Research Centers and Resources

Bowdoin is designed for student success at every level. Campus resources include one of the most distinguished liberal arts college libraries in the country, the nation’s oldest college art museum, the Peary-MacMillan Arctic Museum, the Coastal Studies Center, and 200-acre Kent Island – a scientific research station located in the Bay of Fundy. Bowdoin's campus is wired and wireless so that students can connect to the digital world from almost any campus location.

Arctic Studies Center:
The Arctic Studies Center was started in 1985 to link the resources of Bowdoin’s Peary-MacMillan Arctic Museum and College library with teaching and research efforts. The Museum, which is named after two famous Arctic explorers and Bowdoin alumni, Admiral Robert Peary (Class of 1877) and Donald B. MacMillan (Class of 1890), has unique collections of ethnographic photos and films documenting expeditions and lifeways of Native Americans; a collection of equipment taken from Peary’s and MacMillan’s many Arctic explorations, natural history specimens, and painting and drawings made by Inuit and Indians of Arctic North America. Through course offerings, field research programs, employment opportunities, and special events, the center promotes anthropological, archaeological, geological and environmental investigations of the North.
Bowdoin College Library:
Bowdoin has an exceptionally strong undergraduate liberal arts library, offering collections approaching one million volumes and access to extensive digital resources. These print and online sources include notable research materials, such as government documents, manuscript and rare book holdings, Bowdoin College archives, and large collections of photographs, current and historic newspapers, microforms, documentary and feature films, sound recordings, and musical scores.
Bowdoin’s distinguished collections, built up over more than 200 years, are housed primarily in Hawthorne-Longfellow Library, which includes the George J. Mitchell Department of Special Collections and Archives. Hatch Science Library contains material related to the sciences and mathematics; smaller branch libraries are devoted to art, music, and film studies/language instruction.
Bowdoin College Museum of Art:
The collections of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art range from the cultures of the ancient Mediterranean world to work created in the last years of the 20th century. The antiquities collection, containing over 1,200 Assyrian, Egyptian, Greek, Roman and Byzantine objects, is the most comprehensive of any small college museum in the country. Western Europe is represented by painting, sculpture and decorative arts, including a group of Italian and Spanish Renaissance and Baroque paintings given by the Kress Foundation in 1981 and by one of the nation's largest collections of medals and plaquettes, given in 1966 by Amanda Marchesa Molinari. American art is particularly strong and comprehensive from the colonial period onward, with notable bodies of work by Feke, Stuart, Copley, John Sloan and Rockwell Kent and individual highlights by Heade, Eakins, Cassatt, Gorky, and Wyeth. The Winslow Homer Collection consists of a selection of paintings, primarily important watercolors, a variety of memorabilia donated by the artist's family, and a comprehensive group of his etchings and wood engravings. Prints and drawings constitute a major resource, from the Old Masters through to the present moment, with an important and growing representation of 19th and 20th century photography. Holdings in oriental art include objects from China, Japan, Korea and India with a special strength in ceramics. A small collection of African, New World and Pacific Island artifacts includes masks, reliquary figures, statuettes and a considerable group of Pre-Columbian jades. The collections are continually growing, through purchase, gift and bequest.
Coastal Studies Center:
Located on Orr's Island, Maine, the Coastal Studies Center is devoted to interdisciplinary teaching and research in disciplines including archaeology, history, marine biology, terrestrial ecology, ornithology, geology, and visual arts. The Center’s facilities include a marine biological laboratory with flowing seawater for laboratory observation of live marine organisms, and a terrestrial ecology laboratory, which serves as a field station for research and study of coastal ecology. It is surrounded on three sides by the ocean and encompasses open fields, orchards, and old-growth spruce-fir forest. An active program of summer research brings together students and faculty from varied disciplines to study and share work related to Bowdoin's coastal environment.
Educational Research & Development:
Bowdoin's pioneering Educational Research and Development (ER&D) program responds to the growing need to provide support for technology-related faculty research and instructional programs. The ER&D staff partner with faculty to explore, facilitate, design, develop, assess, and evaluate technology-related projects that receive internal and/or external grant support and that open up opportunities to collaborate with other institutions.
Kent Island - Bowdoin Scientific Station:
The College maintains a scientific field station on Kent Island, off Grand Manan Island in the Bay of Fundy, New Brunswick, Canada, where students and faculty can conduct research in ecology, animal behavior, marine biology, botany, geology, and meteorology. The field station has built an international reputation, with more than 150 publications based on research at Kent Island, many of them co-authored by Bowdoin students. Although formal courses are not offered at the station, students from Bowdoin and other institutions select problems for investigation on the island during the summer and conduct independent fieldwork with advice and assistance from faculty members. Students have the opportunity to collaborate with faculty members and graduate students from numerous universities and colleges.
Women's Resource Center:
The mission of the Bowdoin College Women's Resource Center is to support and enhance the academic, personal, and extracurricular development of women at Bowdoin, and to build awareness of gender issues existing on campus and in society.