Acta

Highlights of faculty and staff activities

Jacqueline Azzarto, social work, received an award this spring from the Saratoga County Economic Opportunity Council. She was recognized for her leadership roles in developing programs to serve the poor and in encouraging Skidmore students to work in community agencies.
Ross Professor Terence Diggory, English, organized and chaired a panel at the sixth conference of the International Association for Word and Image Studies in Hamburg, Germany, in July. Also, Diggory reports seeing Timothy Hitchens ’03 at the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church USA in Columbus, Ohio, this summer. Diggory attended as the elder commissioner for the Albany area, while Hitchens was a youth advisory delegate for Carlisle, Pa.
Scott Feldsher, theater, had his The World Is Round—a “cubist opera” based on a Gertrude Stein children’s tale and with music by Pea Hicks—performed in workshop in Los Angeles this summer. The piece was first conceived at Skidmore.
Catherine Golden, 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. The essay won the thirtieth-anniversary Northeast Modern Language Association Prize.
Gouache paintings of China by Doretta Miller, art, were featured in an article in Watercolor: An American Artist Publication, Fall 2002.
Patricia Ann Miller, student aid, retired after thirty-seven years at Skidmore. Most recently she was associate director of student aid and family finance.
Barbara Rhoades, Tang Museum, retired after thirty-two years at Skidmore. She helped organize and document the college’s permanent collection of artworks and served as registrar at the Tang.
Jay Rogoff, English, presented a talk, “No Place Like Home: Ballparks, Cities, and Visions of Paradise,” in Buffalo, Utica, and Colonie, N.Y., this spring. The lectures were sponsored by the New York Council for the Humanities. Rogoff has also published several poems lately in The Progressive, The Comstock Review, Many Mountains Moving, and other journals.
Linda Simon, English, gave a paper titled “The Empowered Physician: William Wilberforce Baldwin and 19th-Century Medical Therapeutics” at this summer’s International Henry James Conference in Paris. Baldwin was James’s physician.
This past year Joel Smith, philosophy, chaired the board of ASIANetwork, a national consortium for the study of Asia in small liberal-arts colleges. His duties included organizing ASIANetwork’s tenth anniversary conference near Chicago in April.
Mary Stange, religion, had an essay titled “The Political Intolerance of Academic Feminism” published in the June 21 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Mason Stokes, English, published an article in issue 92 of Transition, the Harvard-based journal of race and culture. His essay discusses the exploration of homosexuality that was part of the literary and artistic Harlem Renaissance.
David Vella, mathematics, helped organize the annual Hudson River Undergraduate Mathematics Conference, held in April at Hamilton College. Also attending from Skidmore were mathematicians Mark Hofmann and Mark Huibregtse and several of their students. Vella chaired a session on abstract algebra; he and three Skidmore students gave talks as well.