Joshua Woodfork to Direct President's Office
Joshua Woodfork
Joshua C. Woodfork has been named executive director of the Office of the President and coordinator of strategic initiatives at Skidmore College. The appointment is effective September 3.
An assistant professor in Skidmore’s American Studies Department from 2005 to 2010, Woodfork already is known to many at the College. In addition to his teaching duties, he worked with Student Affairs on a campus-wide Black and Latino Males Initiative, co-founded Skidmore’s Black Faculty and Staff Group, and mentored students in the College’s Opportunity Program.
Woodfork was among 200 applicants considered in a national search, President Philip A. Glotzbach noted.
“He will advise and assist me on matters of strategic and institutional importance, he will work closely with the President’s Cabinet on issues that come before that group, he will take a leadership role in the President’s office, and from time to time he will represent both me and the College in external settings,” Glotzbach said.
In 2010, Woodfork joined American University as assistant professor of American Studies and served as faculty liaison to the university’s Frederick Douglass Distinguished Scholars Program, an educational access and opportunity program centering on exceptional students who are dedicated to improving under-resourced communities worldwide. In January 2013, he became director of the Consortium on High Achievement and Success (CHAS), a consortium of selective liberal arts colleges (including Skidmore) that works to enhance the success of historically underrepresented students.
Woodfork’s scholarly interests and teaching have centered on U.S. history, ethnography, intersectional analysis, popular culture, multiraciality, African Americans, whiteness, and social justice.
Elected student body president at Colby College, from which he graduated in 1997 and has served as a trustee, Woodfork earned his M.A. in American Studies from Michigan State University in 1999 and his Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Maryland in 2005.
In addition to receiving Skidmore College’s President’s Award in 2008, Woodfork has been recognized with an Emerging Scholar Award by Franklin and Marshall’s Center for Liberal Arts and Society and a Community Service Award from the Saratoga branch of the NAACP.
