Faculty-Staff Activities

Jacqueline Azzarto, associate professor of social work and director of the Social Work Program, received a National Community Action Award this spring from the Saratoga County Economic Opportunity Council. One of five community leaders to be honored, Azzarto was recognized for her work on behalf of low-income families in Saratoga County over the years. Her leadership within the EOC, as well as her work with other community agencies to develop programs to serve the poor, were cited. In addition, Azzarto’s encouragement of numerous students to work in Saratoga County community agencies was recognized.

Jay Rogoff, lecturer in English, spent eight weeks in residence at Yaddo,
Jan. 10-March 7, where he also served as special assistant to the president.

He presented his Speakers in the Humanities slide talk, “No Place Like Home:
Ballparks, Cities, and Visions of Paradise,” several times this spring: March 24 at the Preservation Foundation of Erie County in Buffalo; April 11 at Mohawk Valley Community College in Utica; and April 28 at the William K. Sanford Town Library in Colonie. The talks were sponsored by the New York Council for the Humanities. On April 9, in anticipation of the Utica presentation, he was interviewed on Utica radio about baseball, ballparks, and communities.

On April 2, in celebration of National Poetry Month and the Tang Teaching
Museum’s “Chain Reaction” Rube Goldberg exhibition, Rogoff participated in a Poetry
Chain Reaction as part of the Tang Dialogue series, along with Peg Boyers,
executive editor of Salmagundi; Barry Goldensohn, professor of English; and
six Skidmore student poets.

David Vella, associate professor of mathematics, was one of the organizers of the annual Hudson River Undergraduate Mathematics Conference (HUMC) April 27 at Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y. Also attending the event from Skidmore were Mark Hofmann, associate professor of mathematics, and Mark Huibregtse, professor and chair of the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, as well as several Skidmore students. The conference drew more than 300 participants from more than 40 colleges and universities in the Northeast.

In addition to designing and maintaining the HRUMC web site, collecting the abstracts for the talks on-line, and helping to schedule more than 120 talks, Vella chaired one of the sessions in abstract algebra and presented a lecture, “The Overlap Index of a Coupled Parabolic System.” Three Skidmore students also gave talks: Adam Lahti ’02 presented “Coxeter Groups in Nature”; Jason Dolmetsch ’03 gave a talk on “Liebniz’s Formula for pi/4”; and Kendrah Murphy ’03 gave a talk titled “Euler’s Formula for pi-squared/6.”
Skidmore has hosted the conference twice — in 1996 and in 2001. Next year marks the 10th anniversary of the HRUMC, which will convene at Union College.

Alan Wheelock, visiting associate professor of English, was the advertised speaker at Colonie Library’s book discussion series, “The John Steinbeck Centennial Celebration: 1902-2002,” funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities. He spoke on Steinbeck’s 1936 best-seller, In Dubious Battle, whose publication raised accusations of communist sentiments in the author. After delivering a short overview of the rise of radical literature during the 1930s, Wheelock joined the group for a roundtable discussion of the novel and its issues.

Publications

Catherine Golden, professor of English, published “Late 20th-Century Readers in Search of a Dickensian Heroine: Angels, Fallen Sisters, and Eccentric Women” in Modern Language Studies, Vol. 30, No. 2, (Autumn 2000), which was released this spring. Her essay received the 30th Anniversary Northeast Modern Language Association Prize. Golden’s review of Oscar Wilde’s Decorated Books has been published in Victorian Studies, Vol. 44, No. 1 (Autumn 2001). In addition, her LS2 101H class, titled “The Victorian Illustrated Book,” put on an exhibition, “Dressed to Express: Costume in Victorian Illustration,” March 18 to April 14 in the Winter Gallery of the Tang Museum.

Jay Rogoff, lecturer in English, has had several poems published recently: “The Hildesheim Doors” appeared in The Progressive, Vol. 65, No. 12 (December
2001); “Death in Waiting” in The Comstock Review, Vol. 15, No. 2 (Winter 2001); “The Field,” “Scenery,” and “The Soul” in Many Mountains Moving, Vol. 4, No. 3 (Winter 2001); “A Ghost,” “My Grandmother in the Home,” and “Toll Road, Winter” in Metroland, Vol. 25, No. 3 (Jan. 17, 2002), as that weekly paper’s first-ever poetry feature; and “Mennonites by the Sea” in The Southern Review, Vol. 38, No. 1 (Winter 2002). Two of his poems from The Cutoff have been reprinted in Line Drives: 100 Contemporary Baseball Poems, edited by Brooke Horvath and Tim Wiles (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2002). In addition, Rogoff has had the following poems accepted for publication: “First Dance” and “Last Dance” by Green Mountains Review; “Donne’s Effigy” and “The Glass of Fashion and the Mold of Form” by The Paris Review; and “Memorial Chapel” by The Progressive.

Rogoff also contributed the essay “Abstracting Anne Diggory” to the catalog of the painter’s retrospective exhibition, Anne Diggory: Twenty-Five Years, 1977-2002, which showed at the Saratoga County Arts Council Gallery April 4-27, 2002.

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