Faculty Advisory Board

Meet Our Faculty Advisors

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.

Nicholas Jacobs

Assistant Professor of Government

Faculty Associate Director

Nicholas Jacobs is a political scientist whose research focuses on multi-level governance and the politicization of administrative power. He has published over two dozen peer-reviewed articles and book-chapters on topics ranging from school segregation, tax reform, and America’s urban-rural divide. His first book, What Happened to the Vital Center?, with Oxford University Press, explores how institutional developments throughout the 20^th century created incentives to craft public policies away from median voter and use administrative tools as a mobilizing strategy for party activists. He received the American Political Science Association’s John Kincaid award for his research on federalism and intergovernmental relations and he regularly comments on American politics for local and national media outlets. At Colby, he teaches courses on American political development, public policy, political science research methods, and institutional reform. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia and a B.A. from the University of Mary Washington.

Alison Bates

Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies

Dr. Alison Bates is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at Colby College. Dr. Bates researches social acceptance of renewable energy systems and implements an equity and justice framework to inform decision-making in the energy transition. Dr. Bates has more than a decade of experience researching offshore wind development, and the possibilities for technical solutions to social challenges with floating wind. She has worked on national energy policy with U.S. Senator Coons to develop markets and policies for renewable energy infrastructure along the Atlantic Outer Continental Shelf and served in an advisory role with energy markets planning in Maine with state agencies, NGOs, and industry. She earned her Ph.D. in Marine Policy at the University of Delaware Center for Carbon-free Power Integration and has many years of experience in the non-profit sector for environmental education and public land conservation.

AB Brown

Assistant Professor of Contemporary Performance

AB Brown is a performance artist, writer, and educator working in the homeland of the Wabanaki/Maine. They create research-based performances, rituals, and installations to interrogate the ways colonial histories persist in contemporary quotidian structures and practices. They are currently working on two large-scale projects, a haunted botany, which looks at the colonial afterlives of human relationships to various plant species and Ceremony 332, a series of performance rituals that reroute the nationalist, classed, and racialized logics embedded in many existing queer and trans memorial practices. Their scholarship considers the colonial logics embedded in the asylum system in South Africa and how queer African refugees stage “performances of statelessness” to enact formations self, community, and belonging outside of conventional asylum policies and processes. Their work has been supported by the
MAP Fund, the Institute for Citizens & Scholars (formerly Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation), the New England Humanities Consortium, and scholar residency with the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art’s Time Based Arts festival. Their writing can be found in The Brooklyn Rail, Women and Performance: a journal of feminist theory, Text and Performance Quarterly, the Journal of African Cultural Studies, and the edited anthologies Queer Nightlife and Queer and Trans Migrations: Dynamics of Illegalization, Detention, and Deportation. They received their PhD in Performance Studies from Northwestern University and are currently Assistant Professor of Contemporary Performance at Colby College.

Stacy Doore

Clare Boothe Luce Assistant Professor of Computer Science

Stacy A. Doore is the Clare Boothe Luce Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Colby College in Waterville, Maine. She received her Ph.D. in Spatial Information Science and Engineering at the University of Maine. Stacy is the founder of the INSITE Lab, a research lab focusing on emerging assistive technologies including mixed reality, robotics, and artificial intelligence to help people gain access to better spatial information for exploring multi-scale environments. Her current research explores spatial reasoning and language, multimodal interfaces, human-robot teams for non-visual navigation, and computer science ethics pedagogy. This interdisciplinary work partners with colleagues in digital and computational studies, philosophy, arts and cinema studies, environmental science, and psychology. She teaches courses in Introduction to Computational Thinking, Advanced Databases, and Computing, Ethics, and Society. She is a member of the Autonomous Vehicle Research group, co-creator of the Computing Ethics Narratives project funded by the Mozilla Responsible Computing Challenge (RCC), and a member of the ACM Ethics in Computing Education Task Force. Stacy currently serves as the chair of the Mozilla RCC alumni group. Her research has been supported by NSF, NIH, U.S. DOT as well as the Luce Foundation, the Mozilla Foundation, and the Google
Foundation.

Sarah Duff

Assistant Professor of History

Sarah Emily Duff is an historian of age, gender, and reproduction in nineteenth- and twentieth-century South Africa and the British Empire. The author of Changing Childhoods in the Cape Colony: Dutch Reformed Church Evangelicalism and Colonial Childhood, 1860-1895 (2015) and Childhood and Youth in African History (2022), her work thus far has focused largely on histories of children, childhood, youth, and young people. She is currently at work on projects which draw together her interests in age and sexuality (a history of sex education in South Africa) and gender, age, and reproduction (histories of menopause in the nineteenth-century British Empire), the latter of which is funded by a New Directions Fellowship from Mellon. Before moving to Maine, she was Senior Researcher at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, and she taught and held postdoctoral positions at Stellenbosch University in South Africa and at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Yang Fan

Todger Anderson Assistant Professor of Investing and Behavioral Economics

Yang Fan is an economist that specializes on corporate governance and innovation. Professor Fan’s research ranges from the diversity of corporate boards to innovation decisions at startups. His most recent work examines the technological costs of innovation at publicly traded firms, where firms that are too unique or differentiated are often disadvantaged due their inability to build on innovations at peer firms. This result helps explain why firms today, on average, are less willing to take innovation risks. At Colby, Professor Fan teaches courses on Corporate Finance, Computational Finance, and Principles of Macroeconomics and enjoys regularly engaging students outside of the traditional classroom, acting as the faculty advisor to the Colby Student Investment Club and Colby’s First-Generation Investors. Professor Fan holds a Ph.D. from the University of Washington and a B.A. from the University of California at San Diego.

Aaron Hanlon

Associate Professor of English

Chair – Science, Technology, and Society Department

Aaron R. Hanlon is an associate professor of English with research interests in philosophy of fiction, the computational study of literature, and early modern history and philosophy of science in Britain. He is the author of two books, A World of Disorderly Notions: Quixote and the Logic of Exceptionalism (University of Virginia Press, 2019) and Empirical Knowledge in the Eighteenth-Century Novel (Cambridge University Press, 2022), and co-editor of the essay collection British Literature and Technology, 1600-1830 (Bucknell University Press, 2023). He writes on a range of topics for broader audiences in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, The Atlantic, and others. Aaron is a dedicated supporter of Tottenham Hotspur FC in the English Premier League and enjoys working on soccer data analytics projects on the side when he’s not playing the beautiful game in his spare time.

Farah Qureshi

Assistant Professor of Anthropology

Farah Qureshi is an economic anthropologist, researching the impact of algorithmic credit scoring on mobile money payment systems in Kenya. Her work includes anthropology of money, financial systems, automated decision making, the social impact of AI systems, data justice, virtual anthropology, and contemporary East African society.

Jennifer Yoder

Robert E. Diamond Professor of Government and Global Studies

Professor Yoder holds a joint appointment with the Department of Government and the Global Studies Program and teaches courses on European politics and societies. Her special interests are German politics, remembrance and reckoning after communism, and borderlands in Europe. Her latest project examines the construction of European memory and the role the European Union plays in facilitating discussions of the past, particularly across the old West-East divide. Yoder is the author of two books: From East Germans to Germans? The New Post-Communist Elite (1999) and Crafting Democracy: Regional Politics in Post-Communist Europe (2013). Her articles have appeared in Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte, German Politics and Society, German Politics, German Studies Review, East European Politics and Societies, Europe-Asia Studies and Regional and Federal Studies.