Two Beacon College professors made their marks in print recently in scholarly and literary journals.
Dr. Stefan Krause, assistant professor of anthropology at Beacon College, and Reed M. Perkins, professor of environmental science and chemistry at Queens University of Charlotte in North Carolina, teamed up on “Adapting to Climate Change Impacts in Yap State, Federated States of Micronesia: The Importance of Environmental Conditions and Intangible Cultural Heritage.” The article will be published in the May edition of Island Studies Journal, a scholarly journal, based at the University of Prince Edward Island, Canada, that focuses on the interdisciplinary study of the conditions and issues that affect our “world of islands.”
In the article, Reed and Krause, an expert on the Yap State and Federated States of Micronesia — a clusters of four main islands and 14 coral atolls and smaller outer islands in the western Pacific — analyze how the Yap State has adapted in the wake of rising sea levels, saltwater intrusion, and other ruinous impacts of climate change.
The full article is available for review.
Meanwhile, Dr. William Nesbitt, professor of English, published “Blue,” a homily on the human costs of homelessness and society’s inertia and disaffection with one of America’s intractable ills, in the April 2018 edition of One Person’s Trash. The print literary journal publishes prose and poetry about and by the homeless.
His 2007 visit to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where he beheld an installation piece called “Indigo Blue,” which incorporated 18,000 shirts, inspired passages such as:
For the love of something that might be holy, I want to grab these shirts and give them to the people outside. Fling shirts out of windows. Send shirts up flagpoles. Watch shirts float down from the sky like loose kites, like blue ghosts hugging lost lovers, like great birds of blue coming to roost on the bare and tattered shoulders of the poor. Pieces of the torn sky. A phantom army of blue marching out the front door. I want to be the Robin Hood, the Gandhi, the Mother Theresa of blue shirts. A Christ of cerulean; a Buddha of blue. Some small champion of cobalt. I want to dye myself blue for the cause. The cult of blue. A swirling blue rapture. Silence is a kind of blue. Blue lips kissing blue faces. Blue children. The blue note.
To read the piece in its entirety, you can buy the current issue of One Person’s Trash for $4.