Skidmore College - Scope Magazine Spring 2019

12 SCOPE SPRING 2019 INSPIRED COMPOSER Evan Mack , teaching pro- fessor of music, has been named a Top 30 Professional of the Year by Musical Amer- ica. The magazine noted that Mack was “considered one of the most gifted composers of his generation by industry insiders.” Mack’s opera “The Ghosts of Gatsby” won the National Opera Association’s Argento Competition in Salt Lake City and will be staged at the association’s national conference in Cleveland in January. His opera “Yeltsin in Texas” will premiere at the Opera in the Heights New Works Festival the follow- ing month. The comedic chamber opera, with libretto by Josh Maguire, presents the story of Russian Presi- dent Boris Yeltsin’s visit to a Houston supermarket that challenges his view of communism. GRADY-WILLIS TO LAUNCH BLACK STUDIES PROGRAM Winston Grady-Willis is returning to Skidmore as the inaugural director of the College’s Black Studies Program. Grady-Willis, who taught American studies at Skidmore from 2008 to 2011 and also served as the College’s director of intercultural studies, returns to campus from Portland State University, where he directed the School of Gender, Race and Nations. He has also taught at Metropolitan State University in Denver, Colorado, and at Syracuse University. He holds a B.A. in history from Columbia University, an MPS in Africana stud- ies from Cornell University and a Ph.D. in U.S. history from Emory University. ALDARONDO NAMED GUGGENHEIM FELLOW Cecilia Aldarondo, a filmmaker and assistant professor of English, has been named a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow by The John Simon Guggenheim Memo- rial Foundation. “I am thrilled to have the support I need to continue two docu- mentaries I am currently directing, one on the aftermath of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, and the other exploring the keen anguish of adolescence,” Aldarondo says. Aldarondo’s “Memories of a Penitent Heart” premiered at the 2016 Tribeca Film Festival and was broadcast on the “POV” documentary series in 2017. In 2015, she was named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film.” A COMPLICATED LEGACY Associate Professor of His- tory Matthew Hockenos ’ “Then They Came for Me: Martin Niemöller, the Pastor Who Defied the Nazis,” presents a new biography of Martin Niemöller, a Ger- man pastor heroized in postwar Germany for standing up to the Nationalist Socialist regime, but whose life was much complicated in Hockenos’ telling. A review in The Wall Street Journal called the book “gripping”: “In Mr. Hockenos’s telling, Niemöller is neither a hero nor an idol; he is a person to be admired because he expressed genuine contrition and proved able to change.” The New Yorker, similarly, notes that “Hock- enos’s portrait sheds valuable light on a man and a society willing to overlook the sins of a leader whose interests initially seemed to dovetail with their own.” Hockenos, the inaugural Harriet Johnson Toadvine ’56 Chair in 20th Century History, also penned an op-ed on Niemöller for Time magazine. F A C U L T Y H I G H L I G H T S Mack: Jaimee Dunning; Aldarondo contributed photo; Hockenos: Erin Covey