has been a permanent fixture in the city’s literary and elite social circles. But on his sixty-fifth birthday, Jep unexpectedly finds himself taking stock of his life, turning his cutting wit on himself and his contemporaries, and looking past the lavish nightclubs, parties, and cafés to find Rome itself, in all its monumental glory: a timeless landscape of absurd, exquisite beauty. Featuring sensuous cinematography, a lush score, and an award-winning central performance by the great Toni Servillo, this transporting experience by the brilliant Italian director Paolo Sorrentino is a breathtaking Felliniesque tale of decadence and lost love.
This two-week workshop, now in its third year, is co-created with students in Assistant Professor of African-American Studies Sonya Donaldson’s class AA328: African American Girlhood. The workshop is led by Ashley Nicole Baptiste, Artist in Residence at Middlebury College and Associate Artistic Director at the Jersey City Theater Center.
The workshop is open to the Colby community. Building on the work of Kyra Gaunt and bell hooks, the workshop engages with the concept of “kinetic orality,” drawing from Cornel West’s notion of African Americans’ creativity in the wake of violence and trauma. Forms of play in the context of Black girlhood and education elucidate the ways in which joy, pleasure, and creativity inform the broader culture and reveal the social memory of Black communal life. Through “Black Girls’ Playdate: A Liberatory Praxis,” students create a generative and transgressive space of teaching and learning.
To read more about Professor Donaldson’s work and the previous Playdates, click here!
Organized by African American Studies, with cosponsorship from the Center for the Arts and Humanities.
The Colby Summer Institute in Environmental Humanities (SIEH) gathers scholars from around the globe to collectively explore how the Environmental Humanities contribute to the theorization, imagination, and practice of socially just and ecologically hopeful futures for humans and nonhumans. For each iteration of the Summer Institute, we select some of the most respected scholars in environmental humanities to present lectures on their current research, lead seminars on the most important questions facing the discipline, and guide works-in-progress workshops where the research of every participant is critiqued and polished by their peers. In addition to this intense scholarly engagement, we take full advantage of Maine’s natural and cultural treasures. Participants recharge, forge connections, and find inspiration during excursions to Allen Island, the Colby Arboretum, and the Colby Museum of Art. The week-long timeline allows new friendships and professional relationships to develop, creating an enduring network of Institute Alumni Fellows.
If you are an academic, artist, activist, or independent scholar with a passion for the environmental humanities, we invite you to join us in beautiful Maine from July 27 – August 1, 2026, for a week of seminars, lectures, workshops, field trips, and other events.
The seventh annual Summer Institute seminar leaders will be Mishuana Goeman, Professor and Chair of Indigenous Studies, University at Buffalo; Macarena Gómez-Barris, Professor of Modern Culture and Media and Director of the Center for Environmental Humanities, Brown University; Nicole Seymour, Professor of English and Graduate Advisor for Environmental Studies, California State University at Fullerton; and Nicole Starosielski, Professor of Film & Media, University of University of California, Berkeley!
The application period for the 2026 iteration of the SIEH has now closed. For FAQs, please see this page.
If you have further questions about the SIEH, please email Program Coordinator Portia Hardy at [email protected].