Community notes
In spring of 2022, William H. Drury, Jr. Chair in Ecology and Natural History John Anderson took nine students to the Northeast Natural History Conference in Albany, New York, where they presented papers and posters on their work on the COA islands. Summer was another busy season at the COA Alice Eno Field Research Station on Great Duck Island, with a team of six students working on their own projects and assisting in long-term data collection. John was also a co-author on a paper in the journal Waterbirds on the importance of natural history. In the fall of 2022, John and two students traveled to Corpus Christi, Texas, to present their Great Duck Island work and to meet with alum Kate Shlepr ’13, who has been serving as secretary to the Waterbirds Society in addition to being a Knauss Fellow in Washington, DC working for the House Transportation Committee.
After over two years in production, The Bloody Room, written and directed by Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman Chair in Performing Arts Jodi Baker and T.A. Cox Chair in Studio Arts Nancy Andrews, premiered on July 9, 2022 at the Maine International Film Festival. Nancy was an artist in residence (remotely) at The Film/Video Residency Program at the Wexner Center, where she supervised the editing of The Bloody Room with editor and sound mixer Paul Hill. The project was shaped and shot with a fearless team—Pietro Cascia ’22, Leta Diethelm ’21, Gaby Gordon-Fox ’22, Leelou Gordon-Fox ’21, Camden Hunt ’22, Aniruddha Jaydeokar ’23, Sophie Joyce ’22, Simone E Lepage ’23, Abby Jo Morris ’21, Anna Parsons ’23, Gwen Shope ’21, Danylo Shuvalov ’22, Goya van den Berg ’21, Thule van den Dam ’21, W. W. Disal Lahiru ’22, and Hannah Williams ’23—who were all part of the Horror Film course taught by Andrews and Baker during the winter of 2020. Added to this illustrious group were Eve M. Cohen, director of photography, and Mike Mislan, gaffer, who both traveled from Los Angeles, and Ben Nimkin ’08, sound recordist.
Nancy was invited to be a visiting artist at HewnOaks (hewnoaks.org) and attended for 10 days in late June/early July 2022. After more than a year in production, Nancy completed an album with Baltimore recording artist Linda Smith, mixed and co-produced by Zach Soares ’00. The album, A Passing Cloud, came out on March 17, 2023.
Partridge Chair in Food and Sustainable Agriculture Systems Kourtney Collum joined the board of the Bar Harbor Food Pantry in April 2022. Kourtney also served as a partner on the MDI Food Access Project, a collaboration between Open Table MDI, The Bar Harbor Food Pantry, Healthy Acadia’s Gleaning Initiative, Island Connections, and the COA Beech Hill Farm Share the Harvest program. The MDI Food Access Project provides free, healthy meals, non-perishable food, and fresh produce to residents of Mount Desert Island, the outer islands, and Trenton. The food delivery van makes several scheduled stops each week. This year we were able to fund three COA interns for the program—Darcy Kerr ’24 and Adam Burke ’23 who worked with Open Table MDI, and Zachary Aiken ’23 who worked with Healthy Acadia. In December 2022, Kourtney traveled to México’s Yucatán Peninsula to study Spanish and witness COA’s Spanish language & cultural immersion program in action. She was beyond impressed with the program, the instructors, the students, and the communities.
COA president Darron Collins ’92 is a co-editor and contributor to Unfurling Unflattening, soon to be released by MIT Press. The book examines the use of Nick Sousanis’s graphic novel Unflattening in higher education. Darron’s chapter is called, “The Profound Nudge: Drawing toward Unflattening in a First Year College Course Called Human Ecology.”
Faculty member in philosophy, peace studies, & language learning Gray Cox (’71)‘s research and teaching on AI-related issues has finally culminated in a book being published. In March 2023, the Quaker Institute for the Future released Smarter Planet or Wiser Earth? How Dialogue can Transform Artificial Intelligence into Collaborative Wisdom. Gray gave an invited keynote talk on the topic for an international conference of programmers and technologists in Brazil (the 2022 NIC.br Annual Workshop of Survey Methodology, see a video of talk at: youtube.com/watch?v=tdISk_1iDeo). He is also giving popular talks on it for general audiences like the Downeast Ophthalmology Symposium of the Maine Society of Eye Physicians and Surgeons, as well as Jesup Memorial Library, and he would love to be invited in person or by Zoom to share in venues of interest to COA alumnx! The argument of the book —and talks on it—includes songs, which are available online at: graycox.bandcamp.com/album/songs-for-a-wiser-earth
Beech Hill Farm managers Anna Davis and David Levinson welcomed Aida Rosa Levinson Davis to the world on January 25, 2023. She is strong and healthy and they are all completely in love.
Kelly Dickson, MPhil ’97, joined the COA staff in August 2022 as a grant writer in the advancement office. Prior to that, she was a fundraising consultant with Gary Friedman & Associates of Bar Harbor. Kelly has enjoyed her return to the college, where she was a student, president of the alumnx association, and trustee before moving to England from 2006-2017. She and her husband George are now dual citizens of the US and the UK, and live in Islesford on Little Cranberry Island.
Martha Andrews Donovan, lecturer in writing, has been using her iPhone camera for the past six years to take daily photographs of landscapes and artifacts that she posts on social media (often with accompanying musings and lines of poetry), part of a practice of paying attention. She continued this daily practice during her month-long travel in India in 2019. Drawn to windows and doorways as places of transition, Donovan captured liminal spaces in her images from India. One of those images, Finding My Way to the Color Red, which was taken at the beautiful, fragile fort-palace Juna Mahal in southern Rajasthan at the edge of the Aravalli hills, was published recently in Smoky Quartz: Tenth Anniversary Anthology (Monadnock Writers’ Group, 2022), which focused on the theme of transformations. Donovan also gave a virtual slide show and travel talk for the Bass Harbor Memorial Library in April 2022, which focused on her journey to India. Her recent musing on her childhood summers on Hurricane Ridge in South Harpswell was scheduled to appear as A Letter From Home in the March/April 2023 issue of Maine Boats, Homes & Harbors.
After the program had been put on hold for two years due to the pandemic, COA professor Dave Feldman directed the Santa Fe Institute’s Complex Systems Summer School, held on the campus of the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico in June of 2022. He will direct the program again in June of 2023. Last summer, a long-dormant piece of work from Dave’s PhD dissertation was published: David P. Feldman and James P. Crutchfield, “Discovering Noncritical Organization: Statistical Mechanical, Information Theoretic, and Computational Views of Patterns in One-Dimensional Spin System,” Entropy 2022, 24(9), 1282. In the fall of 2022, Dave spoke at a rally on the Bar Harbor Village Green shortly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Over the last year, Dave has received two small grants from the Maine Space Grant Consortium: one to add labs and other activities to his Chaos and Fractals class; the other to revise Calculus I and II.
During the spring of 2022, Sharpe-McNally Chair in Green and Socially Responsible Business Jay Friedlander led the Mount Desert Business Boot Camp to enhance the skills of local entrepreneurs. He also co-taught a course remotely on sustainable innovation at CESA, the leading Colombian business school. Jay was on sabbatical in fall 2022. Activities included a presentation on sustainable business for faculty at UPAEP in México, meeting with an interdisciplinary university in Paris, and walking the 470 mile Camino Frances. In addition, Jay and COA alum Jordan Motzkin ’10 launched Profit Decoder to help small businesses and startups get a grip on their profitability in minutes—no accounting or spreadsheets required.
COA George B. Dorr Museum of Natural History Director Carrie Graham attended the annual meeting of the Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections in Edinburgh, Scotland, in June of 2022. She presented a poster, “Moving Forward and Fitting In: designing storage and relocating the museum collections at College of the Atlantic,” co-authored with Kim M. Wentworth Chair in Environmental Studies Stephen Ressel and conservator Ronald Harvey. Carrie attended presentations and workshops with natural history museum professionals from around the world, toured the collections and conservation facilities at the National Museums Scotland, and enjoyed visiting exhibits at Edinburgh’s many wonderful museums, galleries, and gardens.
Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Chair of Earth Systems and Geosciences Sarah Hall continued working with students on various watershed and water quality projects in the MDI region. Students in the spring 2022 Watersheds course assisted Acadia National Park personnel with mapping efforts in watersheds impacted by recent large storm events. Current COA students Adam Feher ’23, Lenka Slamova ’24, Ben Capuano ’23, Ludwin Sosa ’24, Joshua Harkness ’25, and Lily Dutton ’25 presented posters of their independent study work with Sarah and local collaborators at regional conferences (Maine Sustainability and Water Conference; Geological Society of Maine; Acadia National Park Science Symposium). Adam, Lenka, Ben, and Ludwin’s projects are concerned with arsenic and other metal contamination in local groundwater. Joshua and Lily are documenting landscape modifications in the Breakneck Brook watershed due to large precipitation events. During the winter break, Sarah joined 10 COA students for the first three weeks of the Spanish immersion program in Yucatán, México. In addition to continuing to develop her Spanish language skills, she hopes to organize future courses and student projects in the region in collaboration with personnel at PICY: Programas de Inmersión Cultural en Yucatán.
After spending four years as an event planner at the Jackson Laboratory, Katie Hodgkins ’16 returned to the COA community as a staff member, taking a position as the college’s conferences and events coordinator. She lives in Ellsworth with her husband Corey, their two children, Braden (three years old) and Caspar (one year old), and their dog Kodak.
With encouragement from the Endeavor Foundation, a group of library directors from small colleges around the country—including Thorndike Library Director Jane Hultberg— began meeting regularly in 2022. The Foundation was interested in funding a project that would benefit these small academic libraries. The directors decided they all had an interest in Kanopy Base, a new subscription-based streaming service with access to 10,000+ films. Kanopy agreed to give us a six-month pilot, which the Endeavor Foundation was willing to fund from January through June of this year. This will allow each institution time to assess whether to invest in a full year’s subscription following the pilot. College of the Atlantic is a beneficiary of this grant. The library directors of these 10 small libraries have continued to meet monthly, sharing successes and challenges and learning from one another. Jane has found it to be a really wonderful cohort of librarians.
COA Allied Whale Photo ID Director Lindsey Jones MPhil ’18, Captain Toby Stephenson ’98, Research Associate Ann Zoidis, and Steven K. Katona Chair in Marine Studies Sean Todd published an article in Aquatic Mammals Journal in November 2022. The article, “Drone Observations of a Mother–Calf Humpback Whale (Megaptera novaeangliae) Pair Synchronous Feeding in the Bay of Fundy, Canada,” presents the first drone video observation of a humpback whale calf mimicking its mother’s lunge feeding behavior. In September of 2021, as the authors were conducting permitted field research in the Bay of Fundy under NOAA permit #20951, they flew a drone over a mother-calf humpback pair and were lucky enough to record video of this rarely observed behavior. While aerial video of feeding whales is nothing new, a young calf mimicking its mother’s feeding lunge certainly is. The calf’s duplication of the mother’s behavior provides insight into the mysterious and subtle world of how calves learn to gather food, a behavior that had never been recorded before.
Trisha Cantwell Keene began her second three-year term on the Jesup Memorial Library Board of Directors and started her second year as an officer of the board. Trisha also serves on the Maine Balsam Consortium Executive Committee. COA belongs to the Maine Balsam Consortium, which is made up of 35+ small Maine libraries who utilize the open-source Evergreen integrated library system. She is currently the vice president of the Balsam Consortium. Finally, Trisha’s daughter Amy Cantwell Keene is getting married in May. For those who may remember, Amy spent her early years up to age two in the library, coming in to work with Trisha when she worked nights. Amy “grew up” at COA, and the college has certainly helped form her into the caring individual she is today.
Writing professor emeritus Anne Kozak is the author of Images of America: Acadia National Park (Arcadia Publishing, 2023), due out in May. The book is a photographic exploration of the founding of Acadia and the development of its infrastructure, particularly the bridges and motor roads, and includes often-untold stories of the women involved in the effort. Access to two private photograph collections—as well as the collection of Leo Grossman, the engineer for the Cadillac Mountain Road— allowed Kozak to use many previously unpublished images. Josh Winer ’91 and Anne’s grandson, Sam Putnam, are contributors to the book.
McNally Family Chair in Human Ecology and Philosophy Heather Lakey ’00, MPhil ’05 presented a paper at the seventh annual Reproductive Ethics Conference held in January 2022, in Galveston, Texas. In “Rethinking Regret: Simone de Beauvoir and the Ethics of Abortion,” Heather argued that the existentialist, feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir provides philosophical resources to challenge anti-abortion narratives and engage with the complex ambiguity of reproductive decision-making. Heather received helpful feedback from an academically diverse audience, including healthcare providers, legal scholars, philosophers, and bioethicists.
In June 2022, Elizabeth Battles Newlin Chair in Botany Susan Letcher went to Costa Rica as a visiting faculty member for a graduate course in tropical biology with the Organization for Tropical Studies, where she advised a student project on wood decay rates in an old-growth forest. In August 2022, she switched to student mode, attending a week-long course on ferns and lycophytes at the Eagle Hill Institute in Steuben. She has continued to publish in high-impact scientific journals. Susan was part of the lead writing team for a major publication on the floristics of tropical forest regeneration, published in Science Advances in July 2022, and contributed to a study of how forest fragmentation affects the predictability of forest recovery, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B in January 2023.
The anthology, In the Footsteps of a Shadow: North American Literary Responses to Fernando Pessoa co-edited by Dan Mahoney, Charles Cutler, and Gaby Gordon-Fox ’22 will be published by MadHat Press in fall 2023. The book gathers together poets and writers in dialogue with—or responding to—the work of Portuguese modernist writer Fernando Pessoa. Notable contributors in the collection include Allen Ginsberg, Kay Ryan, Frank X. Gaspar, and COA founding faculty member Bill Carpenter.
Emily and Mitchell Rales Chair in Ecology Chris Petersen would like to send a shoutout to the advancement staff and COA Dean of Institutional Advancement Shawn Keeley ’00 for following up with a second grant to support student internships from the Seth Sprague Family Charitable Fund, a project Chris initiated with Jill Barlow-Kelley in 2020 working with local area nonprofits. In 2022, Chris started a collaboration with the Town of Mount Desert and Acadia National Park on assessing the health of Otter Creek and potential pathways to remediate problems, and Chris has been working with Hannah Webber from Schoodic Institute to help the community understand their options for moving forward. In October, Chris, along with Hannah and Mount Desert Town Manager Durlin Lunt, gave a talk summarizing their work over the year at the Acadia Science Symposium. Chris also continues to work on multiple grants and organizations on a variety of issues, including climate change, fisheries co-management, aquaculture, and ecological and community sustainability focused on downeast Maine.
In the summer of 2022, Library Assistant/Work-study Coordinator Catherine Preston-Schreck had an invigorating and fun change of pace as COA’s interim summer conferences and events coordinator, while continuing part-time farm work at Bar Harbor Farm, owned and operated by Glenon Friedman ’86 and Rose Avenia ’86. In the spring of 2022, Catherine was awarded a scholarship to participate in the New England Library Association’s New England Library Leadership program. The 2022 cohort consisted of over 30 library staff from across New England who met weekly for three months to discuss current issues in libraries and leadership practices, culminating in an in-person meeting in Manchester, New Hampshire, held in conjunction with the New England Library Association annual conference. Catherine started 2023 with a generous scholarship awarded by the Association of College and Research Libraries, a division of the American Library Association, to attend the Association of College and Research Libraries conference in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania in March.
Kim M. Wentworth Chair in Environmental Studies Steve Ressel was co-author (along with three COA students) on Charney, N. D., J. A. Tunstad ’22, G. Lattig ’24, W. Reason ’24, and S. Ressel. 2022. “Ambystoma maculatum: predation.” Herpetological Review 53:274-275, a natural history note that described predation on spotted salamanders by barred owls. He also was commissioned by the editors of the new edition of Maine Amphibians and Reptiles to write revised species accounts for two native anurans, Hyla versicolor (gray treefrog) and Pseudacris crucifer (spring peeper) for this upcoming publication. Finally, Steve submitted a manuscript titled “Coastal Saline Pools as Breeding Habitat for Spotted Salamanders (Ambystoma maculatum)” to Northeastern Naturalist, which he co-authored with seven students who enrolled in Applied Amphibian Biology during the 2021 spring term.
Zach Soares ’00 joined the Bar Harbor Planning Board in 2022 for a full three-year term after serving half a term as a replacement member beginning in 2020.
Natalie Springuel ’91 is now the marine extension program leader for the University of Maine Sea Grant Program. She has been working in marine extension for a long time, a truly human-ecological profession! This step feels like a great opportunity to help lead the program’s strategic priorities during a complicated time on the Maine coast when climate change impacts everything from ocean ecosystems to fisheries, aquaculture, and community resilience, she says. The best part is that Natalie’s extension office is still based at COA, where it has been since 2002 through a very cool partnership between COA and the University of Maine. This means that she can continue to mentor COA students, teach the occasional class, and help coordinate the Mapping Ocean Stories project, a partnership between COA, Sea Grant, the Island Institute, and the First Coast that uses oral histories to document and share stories of the Maine coast and its people.
From November 2022 through February 2023, Steven. K. Katona Chair in Marine Studies Sean Todd and Captain Toby Stephenson ’98 spent seven weeks aboard Seabourn Venture’s inaugural Antarctic season, visiting both east and west coasts of the Antarctic Peninsula as far as the Antarctic Circle, lecturing and collecting whale tails for COA Allied Whale’s Antarctic Humpback Whale Catalog. In July and August 2022, Sean was a member of Venture’s crew in the Arctic summer, reaching as far as 82 degrees north, working in the waters of Svalbard and beyond in search of feeding humpback whales in the North Atlantic and Arctic basins.
