Faculty Presenters

Catherine White Berheide is professor of sociology at Skidmore College and principal investigator for the National Science Foundation ADVANCE PAID grant “SUN—Skidmore Union Network: Supporting Women Faculty in STEM at Liberal Arts Colleges.” She earned her doctorate at Northwestern University and did her undergraduate work at Beloit College. Author of dozens of journal articles, she is co-editor of three books: Gender Transformation in the Academy; Included in Sociology: Learning Climates That Cultivate Racial and Ethnic Diversity and Women, Family, and Policy: A Global Perspective. Like many of her most recent publications, the paper she will be presenting at the Humanistic Inquiry Symposium on Metamorphosis is based on research conducted as part of the NSF ADVANCE grant. She has twice been named a Carnegie Scholar by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. In 2003, she won the American Sociological Association Section on Teaching and Learning Hans O. Mauksch Award for distinguished contributions to undergraduate sociology. She is finishing her term as president of the Phi Beta Kappa Society in 2018 and has served as secretary of the American Sociological Association.

April Bernard is a poet, novelist and essayist; she has been the recipient of the Walt Whitman Prize from the Academy of American poets, a Guggenheim grant, and a Whitney Humanities Center fellowship. Her books of poems are Brawl & Jag, Romanticism, Swan Electric, Psalms, and Blackbird Bye Bye; her novels are Pirate Jenny and Miss Fuller, which was shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award. A frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books and other journals, she is professor of English and director of creative writing at Skidmore College and a member of the faculty at the Bennington MFA Writing Seminars.

Ian Berry is Dayton Director of the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery and professor of liberal arts at Skidmore College. He arrived at Skidmore in 2000 as the Tang’s inaugural curator and is responsible for the overall direction of the Museum’s curatorial program. Berry is a leader in the field of college and university museums and is a regular speaker on interdisciplinary and inventive curatorial practice and teaching in museums. Well-known for his active publication record, Berry has produced books that have garnered numerous awards including eight prizes in the American Association of Museums’ annual publications awards, and annual reviews of notable books in many newspapers and magazines. He teaches the Art History seminars "Inside the Museum" and "The Artist Interview" and is a frequent guest speaker for a wide variety of academic departments. From 2006 to 2012 Berry served as consulting director of the Emerson Gallery at Hamilton College, and in 2009–10 was the Roy Acuff Chair of Excellence in the Creative Arts at Austin Peay University. Berry has chaired the Visual Arts Panel of the New York State Council on the Arts and is a Museum Association of New York Board member. He serves on several advisory committees, including Cranbrook Academy National Advisory Committee, Artist Advisory Board of the Fabric Workshop and Museum and Saratoga Springs Arts Commission, among other regional and national arts organizations.

Will Bond is a founding member of SITI Company, with which he has performed internationally in Orestes, The Medium, Culture of Desire, Bob (Drama Desk Nomination best solo performance), War of the Worlds and Radio Macbeth. He has toured with Tadashi Suzuki and SCOT in Dionysus and Lear, and with Robert Wilson’s Persephone. Bond was a featured performer in A RITE with the SITI & Bill T Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company commissioned for the 100th anniversary of Stravinsky's Rite Of Spring. Original works include History of the World from the Very Beginning, a monologue with music; I'll Crane for You, a solo dance work commissioned from Deborah Hay; and The [IM]Perfect Human and Option Delete, two short dance works. Bond was awarded a prestigious 2014 EMPAC Dance MOViES commission for the short film Lost & Found premiering in January 2015. He is published in Routledge Press's Companion to Stanislavsky. Bond is currently senior artist-in-Residence in the Skidmore College Theater Department.

Guitarist Joel Brown has performed at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center, the Barbican, on NBC, the BBC and CNN. With Chris Brubeck’s Triple Play he has performed in 48 states and has made many recordings.  A distinguished artist-in-residence, Brown has been on the Skidmore College music faculty for 33 years.

Joseph Cermatori, assistant professor of English, teaches courses in the long history of modern theater and drama and conducts research on the intersections of theatrical and theoretical writing. He is currently at work on a book on the subject of critical exchanges between philosophy and performance from 1875 to 1950, currently titled Baroque Dialectics: Theater, Aesthetics, and the Origins of the Modern. His writing has been published in Modern Drama, Theatre Topics, Theatre Journal, Theater, Imagined Theatres, Brooklyn Rail, Village Voice and New York Times, and he is a contributing editor for the interdisciplinary contemporary arts magazine PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art.

Dan Curley is associate professor of classics at Skidmore College. His teaching and research interests include ancient tragedy, Latin poetry and the classical world on film. Common to all of these is the creation and transformation of mythical characters for reading and viewing communities. Recent work includes Tragedy in Ovid: Theater, Metatheater, and the Transformation of a Genre (Cambridge University Press, 2013); and “Divine Animation: Clash of the Titans (1981)” in Cyrino and Safran (ed.) and Classical Myth on Screen (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). 

Crystal Dea Moore is professor of social work and is currently serving as interim dean of the faculty/vice president for academic affairs. Deeply interested in how loss transforms individual lives as well as relationships, she is working on a book project that examines the phenomenon of missing persons from a systems perspective. The metamorphosis associated with such ambiguous loss creates challenges in making meaning while coping with the presence of absence.

Debra Fernandez, chair of the Dance Department, joined the Skidmore faculty in 1991 and has been making dances nonstop ever since. She has dedicated her life to teaching and to the act of creation, and there is no way she would ever carry a gun to school!

Bina Gogineni is assistant professor of English at Skidmore College, where she teaches postcolonial theory and literature with an emphasis on global Anglophone literature. She received her A.B. in English from Harvard University and her Ph.D. in English and comparative literature from Columbia University. Under advance contract with Northwestern Universityh Press, the book she is completing analyzes the nexus of enchantment, colonialism and the novel form in Indian and comparative contexts. She is also in the midst of three collaborations that bring postcolonial critique to bear on questions of the Anthropocene: papers co-authored with Kyle Nichols, a Skidmore geomorphologist; a large-scale interdisciplinary research project in development with co-P.I.s Kyle Nichols and Nikolas Kompridis, political philosopher and founder-director of Australian Catholic University’s Institute for Social Justice; and an exhibition co-curated with Mitch McEwen, a Princeton architect.

Sarah Webster Goodwin is professor of English and has taught at Skidmore since 1983. Her research interests have included interdisciplinary approaches to death and representation; feminism, utopia and narrative; and the history of sugar through the lens of post-colonialism. Goodwin is co-curating an exhibition at the Tang on sweetness that will open in February 2019.

Brett Grigsby is on the music Faculty at Skidmore College. Grigsby has concertized extensively as both soloist and chamber musician, having played at the 92nd Street Y in NYC and in collaboration with the National Jazz Ballet Company of Montreal. Most recently Grigsby's work with the Finger Lakes Guitar Quartet includes a performance upcoming with the Albany Symphony Orchestra.

Heather Hurst is an archaeologist and archaeological illustrator who works in Central America and Mexico. She received her Ph.D. in anthropology from Yale University in 2009, completing a multi-site investigation of Maya wall paintings in the Guatemalan lowlands. Her research and teaching interests focus on artists’ materials and practice, mural painting, ritual, architecture, fragments, conservation, archiving and cultural heritage preservation. Hurst has participated in 20 years of fieldwork in Mesoamerica, including the sites of Bonampak, Copán, Oxtotitlán, Palenque, Piedras Negras, San Bartolo and Xultun. Her work has been published in National Geographic, Science, and the New York Times, and exhibited at the Met, National Gallery of Art and LACMA, among others. Hurst received a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship in 2004 and is currently a Guggenheim Fellow.

My first book, Converting Women: Gender and Protestant Christianity in Colonial South India (Oxford University Press, 2004), arose out of my Ph.D. dissertation from the University of Chicago Divinity School.  After publishing several articles and essays that explored the significance of gender in the conversion to Christianity of mostly low-caste groups in south India, I metamorphosed into a scholar of religion and ecology with a focus on non-Brahmanical Hinduism and wrote a second book, Sacred Groves, Local Gods: Religion and Environmentalism in South India (Oxford University Press, 2013). I continue to be fascinated by the religiosity of non-elites in south India, as is reflected in my current project on roadside shrines in urban Chennai.

Sara Lagalwar is assistant professor and director of the Neuroscience Program and is the Williamson Chair in Neuroscience. She came to Skidmore in the fall of 2012, following postdoctoral research at the University of Minnesota and completion of her doctoral work at Northwestern University. She is a cell and molecular neurobiologist and studies neurodegenerative disease. Her major research question is: What cellular mechanisms make certain neurons vulnerable to disease? At Skidmore, students in her research lab study the neurodegenerative disease Spinocerebellar ataxia type 1 at the molecular, cellular and behavioral level using human cell lines and transgenic mice. She teaches classes in introductory neuroscience, cell and molecular neuroscience, Alzheimer's disease, cerebellum and bioinformatics, and a Scribner Seminar titled "Stress and the Human Brain." Her interest in brain plasticity bore out of the “plasticity theory” which hypothesizes why neuronal populations that are most taxed during our lifetimes are most susceptible to neurodegeneration.

Ryan Overbey teaches in the Religious Studies Department and Asian Studies Program at Skidmore College. He works at the intersection of ritual and intellectual history in the Buddhist tradition, probing the close links between theory and practice, between philosophy and liturgy. As a philologist, he focuses on the edition and interpretation of texts preserved in Chinese, Sanskrit and Tibetan in the first millennium CE. As a scholar and teacher in religious studies, he seeks to collapse distinctions between “premodern” and “modern,” between “elite” and “popular,” and between “west” and “east.”

The ParkeHarrisons construct fantasies in the guise of environmental performances for the protagonists of their images. The artists combine elaborate sets within vast landscapes to address issues surrounding man’s relationship to the earth and technology while additionally delving into the human condition. Their works are included in numerous collections including Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Art Institute of Chicago and International Museum of Photography at the George Eastman House. Currently they have a large mural on view at the Worcester Art Museum titled These Days of Maiuma. They have two monographs published by Twin Palms Publishers, The Architect’s Brother and Counterpoint. They are represented by Catherine Edelman Gallery in Chicago and Slete Gallery in Los Angeles.

Jeffrey O. Segrave is currently professor of health and human physiological sciences at Skidmore College. Segrave has been at Skidmore since 1978 and has served as women’s tennis coach, chair of the Department of Exercise Science, Dance and Athletics, director of athletics, dean of special programs, and co-pI of Project Vis. He was awarded the David H. Porter Endowed Chair in 2015, the Distinguished Faculty Service Award in 2014, and he delivered the Moseley Lecture in 1999. His main area of scholarly interest lies in the socio-cultural analysis of sport; hence he embraces an interdisciplinary approach that seeks to study sport at the intersections of history, sociology and literature. In particular, he has been a lifelong scholar of the Olympic Games and for four decades has focused his research on the cultural, political and sociological aspects of the modern Olympics. He has published 16 book chapters and more than 60 articles on sport in a wide variety of journals including the International Journal of Comic Art, International Journal of Sport and Society, Journal of Olympic History, Olympika: The International Journal of Olympic Studies, Stadion: The International Journal of the History of Sport, Aethlon: The Journal of Sport Literature, Sociological Focus, and International Review for the Sociology of Sport. He has also published three anthologies on the Olympic Games: Olympism (1980), Sport and Higher Education (1985) and The Olympic Games in Transition (1988).

Rachel Seligman is the assistant director for curatorial affairs and Malloy Curator at the Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College. She has a B.A. in art history from Skidmore College and an M.A. in art history from George Washington University. She has worked at the National Museum of American Art, the Courthouse Gallery at the Lake George Arts Project in Lake George, New York and was the director and curator of the Mandeville Gallery and curator of the permanent collection at Union College, in Schenectady, New York, from 1997 to 2011. She has taught art history at Adirondack Community College in Glens Falls, New York, Skidmore College and the College of Saint Rose in Albany, New York. She has curated numerous historical and contemporary art exhibitions, including Twelve Years a Slave: The Kidnapping, Enslavement, and Rescue of Solomon Northup (1999), A Monument Of Progress—The 175th Anniversary of the Erie Canal (2000), Dynamic Equilibrium—Art and Science (2009), We the People (2012), Classless Society (2013), Machine Project—The Platinum Collection (Live by Special Request) (2015) and Sixfold Symmetry: Pattern in Art and Science (2016/17), among others. Seligman is the co-author of Solomon Northup: The Complete Story of the Author of Twelve Years a Slave (Praeger, 2013).