Special Fall Lectures Announced by Skidmore

SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y. - Two highlights of Skidmore's academic calendar -- the Steloff Lecture and the Fiscus Lecture -- are scheduled back-to-back this fall. Each will be delivered by a renowned scholar and both are open without charge to the public.

Nobel Laureate to Deliver Steloff Lecture

Seamus Heaney, who won the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature "for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past," will give this year's Steloff Lecture at 8 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 4, in Janet Kinghorn Bernhard Theater. Heaney will receive an honorary degree before he lectures.

Born in Northern Ireland in 1939, Heaney was, as a young man, deeply involved in Irish politics, and his involvement is reflected in a number of his books, most especially the 1976 volume North, which won the W.H. Smith Award and the Duff Cooper Prize. Several of his other books focus on questions of Irish history, on troubling moral issues, and on personal matters. Among his best-known books are Station Island (1984), The Haw Lantern (1987, winner of the Whitbread Award) and The Spirit Level (1996, winner of the Commonwealth Award and Whitbread Book of the Year.)

"Arguably the finest poet now writing in English, Seamus Heaney has never fully reconciled himself to the legacy of English verse," writes James Shapiro in The New York Times Book Review, critiquing Heaney's new translation of Beowulf (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000). Shapiro continues, "The poem's subject matter was a good match for Heaney's poetic strengths and interests: a hero's victories over inhuman threats to hearth and homeland and the fragility of social bonds in a world riven by violence. But Beowulf was also the first great poem in English, celebrated as the font of that alliterative tradition." Shapiro predicts that generations of readers will be grateful for Heaney's accomplished translation. The book has been a suprise best-seller in both the United States and England.

Since 1996, Heaney has been Emerson Poet-in-Residence at Harvard University, residing there for six weeks every other autumn. He earlier was Harvard's Boylston Professor of Poetry and Rhetoric and from 1989 to 1994, was a professor of poetry at Oxford University.

Skidmore's Steloff Lecture was established by the late Frances Steloff, a native of Saratoga Springs and well-known patron of writers who established the Gotham Book Mart in New York City.

"Warren Court Revolution" to Be Judicial Scholar's Topic

Boston University professor Mark Silverstein will give this year's Ronald J. Fiscus Lecture, titled "The Real Warren Court Revolution," at 8 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 5, in Gannett Auditorium of Palamountain Hall.

A top scholar on nominations and judicial appointments to the U.S. Supreme Court, Silverstein has focused most recently on the evolving political and legal contexts that have shaped the nomination process since the late 1960s. His book, Judicious Choices -- The New Politics of Supreme Court Confirmations (W.W. Norton & Co., 1994, updated 1995) analyzes the politics behind Supreme Court confirmations of the recent past and the transformation of this process from a tightly controlled, leadership-dominated deference to presidential choice to a thoroughly democratized process, shaped by extraordinary public participation and media coverage. Writes Silverstein, "The harsh reality of recent experiences -- that modern interest group and media politics shape the selection of judges to our highest courts -- has provoked a good deal of concern on the part of politician and citizen alike. Reform, however, is not only unlikely -- but perhaps ill-advised as well."

Silverstein also is the author of Constitutional Faiths: Felix Frankfurter, Hugo Black and the Process of Judicial Decision Making (Cornell University Press, 1984). This analysis of the judicial philosophy of two of the best-known Supreme Court justices of the 20th century won the Edwin S. Corwin Award of the American Political Science Association in 1983. The prize goes to the best doctoral dissertation in the field of public law.

His publications include two additional books and a number of articles and chapters in such publications as the National Law Journal, Journal of Law and Politics, and Political Science Quarterly. He has lectured widely on the topics of judicial nominations, judicial recruitment, and the Supreme Court confirmation process.

In addition to the Corwin Award, Silverstein is the recipient of the Neu Family Award for Excellence in Teaching at the College of Arts and Sciences at Boston University, a Brookings Institution Fellowship for governmental studies, and the Clark Award for Distinguished Teaching at Cornell University.

Silverstein earned an A.B., J.D., and Ph.D. degrees at Cornell University. He has been a faculty member at Boston University since 1983.

Inaugurated in 1991, the Fiscus Lecture honors the late Ronald J. Fiscus, a Skidmore faculty member from 1980 until his death in 1990. Fiscus was a specialist on constitutional law.