Faculty

In July, new work from Associate Professor of English Myronn Hardy was featured as the poem of the week in the Portland Press Herald. Megan Grumbling, the curator of the Press Herald’s series, describes the poem titled “Threshold with Fog” as “hazy” and praises Hardy’s imagery. “I love this poem’s vivid, dream-like imagery, and how it cross-fades between scenes, leaving us feeling as lyrically displaced and uncertain as the speaker,” Grumbling writes. 

Hardy finished writing “Threshold with Fog” about a year ago. It’s a busy time for him, poetrywise.  “I’m currently writing poem after poem,” he says. As yet, he doesn’t have a new collection in mind. “I don’t know if a new collection is forming. This usually takes years to discover.” HIs inspiration, he says, was, “thinking about being lost in the Leuthold Forest Reserve. And what it may mean to be found and guided by a stranger.” (Leuthold Forest Reserve is in the wilds of Maine, southwest of Jackman.)

Hardy’s most recent poetry collection, Aurora Americana (2023), was called “a clear-eyed vantage of America” by Rebecca Morgan Frank in her review for the Poetry Foundation.

Associate Professor of Digital and Computational Studies Carrie Diaz Eaton was part of a rich discussion about AI on “Maine Calling,” Maine Public’s weekday radio program, on April 7. Diaz Eaton discussed the widely varying attitudes of her students to AI and talked about her course “Calling Bull: Data Literacy and Information Science,” which she’ll be teaching in Fall 2025. It’s a course she teaches regularly, but in recent years, discussion of AI has become a more substantive portion of that course. “Because you’ve got misinformation being created at a scale, on purpose or not,” Diaz Eaton told listeners. Panelists included Michael Donihue, interim director at Colby’s Davis Institute for AI, Bowdoin’s Fernando Nascimento, assistant professor, digital and computational studies, and from the Roux Institute, Berkeley Almand-Hunter, technical director of partner products.

Associate Professor of Philosophy Paul Schofield published an essay this July in the Jacobin, his fourth for this quarterly magazine and website. For this piece, he interviewed homeless people in Olympia, Wash., offering a political and philosophical analysis of American homelessness and our current at-risk democracy. 

“Homeless people find themselves in what we might call a state of internal exile — cast out of, and excluded from, the society in which they physically remain,” Schofield writes. 

The people he interviews speak of horrific, rat-infested, living conditions, the lack of response from law enforcement to violence committed against homeless people, and the double-edged sword of government-provided transitional housing. “If they can tell us we’re not allowed outside, then where are we all supposed to go?” one man Schofield interviewed asked, framing the central question of the article. 

Where can people go when the left and right alike are uncomfortable coexisting with them? How can our society fix a problem that we have attempted to resolve using both extreme sympathy and extreme shame? Schofield offers a solution: “What’s needed is a broad, sustained transformational effort designed to bring those pushed to the margins back into the fold and to prevent people from being pushed out in the first place. What’s needed is a politics that is focused not just on keeping people alive, but on enabling everyone to flourish as the social beings they are.”

In late June, Professor of Education Mara Tieken was a panelist on an episode of Maine Calling, Maine Public’s weekday call-in show, focused on rural students. The episode examined the “options and goals” for rural students in higher education.

Tieken studies rural education and students; her book Educated Out: How Rural Students Navigate Elite Colleges—And What It Costs Them, published by the University of Chicago Press and released in May, is a study exploring the ways that geography impacts the experiences of first-generation students from rural communities — from access to higher education, experiences during college, and postgraduation opportunities.

In August, Tieken, who received the 2024 Kroepsch Award for Excellence in Teaching, was also featured in Ed. Magazine, the publication of Harvard Graduate School of Education, where she received both her master’s in education and her doctorate.