Our mission is to craft a community of students, faculty, and local residents, all deeply engaged with the arts and humanities. We celebrate the intrinsic value of studying language, literature, history, philosophy, the environment, and the creative arts.
Each of our Student Advisory Board members is a passionate environmentalist, a hard-working student, and an innovative and creative thinker. SAB members run EH workshops, attend EH courses, meet regularly to discuss the environment and the humanities at Colby, and produce our environmental humanities literary and art magazine, FAUNA.
Dedicated to celebrating environmentally themed poetry, essays, and artworks by Colby students, FAUNA is curated and edited by the Environmental Humanities Student Advisory Board of the Colby Center for the Arts and Humanities, with Program Coordinator Portia Hardy serving as the Staff Editor.
This year we’ve teamed up with the “Thinking With Animals” PHIL (Public Humanistic Inquiry Lab) for a special issue highlighting writing and art about animals. This edition was designed to flow from water, to air, and then finally to land, symbolizing our relationship to different ecosystems and the ways they come together to form one shared space inhabited by both humans and nonhumans alike. As you make your way through this issue, we invite you to keep in mind the words of PHIL co-organizer and Assistant Professor Laura Nüffer, “How do animals, wild, domestic, even imaginary, shape our experience of the world, and how do we shape theirs? What can we learn when we examine the fuzzy, arguably fictional boundary between animal and human.”
Inside the seventh education of FAUNA, you’ll find wonderfully creative and thought provoking works rooted in the natural world and all of its complexities. FAUNA is a student led magazine, curated by the Center for the Arts and Humanities Student Advisory Board. In each issue we welcome and accept submissions from the Colby Environmental Humanities community, including students, faculty, and staff. Without them, FAUNA would simply not be possible! Whether it be photography, poetry, prose, or artwork, we are grateful for the contributions of everyone who made this year’s issue come to life.
The sixth edition of FAUNA was published in Spring 2024. FAUNA is a labor of love crafted by the Center for the Arts and Humanities Student Advisory Board (SAB) and Portia Hardy as the Editor and Staff Advisor. The magazine would not be possible if it weren’t for the students of the Colby Campus who are dedicated to the environmental humanities and who share their wonderful pieces with us. Whether it be prose, poetry, photography, or artwork, we are grateful for the contributions of the Colby community.
The fifth edition of FAUNA was published in Spring 2023, and features striking black and white photos, poems inspired by the fantastical, and short essays that transport you from your current place. This year’s edition of FAUNA is an eclectic collection of complex creative works which reflect the broader Colby community and the importance of pursuing interdisciplinary interests — as they often produce fruitful thought provoking pieces.
The fourth edition of FAUNA was published in Spring 2022, and features extraordinary art and writing by both Colby students and staff. The magazine begins with the land, contemplating the landscapes that shape us, and their complex and often traumatic histories, before moving on to a celebration of metamorphosis, rebirth, and the shifting seasons.
The second edition of FAUNA was published in Spring 2020, and included not only poems, essays, photographs, drawings, and paintings by students, but also a poem and a comic from two professors who participated in the inaugural Colby Summer Institute.
The third edition of FAUNA was published in Spring 2021, and features a seasonally themed layout, with artwork and writing moving from autumn forests, to winter snows, to spring flowers, to summer seas. Content includes beautiful prints, vibrant photographs, informative essays, thoughtful poems, and more.
The first edition of FAUNA was published in Spring 2019 and was a great success, including exquisite and insightful works by students. Copies were even distributed to the scholars who came from across the world to participate in the inaugural Colby Summer Institute in Environmental Humanities, a week of lectures, workshops, and field trips which took place in August 2019.
We strongly encourage you to submit your environmentally-themed photographs, paintings, drawings, etchings, short stories, poems, and articles to the upcoming fifth edition of FAUNA. No pieces of writing longer than two pages in size 12 font, please. Photos must be high quality, at least 101 pixels per inch. All submissions are due by March 31, 2024. For questions, please email your to Program Coordinator, Portia Hardy, at [email protected].
The idea of creating an environmental humanities magazine, devoted to Colby student art and writing, was first devised by the 2019 Environmental Student Advisory Board (SAB), along with previous Program Coordinator Ayla Fudala. We wanted a way to showcase and share the artistic accomplishments of students, and spread the environmental humanities (EH) message across campus. As EH is a relatively new field, many students hadn’t even heard of it before. FAUNA highlights this groundbreaking field, motivates students to take EH courses, and inspires and celebrates environmentally themed creative work.
The SAB tried out several names before settling on “Charismatic Megafauna”, a term often used in the fantastic classes taught by former Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow of Environmental Humanities, now Assistant Professor of English Christopher Walker, from which many of the SAB members were recruited. We decided to shorten the name, and FAUNA was born.
We look forward to continuing to produce new editions of FAUNA, with the mission of displaying excellent student work and spreading the message of the Environmental Humanities across the Colby campus and beyond. If you are a Colby student and have any environmentally themed art or writing, or if you’re interested in helping to run the magazine as part of the Student Advisory Board, please email Portia Hardy at [email protected]
