The Goldfarb Faculty Advisory Committee is charged with advising the Executive Director on ways to integrate Goldfarb Center for Public Affairs programming with the current curriculum, particularly in public policy. The group helps shape policy themes and priorities, as well as helps identify speakers and students for events. In addition, the committee helps the Center support and fund faculty-led work on issues of public policy research and development, including awarding public policy grants to faculty.
Professor Christel Kesler is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Sociology. Her research focuses on cross-national comparisons of social inequality. She is particularly interested in how political-economic institutions and social policies shape the experiences of immigrants and their host societies in North America and Western Europe. She has worked on several projects that consider immigrant socioeconomic incorporation in various countries. Other recent projects examine immigration-driven diversity’s effects on social solidarity and the welfare state and patterns of racial, ethnic, and national belonging among immigrants’ descendants. Professor Kesler’s work has appeared in journals such as the International Migration Review, Social Science Research, and Social Forces. In addition, professor Kesler teaches numerous courses on social inequality, social policy, international migration, methods for social research, and data analysis.
Adam Howard is the Charles A. Dana Professor of Education and Chair of Education Program at Colby College. Prior to Colby, he taught at Hanover College, Lesley University Graduate School of Education, and Antioch College. At Antioch, he also held the administrative positions of Director of Teacher Education and Associate Dean of Faculty. Before teaching at the college level, he taught high school English and history at Cincinnati Country Day School and directed a non-profit organization designed to provide academic support to disadvantaged middle school students while encouraging high school and college students to consider a teaching career path.
Professor Howard’s research explores social class issues in education with a particular focus on privilege and elite education. In particular, he studies the relationship between identity development and advantages in order to form better understandings of how privilege works through the daily practices of privileged individuals and the structures, policies, and practices of their educational institutions. He is the author of over 80 articles, books, and essays, including Learning Privilege: Lessons of Power and Identity in Affluent Schooling, Negotiating Privilege and Identity in Educational Contexts (with 23 Colby students), and Educating Elites: Class Privilege and Educational Advantage (with Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández).
Associate Professor of Government
Lindsay Mayka is an Assistant Professor of Government at Colby College. Her areas of research include social-citizenship rights for marginalized populations, citizen engagement in the policymaking process, and the politics of institutional weakness, with a regional focus on Latin America. Mayka’s first book, Building Participatory Institutions in Latin America: Reform Coalitions and Institutional Change, was published in 2019 by Cambridge University Press. The doctoral dissertation on which her book is based received the Latin American Studies Association/Oxfam Martin Diskin Dissertation Award.
In 2020, Mayka received the Clarence Stone Scholar Award from the APSA Urban and Local Politics Section, which recognizes scholars who are pre-tenure or recently advanced who are making significant contributions to the study of urban politics. Her research has appeared in Comparative Politics, Journal of Democracy, Journal of Development Studies, and Latin American Politics and Society. Mayka has served as a Democracy Fellow at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at the Harvard Kennedy School, and a visiting scholar at the University of California at Berkeley’s School of Social Welfare.
She holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from UC Berkeley, an M.P.P. in public policy from UC Berkeley, and a B.A. in Political Science from Carleton College.
Robert E. Diamond Professor of Government and Global Studies
Assistant Professor of Psychology
Jin X. Goh is an Assistant Professor of Psychology. He teaches and researches topics concerning social identities and the psychology of prejudice and stereotyping. His research currently focuses on how American history and immigration policies contribute to how people think about, stereotype, and perceive Asian Americans and Asian immigrants. Prior to Colby, he completed his postdoctoral training at the University of Washington, Ph.D. at Northeastern University, and BA at Bard College.
Associate Professor of Environmental Studies
Professor Denise Bruesewitz is interested in how human activities alter aquatic ecosystem function. Specifically, she studies nitrogen, phosphorus, and carbon cycling in aquatic ecosystems with the goal of understanding how ecosystem function and ecosystem services change in response to human activities. Her ongoing projects include understanding how restored oyster reefs in New York City mitigate nutrient pollution, how lakes across the globe process carbon, and determining how rivers and estuaries in south Texas respond to drought and storms. At Colby, she will build upon ongoing research in the Belgrade Lakes, as well as local streams and rivers, with a focus on carbon and nutrient cycling in these aquatic systems.
Associate Professor of English
• Be a vibrant information hub on the most pressing current events in the world
• Increase awareness of the role of public policy to address these complex challenges
• Inspire active citizenship among the Colby Community
• Empower and build the leadership skills of Colby students
• Create networking opportunities to connect students to alumni and world leaders who have established careers in public affairs
• Spark thought-provoking public policy conversations
• Provide forum for open, healthy discourse for all (all majors, all opinions, all people)
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