Campaign for Delaware:
Positioning the College
for the Future
At the College of Arts and Science, we realize that the quality of our teaching depends on maintaining a high level of involvement in research, scholarship, and creative activity. Our students are enriched when professors who are leaders in their fields bring their expertise and experience at the frontiers of knowledge to the classroom. We are pleased to be able to cite a number of areas in which our efforts have received national or international acclaim.
The Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry holds a place among a select group of institutions that combine both a high-quality research program and a large, continuing undergraduate program. Of 616 American Chemical Society-certified chemistry departments nationwide, Delaware is one of only seven that have ranked in the top 25 producers of ACS-certified baccalaureate degrees for 20 consecutive years. At the same time, the department’s graduate program ranks among the top third in the country. Only such institutions as Harvard and the University of Illinois can make similar dual claims. The department’s faculty includes some of the top chemists in the world. For example, Professor Arnold Rheingold recently published his 1,000th scientific paper. According to the Institute for Scientific Information, Dr. Rheingold is the eighth most frequently cited chemist among his more than 600,000 peers around the globe.
The College is also home to the UD/Winterthur Program in Art Conservation, the only art conservation program in the world jointly sponsored by a university and a museum. Both undergraduate and graduate students in the Department of Art Conservation have access to the outstanding collections of early American art, furnishings, architecture, and artifacts at the Winterthur Museum as well as the museum’s conservation laboratories. Such unique hands-on experience prepares graduates of the program for careers as conservators at leading museums around the world. These alumni have been responsible for the examination, technical analysis, and preservation of many historic and artistic icons, including the Declaration of Independence, the Liberty Bell, the Dead Sea Scrolls, Auguste Rodin’s Thinker, Vincent Van Gogh’s Sunflowers, and the flag that inspired our national anthem. One graduate of the program, Monique Fischer, AS ’94M, recently won an Academy Award for her technical work in film preservation.
The Department of Theater’s Professional Theater Training Program (PTTP) was recently ranked among the top 10 graduate programs in theater nationwide by U.S. News and World Report. This highly selective, three-year conservatory program leads to a master of fine arts degree in one of three concentrations: acting, technical production, and stage management. About 85 percent of PTTP students find work within a year of graduating, which compares favorably to the 42 percent of all stage actors holding Actors’ Equity Association cards who work in a given year. Recent PTTP graduates have worked at leading theaters across the country, including the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Arena Stage, Baltimore Center Stage, Stage West, and Lincoln Center, and have had featured roles on Broadway and in film and television. Jewel Walker, one of the program’s founding faculty, was selected as the Outstanding Teacher of Theater in Higher Education by the Association for Theater in Higher Education in 1997.
U.S. News and World Report also gave the Department of Physical Therapy top 10 accolades based on strengths both in faculty research and clinical education of students through our Physical Therapy Clinic on campus and other sites, ranging from Native American reservations to Performing Arts Physical Therapy serving Broadway performers in New York City.
The Department of Geography offers the only Ph.D. program in climatology available in the United States. Climatologists in the department have made important contributions to regional, national, and international efforts to understand and prepare for the effects of severe weather and climate change. For example, Professor Laurence Kalkstein has designed and implemented hot-weather watch and warning systems for Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., and has studied the potential impact of global warming on human health for the Environmental Protection Agency.
The Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice houses two highly respected research centers, the Center for Drug and Alcohol Studies and the Disaster Research Center, both of which train large numbers of students in conducting research. The Disaster Research Center is unique in its focus on group, organizational, and community preparation for, response to, and recovery from natural and technological disasters and other community-wide crises. DRC researchers have carried out systematic studies on a broad range of disaster types, including hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, tornadoes, hazardous chemical incidents, plane crashes, and civil disturbances and riots.
The Department of History is exceptionally strong in the area of American cultural history. Within the past decade, two faculty in the department have won the prestigious Bancroft Prize, awarded annually by the Columbia University Library to authors of the best books about American history. Peter Kolchin, Henry Clay Reed Professor of History, won the award in 1988 for his book, Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom. Professor Christine Leigh Heyrman won the prize in 1997 for her book, Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt.
The Department of English, likewise, has its share of nationally recognized and prolific authors. Professor Jeane Murray Walker, for example, received a 1998 Pew Fellowship in poetry, one of the nation’s largest and most prestigious awards for poets. The New York Times Magazine has called H. Fletcher Brown Professor of English Hershel Parker "the dean of Melville scholars" for his definitive and critically acclaimed biography of Herman Melville. In addition to the printed word, the department has a significant thrust in the rhetoric of other media. To earn her doctoral degree in English in 1997, Michele Suzanne Shauf submitted her dissertation about "hypermedia"—communication methods that combine images, sound, music, text, animation, and video—on CD-ROM. It was the first CD-ROM dissertation ever accepted by University Microforms Inc., the nation’s leading academic cataloging company.
The Department of Psychology ranks in the top third of psychology departments nationwide with particular research strengths in cognitive and developmental psychology and neuroscience. The department is home to world-famous neuroscientist Seymor Levine, National Academy of Sciences member Frances Graham, and Unidel Professor Carroll Izard, whose research on emotional development in infancy has established a standard, widely used method for studying emotion expression in early development.
In addition to these departmental programs, the College of Arts and Science encompasses a number of programs that cross disciplinary boundaries. Programs such as Black American Studies, Museum Studies, Jewish Studies, and the Winterthur Program in Early American Culture unite faculty and students in the pursuit of understanding that can only come at the intersection of traditional fields. The College also provides the means for exceptional and highly motivated students to design their own courses of study through our Liberal Studies and Dean’s Scholars programs.
The Women’s Studies Program has been an excellent model of interdisciplinary scholarship and teaching. The program celebrated its 25th anniversary at UD in 1998 with a week-long series of lectures, films, and performances campuswide. Approximately 80 faculty members and adjunct faculty, representing more than 15 departments, are active in the program, which serves 2,600 students each year with courses leading to a major or minor in the program and that help meet general education breadth requirements.
One of our newest programs, the Cognitive Science Program, embodies the latest advancements in the study of human thinking. Drawing on the departments of Linguistics, Psychology, Computer and Information Sciences, Philosophy, and the Applied Science and Engineering Laboratories (a collaborative effort between the College and the A. I. du Pont Hospital for Children), faculty and students in the program seek to model and explain such phenomena as perception, memory, reasoning, and language as well as investigate applications for their findings. These applications range from new instructional strategies that take into account how children learn, think, and remember to artificial intelligence and improvements in computer technology to assist people with disabilities.
In addition, many of our College of Arts and Science graduates have reached pinnacles of excellence in their chosen fields. Among them are two MacArthur Fellows, investigative journalist Chuck Lewis, AS '75, and social historian Jacqueline Jones, AS '70. The prestigious MacArthur Foundation honor, informally known as the "genius grant," was bestowed on Lewis in 1998 for his work as executive director of the watchdog Center for Public Integrity in Washington, D.C. Jones, chair of the history department at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass., was honored in 1999 for her work examining the experience of workers through the lens of economic transformations throughout American history.