First-Year Experience Staff
Janet Casey
Director
Janet G. Casey is Professor of English and also teaches regularly in the American Studies Department. She is Director of the First-Year Experience and Director of the Arthur Vining Davis grant project for civic engagement.
Professor Casey's scholarly work is on issues of class and gender in early twentieth
century American fiction. She has published two monographs—Dos Passos and the Ideology
of the Feminine (Cambridge UP, 1998) and A New Heartland: Women, Modernity, and the
Agrarian Ideal in America (Oxford UP 2009)—and she is editor of The Novel and the
American Left: Critical Essays on Depression-Era Fiction (Iowa UP, 2004). Current
work includes editing another volume tentatively entitled Teaching Tainted Lit: Popular
American Fiction and the Pleasures and Perils of the Classroom. She is a founding
member of the Middlebrow Research Network and recently served as the first Senior
Chair of the Modern Language Association’s Committee on Contingent Labor in the Profession.
For over twenty years she has been actively involved in adult literacy programs in
New York state.
Marla Melito
Student Academic Development Coordinator
Marla has a B.A. in English from Skidmore College, an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from
George Mason University, and an M.Ed. in Curriculum and Instruction also from George
Mason University. She returned to Skidmore in 2005 to teach in the English Department.
Prior to her return, she was a Visiting Assistant Professor of English and Associate
Director of Fall for the Book at George Mason University, served as a writer-in–residence
for the DC Creative Writing Workshop and DC WritersCorps, and held a variety of jobs
in international public health.
Aletheia (Allie) Taylor
Administrative Assistant
Allie supports the First-Year Experience with her organizational and management skills, which are used on a daily basis to track and maintain multiple department office budgets, assist peer mentors, aid students, parents, faculty and staff with FYE based information and questions, assist the coordinator with arrangement details for speakers, events and a variety of special programs including Orientation.
