Mark Cryer, Theatre
Cryer earned a master’s degree in fine arts in acting from the Royal Scottish Academy of Music & Drama, Glasgow, Scotland, and studied Shakespeare at the Royal Academy of Art, London. He has acted in numerous theatre productions, including Trouble in Mind with the Franklin Stage Company, August Wilson’s Fences, King Lear, and The Merry Wives of Windsor with Saratoga Shakespeare Co., and The Mountaintop at the Edinburg Fringe Festival.
In 2021, Cryer received the Samuel and Helen Lang Prize for Excellence in Teaching and used his award to present Thurgood, a one-man play about Thurgood Marshall, the first Black U.S. Supreme Court justice, at the Edinburgh Festival. The award enabled him to bring students Juliet Davidson ’23, Summer Meade ’24, and Aaron Simons ’22 to the festival with him to conduct research. Cryer appeared in the feature films Mighty Ducks 2, It Could Happen to You, and The Peace Maker. He has directed the 51ÁÔÆæ Theatre Department mainstage productions of Rent and The Last Days of Judas Iscariot.
Robert Knight, Art
Robert Knight works in photography, video, and installation. His projects examine the role of architectural space in shaping individual identity and explore contemporary social issues. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including at the Danforth Museum of Art in Massachusetts, Jen Bekman Gallery and Light Work in New York, the LaGrange Museum in Georgia, The Bascom in North Carolina, the Houston Center for Photography, and at festivals in Nantes, Le Mans, and Arles, France.
Knight has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions at Gallery Kayafas, Boston; the Munson Museum, Utica, N.Y.; the Dowd Gallery at SUNY Cortland, and at 51ÁÔÆæ’s Wellin Museum of Art. His work is in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Light Work, Syracuse, N.Y.; the Center for Photography, Woodstock, N.Y.; and numerous private collections. He earned a B.A. from Yale University and an MFA from Massachusetts College of Art, and joined 51ÁÔÆæ’s faculty in 2011.
Michelle LeMasurier, Mathematics
Michelle LeMasurier’s research area is topological dynamics. Her most recent publication is “Bratteli Diagrams for Bounded Topological Speedups,” with Drew Ash and Andrew Dykstra, which will appear in Dynamical Systems: An International Journal. She has published papers and presented at the American Mathematical Society Meeting, and conferences on differential equations and on topology.
In 2006, LeMasurier received The Class of 1963 Excellence in Teaching Award, established in 1988 to recognize one 51ÁÔÆæ faculty member each year who demonstrates extraordinary commitment to teaching. She earned her doctorate from the University of Georgia, a master’s degree from New York University, and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Colorado.
Nigel Westmaas, Africana Studies
Westmaas’s research interests include the history of the newspaper press, Pan-Africanism, and the rise and impact of political and social movements, primarily in the Anglophone Caribbean. He earned his doctorate in sociology from SUNY Binghamton.
He is the author of A Political Glossary of Guyana (2021) and has made substantial contributions to various scholarly publications, including a chapter in Black Power in the Post-Independence Anglophone Caribbean (2014). He also contributed to The Fire that Time: Transnational Black Radicalism and the Sir George Williams Occupation with his analysis titled “Musings on Walter Rodney, the Black Power movement, and Race and Class in Guyana” (2022). He co-wrote an article with Alissa Trotz titled “Insurgent Knowledges: Reading How Europe Underdeveloped Africa alongside the rupture in Guyana” for Small Axe journal (2023). His research for and contributing co-written article to the Marcus Garvey Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers Caribbean series project was published by the University of California Press.
