What others are saying
The general response to Generations was one of delight and enthusiasm. I believe it affirmed both the alumni and the professors.
Splendid alums, Splendid Generations, one of my all-time favorite Skidmore events…. Last weekend I was intrigued, excited, fascinated, and inspired.
The presentations were just top notch and a real testimony to the value of a liberal arts education.
SYMPOSIUM EVENT ORGANIZERS
Joseph Cermatori
jcermato@skidmore.edu
518-580-5163
Joseph Cermatori is associate professor of English at Skidmore College, where his teaching and research explore modernism, drama and performance, literary criticism, aesthetic theory, intellectual history, and the intersections of literature and philosophy. He is the author of Baroque Modernity: An Aesthetics of Theater (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021), winner of the American Comparative Literature Association’s Helen Tartar First Book Award and an honorable mention for the International Comparative Literature Association’s Anna Balakian First Book Prize, as well as a finalist for numerous other major book prizes in modernist and theater studies. His essays and reviews have appeared in PMLA, Modern Drama, Theatre Journal, PAJ, Salmagundi, and The New York Times, among other venues. He is currently preparing an updated edition of Thornton Wilder’s collected nonfiction writings, while his other recent research addresses Walter Benjamin, Gertrude Stein, opera, and queer modernism. Cermatori has worked extensively as a critic, editor, and dramaturg, including collaborations with director R. B. Schlather on performances of Handel's operas at Hudson Hall in Hudson, New York. He serves on the editorial board of Imagined Theatres and currently directs Skidmore’s Periclean Honors Forum.
Barbara Black
bblack@skidmore.edu
518-580-5145
Barbara Black is Professor of English and Tisch Chair in Arts and Letters at Skidmore College, where she teaches courses on nineteenth-century British literature and culture. She is the author of On Exhibit (Virginia 2000), A Room of His Own (Ohio 2012), and Hotel London (Ohio State 2019), which won a Book of the Year Award from the Victorian Society in America. Black is co-editor of the Anglo-South African Olive Schreiner’s Dreams for Broadview Press (2020). In addition to her teaching at Skidmore, where she has received the Ciancio Award for Excellence in Teaching as well as been awarded the Moseley Lectureship, Black is on the graduate faculty at the Bread Loaf School of English, where she holds the M. Ruth Marino Professorship for 2026. Her essays have appeared in such venues as PMLA, Victorian Poetry, Dickens Studies Annual, Salmagundi, and the Oxford Bibliographies. She has served on the Editorial Advisory Committee for PMLA, the Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies board, and as Book Review Editor for Nineteenth-Century Contexts. She currently serves on the Advisory Board for Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies.