Community notes
Thomas A. Cox Chair in Studio Arts Nancy Andrews is working on a short film called Flower that started from a prompt she was offered, “watermelon sugar,” when she participated in a benefit for the nonprofit arts organization Lights Out, co-founded by Karlë Woods ’18 (see alumni notes). She was a guest at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University as part of experimental animation class by Maya Erdelyi. She also taught guest classes at Bates College and University of Illinois, Chicago in February. While there, she played a gig with Linda Smith at The Hideout. Andrews served as an artist in residence at The Studios of Key West in Key West, Florida for the month of March, and offered a two-day animation workshop there. She is in the process of digitizing several films as she builds towards a retrospective to be shown at Reel Pizza in May.
In summer 2024, Steven K. Katona Chair in Marine Sciences and COA Allied Whale Director Sean Todd continued his work for the North Atlantic Humpback Whale Catalog (curated by COA Allied Whale) with trips to Iceland and Greenland, visiting the remote Northeast Greenland National Park, a High Arctic fjordic system visited by fewer people than have climbed Mt. Everest. He also spent time in Antarctica in December aboard R/V Seabourn Pursuit working as a polar guide and collecting data for the Antarctic Humpback Whale Catalog. Sean also worked collaboratively with some Allied Whale colleagues to publish “Examination of Isotopic Signals to Determine Trophic Dynamics and Diet of Gulf of Maine Mysticetes Prior to an Oceanographic Regime Shift” in Volume 50, Issue 1 (2025) of Aquatic Mammals Journal. Authors included Sean Todd, Jooke Robbins, Mason T. Weinrich, Natasha Pastor MPhil ’20, Dan Dendanto ’91, Per J. Palsbøll, and Allied Whale research associate Ann M. Zoidis (2025). This paper contains important pre-warming diet baseline data that can be used for subsequent papers which came out of the group’s current work examining the impact of climate change on baleen whale foraging success.
In the summer of 2024, professor of physics and mathematics Dave Feldman again directed the Santa Fe Institute's month-long Complex Systems Summer School, and he will do so again this summer. He recently received a grant from the Maine Space Grant Consortium to add model rocketry to Calculus II.
Much of spring and fall 2024 were focused on the inaugural Camino course. Sharpe-McNally Chair of Green and Socially Responsible Business Jay Friedlander and Ursula Hanson, along with trustee emeritus Jay McNally ’84 and Teresa Tierney (MD, retired) led the course and walked with 12 students roughly 500 miles from France to Santiago de Compostela, Spain (see story in this issue). Closer to home, Jay worked with Downeast Dayboat to help them fulfill their mission supporting Maine fishermen and providing consumers with unbelievably delicious scallops. In addition, Jay and Jordan Motzkin ’10 taught courses for hundreds of businesses in partnership with groups like Maine International Trade Center, Maine Center for Entrepreneurs, and other economic development groups. Along with learning key financial concepts, Jay and Jordan use their web app, Profit Decoder, to help entrepreneurs strengthen their profitability. Finally, in 2024 and 2025 Jay collaborated with the Center of Innovation and Leadership at Swarthmore College to redesign and lead their entrepreneurship boot camp and pitch competition, SwatTank.
COA President Sylvia Torti’s memoir essay, "The Mortal Shift" was published in Fish Anthology, Cork, Ireland. It's a story of looking for water to develop a field station in the parched desert of the Colorado Plateau while wrestling with mortality and uncertainty.
Elizabeth Battles Newlin Chair in Botany Susan Letcher published three papers in high-profile scientific journals with an international network of collaborators on the theme of tropical forest responses to climate change. Outside of COA, she started a part-time job as the music director at Somesville Union Meeting House, where she directs the choir and plays piano and organ.
Maggie Denison ’09 and professor of biology and Kim M. Wentworth Chair in Environmental Studies Brittany Slabach ’09 attended the Northeastern Alpine Stewardship Gathering in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in October 2024. Maggie presented a poster of ongoing research investigating the relationship between restoration activities and small mammal community ecology in Acadia National Park. Current students Sierra Abrams ’26, Jackie Brooks ’26, Nathan Morgan ’26, and Chloe Meyer ’25 are all co-authors on this work, as was Acadia National Park Lead Wildlife Biologist Bik Wheeler ’09.
Martha Andrews Donovan, lecturer in writing, was reappointed in June 2024 by the Select Board of the town of Tremont to serve another three-year term as a member of the Board of Trustees for the Bass Harbor Memorial Library, where she also sits on the Board's Personnel and Policy Committee and the Programs Committee. Martha engaged in a personal challenge to write 30 poems in 30 days during the month of January; she calls this practice "Thirty (Mostly) Tiny Shitty First Draft Things"—all part of the uncertainty and messiness and vulnerability and hopefulness of this thing we do as writers.
Richard J. Borden Chair in the Humanities Bonnie Tai has completed a year-long mindfulness teacher-training certification program through Inward Bound Mindfulness Education. Her book chapter, co-authored with Abby Plummer MPhil ’16, Beth Heidemann ’91, and Sarah Kearsley MPhil ’16, will come out this year, in Candace Schlein and Sara Crump's Active and Engaging Classrooms: A Practical Exploration (Information Age Publishing). She serves on the boards of Impact Boston and Unified Asian Communities, and continues to serve as a Hancock County Advisor for Maine Community Foundation.
In 2024 adjunct faculty Jenny Rock ’93 saw her fourth University Centre of the Westfjords (UW, Ísafjörður, Iceland) master’s student, Ela Keegan ’21, defended with high marks. She became Jenny’s 43rd master’s student across all universities. Meanwhile, Katie Culp ’24 is likely to become Jenny’s 44th, also through UW but with research together in New Zealand. In 2024, Jenny’s 6th PhD student also had her doctorate conferred, and Jenny published her 66th research paper/book chapter. More cool COA connections last year included a further research project in New Zealand with Elle Gilchrist MPhil ’21, building on research with Ela Keegan ’21 in 2023.
Title IX coordinator & HR support staff Puranjot Kaur ’05 competed with Team USA at the 2025 World Ice Swimming Championships in Molveno, Italy in January. The event brought together 752 athletes from 48 countries. The competition was held in a 50-meter, Olympic-sized pool, where the water temperature was 36.1°. Puranjot's events were the 50- and 100-meter breaststroke, and the 50-, 100-, and 250-meter free stroke.
In response to the challenging conditions for dialogue about Israel-Palestine, professor of cultural and political anthropology Netta van Vliet organized a series of speakers who came to campus during spring term 2024 to share work and facilitate discussions. Guests included Tarek El Ariss, Susannah Heschel, Neta Weiner, and Samira Saraya. Thanks to enthusiastic interest among audience members, Neta and Samira returned in the fall 2024 term—this time also with longtime collaborator Stav Marin—and the three performed a multilingual (Yiddish, Hebrew, English, Arabic) musical and spoken word piece from their work Beat Midras. Neta, Samira, and Stav also hosted a discussion about current events in Israel-Palestine and Gaza, and a screening of a selection of Samira's films. On Earth Day 2024, Netta organized and facilitated a panel of COA arts and design faculty (Catherine Clinger, Jonathan Henderson, Brook Muller, and Neeraj Sebastian) which thought expansively about the environment and wellbeing, sharing artistic work that invited consideration about ideas of safety and security, risk, proximity and distance, intimacy, aesthetics, and critical thinking. In June, Netta presented a paper, "Responses to Oct. 7th, 2023: Israel, Gaza and Elsewhere" at the Derrida Today conference in Athens, Greece.
Philosophy and language professor Gray Cox’s recent book on AI is now available as a Creative Commons Spanish translation, ¿Planeta más Inteligente o más Sabia?, that can be downloaded online. He was delighted to visit India virtually in June by team-teaching an online seminar with his colleague, Ramasubramanian, through the Gandhian activist organization Samanavaya. Gray is totally psyched to be team-teaching a course on collaborative writing, Ethics, AI, and Authorship, with COA writing professor and writing program director Su Yin Khor. He also continues to wonk out on more technical AI stuff including an article developing an Aristotelian theory of emergent forms of intentionality in AI and a collaboration with Phileas Dazeley-Gaist ’23, with whom he is exploring the development of a human-ecological AI app. He keeps singing and writing songs to deal with political angst and hope—including a new tune, Upbeat All The Time. And, of course, he gets out with family and friends as much as possible to enjoy what he always notes is, according to some people, the second most beautiful island in the world.
Writing program director Su Yin Khor has continued to present at conferences and publish work related to writing, identity, and teaching. At the Conference for Communication and Composition, held in Spokane, Washington in April 2024, she presented research findings from a study about writing pedagogy and classroom practices in a writing class for adult women immigrant learners who participated in a community-based English literacy program. She co-wrote a chapter about leadership in English Language Teaching with her long-time collaborator, Cristina Sánchez-Martín, which was published in Female Leadership Identity in English Language Teaching: Autoethnographies of Global Perspectives (Brill), and edited by Doaa Rashed and Debra Suarez. In a different project with Sánchez-Martín, she co-edited a special issue of TESOL Journal that was published in August 2024. The special issue focused on gender equality in education and each contributor addressed how pedagogical practices and educational institutions can create space for diverse gender identities. After wrapping up her first year at COA, she and her partner spent the summer with family and friends in Sweden and managed to squeeze in a mini backpacking trip in Europe, finally crossing Prague, Vienna, and Budapest off her bucket list.
Over winter break, the library's intrepid weekend supervisor, Wendy Kearney (’92), decided to move into a new career: retirement. Wendy started working for Thorndike Library as a work-study student in 1979. While at Thorndike, she developed a passion for libraries and has been a devout member of the library community on MDI and beyond ever since.
In addition to the decades Wendy has been a part of the COA community, her experiences span from working as a librarian at Northeast Harbor Library, the library at Jackson Laboratory, Thuya Gardens’ rare book collection, Azalea Gardens’ library, and as a cataloguer of books for Acadia National Park. She worked for the Cornell University Johnson Graduate School of Management Library and, thanks to a grant, spent time studying British library practices at the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford. Wendy is a woman of many talents and, true to the many hats island residents don, Wendy also had stints as the postmaster in Hulls Cove, as a film developer in a color photo lab, and as a gardener, naturalist, and tour guide, among other things.
Above all else, Wendy's kind disposition and fabulous stories of shenanigans at COA infused weekend evenings in the library with the feeling that the history of this college and island community is always just below the surface. At any given moment, Wendy's conjuring could bring the past back to life.
Puranjot Kaur ’05.
