What to Expect:
Materials and instructions provided
Guidance from our expert instructors
A festive, cozy atmosphere
A chance to meet new people and get into the holiday spirit!
Don’t miss out on this fun, hands-on way to celebrate the season. We can’t wait to see your holiday creativity come to life!
Happy Holidays!
A look at the prosecution of, and hatred towards, seal hunters for practicing traditional rituals. Plus, an examination of the high-profile celebrities that support anti-hunting campaigns.
Sponsored by the Center for the Arts and Humanities.
What if we could not only solve the climate crisis but thrive while doing it? Join Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson as she paints a picture of a transformed, revitalized world. Blending science, policy, culture, and justice, she shows how bold ideas can become reality. Inspiring solutions, bold actions, and the roles we all can play in building a thriving future. Don’t miss this chance to explore how we can get it right—and shape a better world together.
Please note: This event is primarily student-focused. Only students will be allowed to ask questions during the Q&A session.
If you are unable to attend in person, please register for our livestream here.
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In the News is a recurring event series dedicated to sparking dialogue among visiting speakers and Colby students from diverse disciplines. Together, we tackle pressing topics in politics, policy, and the press. Our speakers bring firsthand insights and practical wisdom about issues that resonate with our student body. We hope attendees will leave with a deeper understanding, a fresh perspective, or even a transformed viewpoint.
Come celebrate Gary Green’s new publication, Almost Home.
Wounded landscapes, crumbling buildings, old dusty wigs still displayed in deserted storefront windows. These plats and parcels represent the history of a built environment and its ongoing discourse with nature. There is a strong sense of passage and decline.
Yet along with the photographs of blighted and neglected landscapes is a glimmer of hope and the possibility of transformation. In one picture, a sliver of light scrapes across a backyard lawn casting tangled shadows that land on the clapboard siding of a neighborhood house. In another, the surfaces of the sun-soaked brick and concrete are rendered so precisely as to elevate their significance by pure photographic description. Of course, there are twists and turns all along the way and a multitude of signs that present our world as more complex than any single feeling or photograph.
Almost Home, the third book that Gary Green has created with L’Artiere, continues the photographer’s exploration of the medium’s possibilities through the poetic landscape of the photobook. The book is printed in tritone on uncoated paper in an edition of 500.
Sponsored by the Center for the Arts and Humanities.
Ben Baker, Assistant Professor Department of Philosophy, Colby College, is a philosopher who works mainly on questions about human minds, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence. He received a PhD in Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, where he also completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Computational Neuroscience. Prior to that, he received my JD from Yale Law School.
He works on questions about how to understand and study cognitive abilities, especially those of human beings, and on the ongoing efforts to emulate these abilities in artificially intelligent systems. How do our capacities for abstract thought relate to the way we perceive and move through the world? What gives rise to important differences in the ways different people think, and what are the social and ethical implications of those differences? What can we learn from machine models that match or exceed human performance in complex domains, and what are the limits of those models? He approaches these questions from multiple disciplinary perspectives and often views them through their presentation in complex and expressive movement, especially dance. Professor Baker is also interested in legal and ethical questions concerning AI.
This series is organized by the Center for the Arts and Humanities with support from American Studies, Computer Science, Art, Cinema Studies, Economics, English, Environmental Studies, Government, Latin American Studies, Philosophy, the Spanish department, and Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies.
Join us after the screening for a Q+A with director Emily Packer!
Holding Back the Tide is an impressionistic hybrid documentary that really considers the oyster as it traces the mollusk’s unlikely history and dynamic life cycles in New York, once the world’s oyster capital. Now, though, their dwindling presence leaves them as little more than specters in the city they were once a foundation of. As environmentalists restore them to the harbor, the oyster is examined through a queer perspective, reflecting humanity’s evolving views and understanding of gender and self-actualization.
Supported by the Colby College Department of Art and co-sponsored by Colby Center for the Arts and Humanities, Cinema Studies, Public Humanistic Inquiry Labs (PHIL), and the Science, Technology, and Society Program.
Assistant Professor of African-American Studies Sonya Donaldson, who started teaching at Colby last fall, centers her research on negotiations of identity, genres, and interstitial and contested spaces, examining them through the lenses of African-American studies, Black diaspora studies, and the digital humanities. She previously taught at New Jersey City University and Hampshire College, and she is the recipient of a 2019 Virginia Humanities Fellowship and a 2016 Woodrow Wilson Postdoctoral Fellowship. Donaldson earned her doctorate in English language and literature from the University of Virginia.
The seminar series is sponsored by the Center for the Arts and Humanities, with co-sponsorship from the Departments of American Studies, Art, Cinema Studies, Economics, English, Environmental Studies, Global Studies, Government, Philosophy, Spanish, Science, Technology, and Society, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and the Latin American Studies program.
Colby College
The Fall Shabbaton is an annual event that brings together the Maine Jewish community and friends from farther afield for a weekend of Torah study, soulful music, Shabbat meals, and invigorating connection. What started out as a Friday-night dinner and concert has evolved into a full Shabbat of learning and singing, with intergenerational programs for college students, children and teens, synagogue members from across the state.
Past guests have included Nefesh Mountain, Deborah Sacks Mintz, Neshama Carlebach and the Glory to God gospel singers, and Joey Weisenberg, as well as Talmud scholar Ruth Calderon. The Shabbaton has grown into a partner program to the Maine Conference for Jewish Life, sustaining our community with Jewish learning and music as we enter the winter months.
To learn more about this event or to register, please click here.
A woman utilises ancient beekeeping traditions to cultivate honey in the mountains of North Macedonia. When a neighbouring family tries to do the same, it becomes a source of tension as they disregard her wisdom and advice.
Sponsored by the Center for the Arts and Humanities.
Hindi is a Palestinian-American poet. Her debut collection of poems, Dear God. Dear Bones. Dear Yellow (Haymarket Books 2022), was an honorable mention for the Arab American Book Award. She is currently editing a Palestinian poetry anthology with George Abraham (Haymarket Books, 2025). Follow her on Instagram @NoorKHindi.
The seminar series is sponsored by the Center for the Arts and Humanities, with co-sponsorship from the Departments of American Studies, Art, Cinema Studies, Economics, English, Environmental Studies, Global Studies, Government, Philosophy, Spanish, Science, Technology, and Society, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and the Latin American Studies program.
Dr. Kishonna L Gray is a Professor of Racial Justice and Technology in the School of Information at the University of Michigan. She is the Director of the Intersectional Tech Lab, a Mellon funded initiative.Professor Gray is also a Faculty Associate at the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. She has served in this role since she was a Fellow in 2016.
Professor Gray previously served as a Martin Luther King Jr. Scholar and Visiting Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Comparative Media Studies and the Women & Gender Studies Program and a Faculty Visitor at the Social Media Collective at Microsoft Research (Cambridge). She is also an affiliate with the Center for Race and Digital Studies (NYU) and UPenn’s Center on Digital Culture and Society.
She is the author of Intersectional Tech: Black Users in Digital Gaming (LSU Press, 2020), Race, Gender, & Deviance in Xbox Live (Routledge, 2014), and is the co-editor of two volumes on culture and gaming: Feminism in Play (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2018) and Woke Gaming (University of Washington Press, 2018).
The seminar series is sponsored by the Center for the Arts and Humanities, with co-sponsorship from the Departments of American Studies, Art, Cinema Studies, Economics, English, Environmental Studies, Global Studies, Government, Philosophy, Spanish, Science, Technology, and Society, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and the Latin American Studies program.
Microeconomist Timothy Hubbard specializes in the structural analysis
of auctions, a technical and complex field with significant policy
implications. He has made substantial methodological and theoretical
contributions and has taken on important, difficult problems in the
field. He is nationally recognized for the sophistication of his
empirical work and his use of state-of-the-art econometric and numerical
methods.
The seminar series is sponsored by the Center for the Arts and Humanities, with co-sponsorship from the Departments of American Studies, Art, Cinema Studies, Economics, English, Environmental Studies, Global Studies, Government, Philosophy, Spanish, Science, Technology, and Society, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and the Latin American Studies program.
For 10 idyllic years, young Mija has been caretaker and constant companion to Okja – a massive animal and an even bigger friend – at her home in the mountains of South Korea. But that changes when family-owned, multinational conglomerate Mirando Corporation takes Okja for themselves and transports her to New York, where an image-obsessed and self-promoting CEO has big plans for Mija’s dearest friend. With no particular plan but single-minded in intent, Mija sets out on a rescue mission.
Sponsored by the Center for the Arts and Humanities.
The Last Physician of Images is the founder and host of the online forum and discussion series “Criticism and Value,” a forum for sharing experimental essays about art, criticism, and hosting live public conversations between living and non-living national and international artists. LPI is a transdisciplinary artist and critic. LPI’s interests include drawing, printmaking, nature, new media, conflict, aesthetics, and value.
This event is programmed in collaboration with the Davis Institute for Artificial Intelligence and the Lunder Institute for American Art. The seminar series is sponsored by the Center for the Arts and Humanities, with co-sponsorship from the Departments of American Studies, Art, Cinema Studies, Economics, English, Environmental Studies, Global Studies, Government, Philosophy, Spanish, Science, Technology, and Society, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and the Latin American Studies program.
Lynda Barry has worked as a painter, cartoonist, writer, illustrator, playwright, editor, commentator, and teacher and found that they are very much alike. She lives in Wisconsin, where she is associate professor of art and Discovery Fellow at University of Wisconsin Madison.
Barry is the inimitable creator behind the seminal comic strip that was syndicated across North America in alternative weeklies for two decades, Ernie Pook’s Comeek, featuring the incomparable Marlys and Freddy. She is the author of The Freddie Stories, One! Hundred! Demons!, The! Greatest! of! Marlys!, Cruddy: An Illustrated Novel, Naked Ladies! Naked Ladies! Naked Ladies!, and The Good Times are Killing Me, which was adapted as an off-Broadway play and won the Washington State Governor’s Award.
She has written four bestselling and acclaimed creative how-to graphic novels for Drawn & Quarterly, What It Is which won the Eisner Award for Best Reality Based Graphic Novel and R.R. Donnelly Award for highest literary achievement by a Wisconsin author; Picture This; Syllabus: Notes From an Accidental Professor, and Making Comics, which received two Eisner Awards and appeared on numerous best of the year lists including the New York Times. In 2019 she received a MacArthur Genius Grant. Barry was born in Wisconsin in 1956.
This talk will be of interest to anyone who would like to know more about the intersections of reproductive justice and racial justice, health and medicine, and feminist scholarship. All are welcome to attend!
WHAT IS COLOR? The Global and Sometimes Gross Story of Pigments, Paint, and the Wondrous World of Art is a wide roaming and inclusive romp that connects cow pee, squashed bugs, rainbow flags and pink triangles, mud paintings, Yayoi Kusama’s dots, Buddhist monks’ robes, Kerry James Marshall’s extensive palette of blacks, Renaissance forgery, mummies, and more. It’s a 150 page hybrid picture book graphic novel that explores the science and stories behind pretty much every pigment humans have made, plus their connection to the history of art around the world.
Sponsored by the Center for the Arts and Humanities, Colby College Museum of Art, the departments of Education, Chemistry, Biology, and the Arts Office.
Laura Fernández, assistant professor of Latinx studies at the University of Richmond, received a degree in Latin American and Iberian Cultural Studies from the University of Notre Dame (M.A.) and a Ph.D. in Latin American Cultural and Literary Studies with a Graduate Interdisciplinary Specialization in Latinx Studies from The Ohio State University’s Department of Spanish and Portuguese. Dr. Fernández is currently working on a book project based on her dissertation, “Giving the Midwestern White Gaze a Latinx Spin: Mediated Latinx Lives in the American Heartland.”
She is a specialist in Latinx popular culture whose research covers a number of areas including Othered Latinidades, rural Latinx narratives, and the intersections of race, ethnicity, and gender of Latinx representations in U.S. pop culture. Her most recent article, “Latinidad Served on the Side: The Latinx Blanqueamiento in Midwestern-Set TV Series,” published in the journal Chiricú, addresses the erasure of a Latinx character’s ethnic identity to maintain the mythos of the Midwest as the American heartland.
The seminar series is sponsored by the Center for the Arts and Humanities, with co-sponsorship from the Departments of American Studies, Art, Cinema Studies, Economics, English, Environmental Studies, Global Studies, Government, Philosophy, Spanish, Science, Technology, and Society, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and the Latin American Studies program.
What if starting up a computer game could offer us as meaningful a natural experience as going outside? Games, especially digital ones, are frequently dismissed as frivolous, arcane, or violent, and people tend to picture those who play them as antisocial homebodies. But research shows that games are played by nearly everyone, often together with others, and increasingly, that they are played wherever we go. This talk contends that games offer unique and playfully persuasive opportunities not only to engage directly with environmental issues, but also to foster moments of empathy, loss, care, experimentation, and optimism—important ways of coming to terms with our planetary troubles.
Alenda Y. Chang is an Associate Professor in Film and Media Studies at UC Santa Barbara. With a multidisciplinary background in biology, literature, and film, she specializes in merging ecocritical theory with the analysis of contemporary media.
The seminar series is sponsored by the Center for the Arts and Humanities, with co-sponsorship from the Departments of American Studies, Art, Cinema Studies, Economics, English, Environmental Studies, Global Studies, Government, Philosophy, Spanish, Science, Technology, and Society, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and the Latin American Studies program.
Amanda Lilleston is a visual artist living in Maine. Her creative practice grows from the traditional and expansive world of printmaking. Her artwork depicts a long and evolving relationship with human anatomy, physiology, and ecology. Using printmaking techniques and paper joining, Lilleston transforms zoological/anatomical/botanical imagery into adapting structures and environments.
Lilleston has exhibited her work both nationally and internationally including the International Triennial Colour in Graphic Arts in Torún, Poland; Boston Printmakers North American Print Biennial; the Atlanta Print Biennial; the Zillman Art Museum, and upcoming participation in the DI CARTA / PAPERMADE 6th edition: International Contemporary Art Biennale at the Museo Civico Palazzo Fogazzaro in Schio, Italy. She has prints in permanent collections at the Munakata Shiko Memorial Museum of Art in Japan, the Southern Graphics Council International Print Archives, and the Fort Wayne Museum of Art, among others.
The seminar series is sponsored by the Center for the Arts and Humanities, with co-sponsorship from the Departments of American Studies, Art, Cinema Studies, Economics, English, Environmental Studies, Global Studies, Government, Philosophy, Spanish, Science, Technology, and Society, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and the Latin American Studies program.
Pieced together from Timothy Treadwell’s actual video footage, Werner Herzog’s remarkable documentary examines the calling that drove Treadwell to live among a tribe of wild grizzly bears on an Alaskan reserve. A devoted conservationist with a passion for adventure, Timothy believed he had bridged the gap between human and beast. When one of the bears he loved and protected tragically turns on him, the footage he shot serves as a window into our understanding of nature and its grim realities.
Sponsored by the Center for the Arts and Humanities.
You – yes, you reading this right now. Statistics say you get more of your news from TikTok than any other demographic. Is this a good thing, or are we totally cooked? Dexter Thomas, a journalist who has reported on drugs, videogames, and cops, talks us through how we can stop doomscrolling, stop being scared to argue with friends, and finally figure out what’s actually happening around us.
Dexter did his PhD on Japanese hip-hop at Cornell University. He has produced documentaries on drugs, extremism, prisons, and videogames for HBO and VICE, made a podcast series for Princeton, and has written for WIRED and The Guardian. His work has earned him three Emmy Awards and a Pulitzer Prize (with the Los Angeles Times). He also once ate donuts in a parking lot with JD Vance.
Q&A session will be moderated by Alison Beyea, Executive Director of the Goldfarb Center, and Koto Yamada, Class of ’25.
Please note: This event is primarily student-focused. Only students will be allowed to ask questions during the Q&A session.
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