Getting to know you
Sarah Day-O’Connell has an 18th-century wig she’s happy to lend out. Oscar Pérez came to the U.S. 11 years ago, to live in Wisconsin, with no coat or jacket in his bag. Chris Vecsey was an all-state euphonium player and baseball pitcher in high school. Leigh Wilton thinks deeply about her multiracial identity. Smriti Tiwari hails fromKathmandu in the Himalayas.
Just a few personal details about Skidmore’s new faculty members this fall: 22 women and 17 men (including Skidmore grads Eric Egan ’08, Jess Mahatthananchai ’09, and Jacob Deblois ’10) in 18 disciplines.
As a fun and informative way of introducing them, the dean of the faculty collected scribbled anecdotes about them on index cards and read them at September’s faculty meeting.
Day-O’Connell, with a Ph.D. from Cornell, specializes in theories of music performance from the 18th century to the present day. She’s been struck by the “abundance of not-to-be-missed events at Skidmore,” adding that her students enjoy connecting ideas from these events with their music class conversations. “As a result, I get to keep learning too!”
Pérez, who earned a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, focuses on Hispanic transatlantic literature and film of the 20th and 21st centuries, especially representations of science, technology, and medicine.
Vecsey, who came to Skidmore for its “well-developed neuroscience program,” is intrigued with learning, memory, and sleep. His research uses fruit flies to understand how signals in the brain control sleep and wakefulness. Vecsey’s Ph.D. is from the University of Pennsylvania.
With a Ph.D. from Rutgers, Wilton is an experimental psychologist who studies the “socio-contextual factors” that influence how people experience race, ethnicity, and diversity in their lives.
Tiwari, who earned a Ph.D. from American University, is an economist who studies the constraints and decisions faced by poor households in developing countries.
More anecdotes and details on other new professors are here. ~ By Peter MacDonald
