Sponsored by the Center for the Arts and Humanities and the Spanish department.
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.
Ticonic Gallery (at 93 Main Street) is delighted to partner with Greene Block + Studios (at 18 Main Street) to celebrate Youth Art Month with a spectacular, multi-site exhibition of artwork by local students in grades K–12. Featuring works in a variety of media, including painting, digital art, pottery, photography, and more. Youth Art Month is an opportunity for students to showcase their work in a gallery setting and share their achievements with their families and their community.
The 2026 theme is The World Needs Art.
Youth Art Month is a national initiative designed to emphasize the value of art education for all children and to encourage support for quality school art programs.
Thank you to the sponsors, the Harold Alfond Foundation, Kennebec Savings Bank, the City of Waterville, and the Colby Center for the Arts and Humanities.
Image credit: Olivia Humphrey, Flower, Colored Pencil, Albert S. Hall School, Grade 5, Teacher Jaice Drozd.
Linguist Louise Banks leads a team of investigators when gigantic spaceships touch down around the world. As nations teeter on the verge of global war, Banks and her crew must find a way to communicate with the extraterrestrial visitors.
The Lascar is a 35minute historical drama set in Aotearoa (NZ) that explores the relationship among South Asian sailors, colonial officers, and Mãori people, as they traffic in seal fur and oil.
Adi Parige is a filmmaker from the San Francisco Bay Area. He wrote and directed The Lascar, which won the 2024 Jury Short Film Award at the Alameda International Film Festival.
Co-sponsored by Cinema Studies, History, and the Center for the Arts and Humanities.
Each year, tens of thousands of people use Yale Divinity Library’s collections either in person or online to try to better understand the history of China and U.S-China relations. This talk explores how that came to be and considers the responsibilities and opportunities for the caretakers of those collections.
Sponsored by the East Asian Studies department, the Center for the Arts and Humanities, and the History and Religious Studies.
While ordering his morning cup of tea, a customer is shown the reality behind his decision to request ‘normal’ milk. A thought-provoking short film that explores the ethics around consuming cow’s milk.
Directed by Thomas Pickering, Written by Thomas Pickering & James Pickering, Produced by James Pickering, Director of Photography – Owain Wilshaw, Production Designer – Gem Randall, Starring Richard Galloway & Eleanor Blackburn, Undercover footage provided by Animal Justice Project.
Sponsored by the Center for the Arts and Humanities.
Eight years before ChatGPT went live, the world of computational creative writing was quite a different place than it is today. This lecture traces a personal journey through wordspace, exploring the boundaries between sense and nonsense.
Is AI nothing more than a wordslop machine? Or can it enable a new forms and interfaces for human writing?
Sponsored by the Davis Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Center for the Arts and Humanities, Departments of Writing, Arts and Science, Technology and Society, and Computer Science.
Jessica M. Smith is an anthropologist and STS scholar whose research interests center on the intertwined social, technical, and ethical dimensions of energy transitions. She is a current Andrew Carnegie Fellow studying the everyday experiences of the coal downturn and the emergent carbon management industry in Wyoming and Colorado. She is also currently PI of an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation grant to study sociotechnical integration in energy technology research.
She is Dean’s Fellow for Earth and Society Programs and Professor in the Engineering, Design, and Society Department.
Her book Extracting Accountability: Engineers and Corporate Social Responsibility was published open access by The MIT Press in 2021 and was funded by a Cultivating Cultures for Ethical STEM grant from the National Science Foundation. Her first major research project investigated gender and mining from the perspective of Wyoming’s Powder River Basin, where she grew up and drove haul trucks in the mines for summer employment during college. That research forms the basis of her book Mining Coal and Undermining Gender: Rhythms of Work and Family in the American West (Rutgers University Press, 2014), which was funded by a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship and a research grant from the National Science Foundation.
Professor Smith is Editor-In-Chief of the journal Engineering Studies. She is a co-convener of the STS Underground network and co-organized the 2016 “Energy Ethics: Fragile Lives and Imagined Futures” conference at the University of St. Andrews, which was later published as special issues of Energy Research & Social Science and the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. She continues to theorize the coal downturn in the United States and contribute to debates about more just energy transitions.
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.
Please join the CAH in celebrating Professor Harkett‘s recently published book Animal Modernities: Images, Objects, Histories. Light refreshments will be provided.
Animal Modernities: Images, Objects, Histories is an academic book that challenges traditional art history by examining the complex relationship between humans and animals in modern art and visual culture, exploring themes of exploitation, ambivalence, and affinity through various images and objects, from paintings to taxidermy and carrier pigeons. Edited by Katie Hornstein and Daniel Harkett, the collection of essays argues that understanding human-animal relations is crucial for addressing contemporary ecological issues.
Sponsored by the Center for the Arts and Humanities and the Art Department
Francesco Marco Aresu earned his Ph.D. in Italian literature (with a secondary field in Classical Philology) from Harvard University. He graduated in Letters from the Università degli Studi di Cagliari in Sardinia, and has Masters from Stanford University and Indiana University.
His areas of expertise are Medieval and Renaissance Italian literature, manuscript studies and history of the book, medieval and humanistic philology, Sardinian literature, textual criticism, and literary theory.
He has published on Dante’s intertextuality, the first illustrated incunable of Dante’s Commedia, Italian metrics and metricology, Boccaccio’s Teseida, Petrarca’s sestinas, the manuscript tradition of Petrarca’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, Baroque theater, Folengo’s metatextuality, Alberti’s early works, and figuralism in literature. He edited and translated eighteenth-century Latin hymns for the Centro di studi filologici sardi. He is editor for the PetrArchive, associate editor for Heliotropia, and editor-in-chief of Bibliotheca Dantesca. His first book, Manuscript Poetics: Materiality and Textuality in Medieval Italian Literature, came out in 2023 with the University of Notre Dame Press.
Before joining the Department of Francophone, Italian, and Germanic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, he taught Italian and Medieval Studies at Wesleyan University.
And he likes Cagliari Calcio.
Sponsored by the Center for the Arts and Humanities, French Studies, Italian Studies and Religious Studies.
This talk reconstructs images and imaging technologies that once linked Chinese communities, American missions, and Sino-US encounters over the first half of the twentieth century. Cameras and visual devices accompanied American Protestant and Catholic missionaries as they undertook cultural,political, and religious projects in Republican China through the first years of the People’s Republic. These evolving visual practices and products ultimately escaped their missionary molds and entered transpacific perspectives, coloring Chinese engagements with the world alongside American views of modern China and East Asia. This talk explores intersections between image-making, transnational imaginations, and historical trajectories of visual material – all of which transformed twentieth century Sino-US encounters on both sides of the lens.
This event is co-sponsored by East Asian Studies Department, Art, Center for the Arts and Humanities, History, and Religious Studies.
Otherworld (2025) is a short documentary that explores the “first contact” between Abenaki people and English colonists in 1605 on Allen Island. Director Lokotah Sanborn is an interdisciplinary artist who grew up on the Penobscot Nation reservation.
Bay of Herons (2023) explores the filmmaker’s’ relationship to Mackworth Island connections between his lived experience and Wabanaki cosmology to explore the legacies and afterlives of colonization. Jared Lank is an interdisciplinary Mi’kmaq artist, writer, educator, and interdisciplinary filmmaker.
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.
In the spring of 2005, acclaimed environmental photographer James Balog headed to the Arctic on a tricky assignment for National Geographic: to capture images to help tell the story of the Earth’s changing climate. Even with a scientific upbringing, Balog had been a skeptic about climate change. But that first trip north opened his eyes to the biggest story in human history and sparked a challenge within him that would put his career and his very well-being at risk.
Chasing Ice is the story of one man’s mission to change the tide of history by gathering undeniable evidence of our changing planet. Within months of that first trip to Iceland, the photographer conceived the boldest expedition of his life: The Extreme Ice Survey. With a band of young adventurers in tow, Balog began deploying revolutionary time-lapse cameras across the brutal Arctic to capture a multi-year record of the world’s changing glaciers.
As Balog finds himself battling untested technology in subzero conditions, he comes face to face with his own mortality. It takes years for Balog to see the fruits of his labor. His hauntingly beautiful videos compress years into seconds and capture ancient mountains of ice in motion as they disappear at a breathtaking rate.
Ortiz, an assistant professor of environmental studies and a coastal geomorphologist, uses a mixture of fieldwork and remote modeling, including the use of artificial intelligence, to understand the primary processes driving coastal evolution and to learn more about what places like atolls will look like centuries into the future.
The seminar series is sponsored by the Center for the Arts and Humanities, with co-sponsorship from the Departments of American Studies, Art, East Asian Studies, English, Global Studies, Spanish, and the Latin American Studies program.
Kim Gallon is an Associate Professor of Africana Studies. As a versatile scholar, her work explores how everyday Black people challenge systems of power through emerging technologies. Her research on data interrogates synthetic data, AI, and medical imaging—especially in the social and technological context of breast cancer—to uncover how race is represented, erased, or contested in algorithmic systems. She also serves as the director of the Community Health Informatics Data Lab,where she and her team are using AI to develop a digital research project on Black women and breast cancer, as well as provide justice-oriented AI literacy education to young Black and Brown artists in Providence.
Join the Performance, Theater, and Dance, Spanish, and Latin American Studies Departments for an artist talk with Yanira Castro. An interdisciplinary artist born in Borikén (Puerto Rico), Castro’s work is rooted in communal construction as a rehearsal for radical democracy. In her artist talk, she’ll discuss her practice, spanning performance, installation, and interactive technologies, and the ways her work engages ideas of land, citizenship, and questions of governance.
This event is co-sponsored by the departments of Performance, Theater, and Dance; Spanish; and Latin American Studies with additional generous support from the Center for Art and Humanities and the Lunder Institute for American Art.
During the Salvadoran Civil War (1980-1992), displaced women living in UN-managed refugee camps in Honduras transformed the traditional peasant practice of embroidery into a powerful medium of political expression. These textiles, sent across the globe to foster international solidarity, preserve memories of war-torn homes, testimonies of massacres denied by both Salvadoran and US official accounts and ethnographic traces of life in exile.
Challenging dominant narratives that cast Salvadoran women refugees as either passive victims or pawns of leftist revolutionary forces, the embroideries document the often-overlooked political labor of care performed by refugee women. This talk centers the subtle forms of political agency made visible through embroidery—acts of care for the dead, self-care and collective care. Through their needlework, refugee women countered state and imperial amnesia by memorializing loss, reclaiming selfhood amid displacement and nurturing visions of a more just future beyond capitalist patriarchy.
Drawing on textile analysis, oral histories and collaborative research with Salvadoran embroidery collectives, I argue that these embroidered testimonies constitute insurgent archives that expand our understanding of wartime political action beyond overt militancy, foregrounding care as a vital, yet frequently marginalized, mode of resistance.
Isa Gagarin is an artist based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Her work navigates the complexities of relating to her birthplace of Guåhan (Guam) through visual art, interdisciplinary work and Chamoru language revitalisation. Educated in painting and drawing, her practice also includes poetry, experimental writing, video and performance. She has been studying Chamoru as a second-language since 2020, which is indigenous to Guam and the Mariana Islands.
Since the mid-2000’s, Gagarin has participated in the dynamic community of artist-run spaces in the Twin Cities. Most recently, her solo exhibition I Hagan Sirena (The Daughter of Sirena) was presented at Pilele Projects in Los Angeles, an exhibition and workshop space founded by Mariquita “Micki” Davis and Edward Sterrett, which is dedicated to supporting projects by Pasifika artists. Gagarin’s work has been included in group exhibitions including Together, curated by Emmett Ramstad at the Minnesota Musem of American Art in St. Paul, MN (2024), Reclaiming Identity, curated by Dakota Mace at the Trout Museum of Art in Appleton, WI (2022), and The Regional, curated by Amara Antilla and Jade Powers at The Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, OH (2021).
Gagarin received a BFA in Painting from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 2008, and earned her MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2018. She currently teaches in the Art Department at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.
The seminar series is sponsored by the Center for the Arts and Humanities, with co-sponsorship from the Departments of American Studies, Art, East Asian Studies, English, Global Studies, Spanish, and the Latin American
Studies program.
Sponsored by the Center for the Arts and Humanities and the Spanish department.
José’s music incorporates a wide range of influences from Colombian folk tunes to contemporary composition techniques while borrowing from Latin music, heavy metal, and audio sampling techniques. His works range from solo pieces with electronics to orchestral works, passing through chamber ensembles, electroacoustic pieces, and interdisciplinary collaborations. Among others, his music has been performed by groups such as Alarm Will Sound, Wild Up, Grammy award-winning quartet Third Coast Percussion. An alumnus in percussion and composition of the National University of Colombia, he studied composition at the University of Missouri and UT Austin. José was Visiting Professor at East Carolina University and at New College of Florida. José’s music has also been presented by Spanish ensemble Taller Sonoro, LA-based Piano duo Hockett Duo, the Orchestra of St. Luke’s from New York City, Grupo de Cámara de Bogotá, and Austin based percussion ensemble Line Upon Line, among others.
He has participated in institutes and festivals such as Banff Ensemble Evolution program, DeGaetano, Splice, SEAMUS, Missouri International Composer Festival, Line Upon Line Winter Composer Festival, ClarinetFest, and VIPA. José is a recipient of the 2008 National Composition Prize for Young Composers, the 2011 “Ciudad de Bogotá” Composition Award, and the 2013 National Cultural Prize. In the US has received the 2013 Sinquefield Composition Prize and the 2019 Rain Water Grant for Innovation. He is part of the C3 Collective and artistic director of the concert series Stack Overflow, which creates opportunities for composers interested in electronics.
The seminar series is sponsored by the Center for the Arts and Humanities, with co-sponsorship from the Departments of American Studies, Art, East Asian Studies, English, Global Studies, Spanish, and the Latin American
Studies program.
Two one-act plays exploring climate change, spreading authoritarianism, fancy hats, and penguin romance, inspired by the Colby Center for the Arts and Humanities 2025-2027 theme: Islands.
Far Away by Caryl Churchill; directed by guest faculty Lynne Conner
Confronting our deepest fears, Caryl Churchill’s extraordinary play depicts a chilling world where everyone is at war, and not even the birds in the trees or the river below can be trusted.
and
At World’s End by Nora Sørena Casey; directed by Bess Welden
Two Emperor penguin parents face starvation for themselves and their baby, Baby Baby, until a strange new Macaroni penguin comes on the scene. Greedy for his food, they get concerned when the stranger and Baby Baby seem to be falling in love, until a surprising new fact makes heartbreak the least of anyone’s worries.
An African American Gullah family leaves their coastal island home in 1902 and risks losing their culture to start a new life on the U.S. mainland.
Come celebrate Nadia El-Shaarawi’s new publication, Collateral Damages, Tracing the Debts and Displacements of the Iraq War.
The seminar series is sponsored by the Center for the Arts and Humanities, with co-sponsorship from the Departments of American Studies, Art, East Asian Studies, English, Global Studies, Spanish, and the Latin American
Studies program.
Meet Stand-up Comedian Daisuke Muramoto: This two-day event invites a Japanese comedian Daisuke Muramoto, who is based in New York, for a screening of the movie I am A Comedian (2022), and a bilingual comedy show in English and Japanese.
Monday, October 20, 7-9:30 pm, Ostrove: I am A Comedian screening, followed by a talk with Muramoto and Colby Professor Rio Katayama.
Tuesday, October 21, 7-8:30 pm, comedy show at Mary Low Coffee House
Organized by the Department of East Asian Studies, with support from the Departments of Art and of Cinema Studies, Colby Arts Office, Center for Arts and Humanities, Goldfarb Center for Public Affairs, and Cultural Events Committee.
The seminar series is sponsored by the Center for the Arts and Humanities, with co-sponsorship from the Departments of American Studies, Art, East Asian Studies, English, Global Studies, Spanish, and the Latin American
Studies program.
The seminar series is sponsored by the Center for the Arts and Humanities, with co-sponsorship from the Departments of American Studies, Art, East Asian Studies, English, Global Studies, Spanish, and the Latin American
Studies program.
Humanity finds a mysterious object buried beneath the lunar surface and sets off to find its origins with the help of HAL 9000, the world’s most advanced super computer.
Join us for a special evening with Tuhon Ray Dionaldo, founder and head instructor of Filipino Combat Systems as we take a look at the impact of the Filipino martial arts with one of today’s leading practitioners. With a discussion, demonstration, and Q&A session, Tuhon Ray will give an up-close look on why and how FMA have captivated filmmakers and audiences for years.
Tuhon Ray Dionaldo is the creator and the head instructor of Filipino Combat Systems, with schools and groups across North and South America, Europe, and Asia. With over 45 years of experience and expertise in numerous disciplines, he is one of the leading practitioners of the Filipino martial arts today.
For a more comprehensive account of his career and accomplishments, visit: https://www.fcskaliphilippines.com/about-tuhon-ray.html
The impressionistic story of a Texas family in the 1950s. The film follows the life journey of the eldest son, Jack, through the innocence of childhood to his disillusioned adult years as he tries to reconcile a complicated relationship with his father (Brad Pitt). Jack (played as an adult by Sean Penn) finds himself a lost soul in the modern world, seeking answers to the origins and meaning of life while questioning the existence of faith.
Mónica Guzmán doesn’t vote the same way as her parents—but they still talk. She’s built a career on asking better questions and f inding common ground with people who see the world completely differently. This isn’t about changing minds. It’s about being curious, being brave, and rethinking what we assume about “the other side.” Mónica joins us to talk about how curiosity can unlock the hardest conversations—in the dining hall, in the classroom, and with your parents.
Alex Sastre-Rivera (Utuado, 1997) is a poet, student and teacher from Puerto Rico. He is currently Ph.D. candidate at Emory University’s Comparative Literature program, where he studies matters of Caribbean tourism, colonial histories, media, queerness, and literature. He majored in English Literature and have a certificate in Women & Gender Studies from the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras Campus. During his undergrad, Alex was Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow and was one of the founders of Fractal Puerto Rico, an educational and artistic project.
He has eight years of experience organizing creative writing workshops in public schools, college campuses, literary festivals, and online groups. His poetry book pequeñas catástrofes was published in March 2021 by La Impresora. He was a 2024 The Dread Unsayable fellow and is a member of 2025 PocketMFA Winter Workshop. His poetry has been featured in Sin Cesar, distropika, Revista Cinosargo, among others.
Alex is the co-host of the literary podcast Libros Colaos where he, along Karlié Rodríguez, meditate on reading and writing practices and offer advice to readers and scholars who struggle with reading for pleasure. The podcast has come out from Karlié and Alex’s reading archive on Instagram under the same name.
In his free time, Alex enjoys reading multiple books at the same time and drinking good coffee.
The seminar series is sponsored by the Center for the Arts and Humanities, with co-sponsorship from the Departments of American Studies, Art, East Asian Studies, English, Global Studies, Spanish, and the Latin American Studies program.
The subject of “Into Eternity” is Onkalo, the Finnish government’s attempt to solve its nuclear waste problem by carving a vast, 4km-deep bunker out of solid rock to bury it in for at least the next 100,000 years. However, the film’s focus is bigger. Instead of looking for cover-ups and conspiracies at the site, Madsen uses the existence of Onkalo to create a hauntingly beautiful meditation on the mortality of our civilization, asking the question: what do we say about ourselves when we create something that will outlast everything we understand? That may be the last thing that remains of our society?
Elizabeth joined the Physics and Astronomy faculty at Colby College in 2012. Her research interests are in observational astronomy and understanding how the most massive galaxies in our Universe form and evolve over time. In particular, she is focused on determining what physical mechanism is responsible for the cessation of star formation in these galaxies, using clues from their morphology as revealed by high-resolution imaging at optical and near-infrared wavelengths. Elizabeth uses data primarily from the Hubble Space Telescope and ground-based facilities employing Adaptive Optics such as the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii. She was previously a researcher at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and obtained her graduate degree at the University of Hawaii.
The seminar series is sponsored by the Center for the Arts and Humanities, with co-sponsorship from the Departments of American Studies, Art, East Asian Studies, English, Global Studies, Spanish, and the Latin American
Studies program.