Faculty Presenters

Carolyn Anderson is a director and writer. Her devised works, many of which focus on themes exploring human dignity, historical events, social welfare and environmental issues, have been performed at Actor’s Alley Repertory Theater in Los Angeles, The Arizona State Theatre’s Cabaret Theatre, the Theatre of the First Amendment at George Mason University, The Women’s Project in New York, the Hyde Museum, Capital Rep’s Touring program, as well as many other venues. The Play, Faces: A Living Newspaper on AIDS, written in collaboration with Wilma Hall, was produced by theaters and organizations across the country, and was the subject of a documentary produced by PBS/WMHT-TV. Anderson was part of a team of writers who created the film script, Something More at Stake, about The Saratoga Battlefields for the National Park Service.  At Capital Repertory Theater Carolyn collaborated with Jill Rafferty on Petticoats of Steele: A Living Newspaper on Women’s Suffrage for the theater’s education program and touring company. Petticoats of Steel was recently performed at the New York State Museum. Anderson is a director for Capital Rep’s NEXT ACT: New Play Festival, and has directed numerous plays at Skidmore College, including Seamus Heaney’s translation of Sophocles Antigone, The Burial at Thebes, Ibsen’s Enemy of the People, Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas, Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice, and Passion Play, Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, and in collaboration with Will Bond, Lorca’s Blood Wedding. At the Tang Museum in collaboration with designer Gary Wilson, Carolyn directed I think therefore, in response to the museum’s exhibit, therefore I am. She directed a series of plays by Samuel Beckett, Beckettshorts, within the context of the museum’s exhibition on abstraction, The Jewel Thief.  Also at the Tang, Carolyn and Gary created American Collision(s) a theater piece in response to the exhibit, Classless Society. Carolyn teaches directing, and theory, history and literature courses for Skidmore’s theater department.

Benjamin Bogin is Associate Professor and Director of Asian Studies at Skidmore College. He writes and teaches on biographical literature, sacred geography, visual art, and ritual practice in Himalayan cultures. He is the author of The Illuminated Life of the Great Yolmowa (2013) and the co-editor, with Andrew Quintman, of Himalayan Passages: Tibetan and Newar Studies in Honor of Hubert Decleer (2014). He is presently writing a book on a Tibetan Buddhist paradise–Visions of the Copper-Colored Mountain: The Cultural History of an Imagined World. Other research interests include Buddhism and agriculture, death and dying, poetry, translation, and ghosts.   

Robert Boyers is Professor of English at Skidmore, Editor of Salmagundi Magazine and Director of the New York State Summer Writers Institute. He was the first Tisch Professor of Arts and Letters at Skidmore (1995-2006), and began teaching at the college in the fall of 1969. He is the author of eleven books , and writes frequently for such publications as The Nation, Harper's, The New Republic, Granta, The American Scholar, The Yale Review and The Chronicle of Higher Education. His most recent book is The Fate of Ideas (Columbia University Press, 2015). Previous books include The Dictator’s Dictation: The Politics of Novels & Novelists (Columbia, 2005), A Book of Common Praise (Ausable Press, 2002), Atrocity and Amnesia: The Political Novel Since 1945 (Oxford University Press, 1986), After The Avant-Garde (1988) and a collection of short stories entitled Excitable Women, Damaged Men (2005). His essays have been included in Best American Essays, The Annual Pushcart Prize Annuals and many anthologies. He has edited thirteen books, including The Legacy of the German Refugee Intellectuals (Schocken Books, 1970), Psychological Man (Harper & Row, 1974), George Steiner at The New Yorker (New Directions, 2008) and The Ways of the Will (Basic Books, 2002). His forthcoming book, The Tyranny of Virtue: Privilege, Identity & The Hunt for Heresies, will be published by Scribners in New York in October of this year.

John Brueggemann has worked at Skidmore for 25 years, serving as Professor and Chair in the Department of Sociology, and Associate Dean of the Faculty. His teaching and research interests focus on inequality, morality, food, religion and labor history. He has published four books, including Racial Competition and Class Solidarity, Inequality in America: A Reader, Rich, Free and Miserable: The Failure of Success in America, and most recently, Rebuilding the Foundations: Social Relationships in Ancient Scripture and Contemporary Culture (coauthored with his father, Walter Brueggemann). He is currently working on a book about the sustainable food movement. John has been recognized for his accomplishments at Skidmore with a President’s Award, the Quadracci Chair in Social Responsibility, and the Ralph A. Ciancio Award for Excellence in Teaching. He has participated in the community in a range of volunteer activities associated with Shelters of Saratoga, Saratoga County Economic Opportunity, Council, Leadership Saratoga, Saratoga United Methodist Church, and Saratoga Wilton Soccer Club. John is currently running for election to the Saratoga Springs City School District Board of Education.

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.

Sarah DiPasquale PT, DPT, is an Assistant Professor and Associate Chair of Dance at Skidmore College. She earned her Doctorate in Physical Therapy from Sage Graduate School and a B.S. in Health and Exercise Science from Syracuse University. Sarah’s dance performance career ended early due to injury and she now focuses her passion for dance on educating others. She works zealously to create opportunities to make dance training easily accessible and available to all people. Her scholarship focuses primarily on the effects of dance training on people who are differently-abled and at-risk youth. Sarah’s work has been published in The Journal of Dance Education, Arts & Health, Medical Problems of Performing Artists, Performance Enhancement & Health, and Sports.

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 and its literary incarnations through the lens of post-colonialism. Goodwin is a co-curator of the exhibition at the Tang, Like Sugar, that is open through June 23, 2019.

Lisa Jackson-Schebetta is an associate professor of theater at Skidmore College.  Her research and teaching focus on theatre and performance history in the hemispheric Americas, dramaturgy, and directing.  Her first monograph, Traveler, there is no road: Theatre, the Spanish Civil War, and the Decolonial Imagination in the Americas, was published with University of Iowa Press in 2017.  Her second book examines performance and peacemaking in contemporary Colombia.  She is the editor of Theatre History Studies, the peer-reviewed journal of the Mid-America Theatre Conference, and the Vice-President/President Elect of the American Theatre and Drama Society.  Her work has been published in Theatre Journal, Modern Drama, Journal of American Drama and Theatre, and Theatre History Studies, among others.

Jason Ohlberg is an Assistant Professor of Dance at Skidmore College. He attended State University of New York at Purchase and completed his BFA from Cornish College of the Arts where he graduated summa cum laude. He earned his MFA from the University of Washington in 2015. Jason has danced professionally with numerous companies including Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, Dance Kaleidoscope, Jan Erkert and Dancers, and Chamber Dance Company. He has served on the faculties of Barat College, Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, Spectrum Dance Theater, Pacific Northwest Ballet, University of Washington, and Cornish College of the Arts. He has been making dances for over twenty years and his choreography has been seen in concerts, festivals, and performances throughout the country. Jason has presented research at the annual conferences of the International Association of Dance Medicine & Science (IADMS) and the National Dance Educators Organization (NDEO).

Michael Orr is Dean of the Faculty/Vice President for Academic Affairs at Skidmore College. He joined the College in 2018, having previously served as the Krebs Provost and Dean of the Faculty at Lake Forest College. Before joining Lake Forest College, he served as a faculty member at Lawrence University for more than 20 years. A scholar of late medieval English illuminated manuscripts, he is co-author of three volumes in the Harvey Miller series An Index of Images in English Manuscripts from the Time of Chaucer to Henry VIII, c. 1380-c.1509 and has published a range of articles and book chapters on the production and decoration of illuminated books in late medieval England.

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.”