For the Record provides information about recent professional activities and achievements of University of Delaware faculty, students and alumni.

Recent presentations, honors and new appointments include the following:

Presentations

Rudi Matthee, John and Dorothy Munroe Distinguished Professor of History, attended the eighth biennial meeting of the Association for the Study of Persianate Societies (ASPS), held in Tbilisi, Georgia, March 15-18. In his capacity as vice president of the association, he acted as master of ceremony at the meeting’s opening session. He attended the board meeting of the international branches of ASPS, and he presented a paper, “A Safe Space for the Shah and His Women: The Practice of Quruq in the Safavid Period.”   

Theodore E. D. Braun, professor emeritus of French and comparative literature, organized and chaired a panel on enlightenment censorship at the 49th annual meeting of the American Society for 18th-Century Studies held March 22-24 at Orlando, Florida. At the same meeting, he read a paper on a professional roundtable panel on scholarship, community and retirement, entitled "Preparing for Retirement."

Roberta Golinkoff, Unidel H. Rodney Sharp Chair in the School of Education, delivered a U.S. congressional briefing on language development geared toward policymakers, organized by House members Rosa DiLauro and Chuck Fleishmann, and the organization Zero to Three. Golinkoff presented information on the "30-million word gap," which describes findings that children from low income families hear far fewer words addressed to them than children from higher income families. Golinkoff's presentation emphasized, however, that it is not only the quantity of words that matters for a child's language development; quality, or the amount of back-and-forth exchanges between children and their caregivers, is very important.

Troy Mix, policy scientist with the Institute for Public Administration, presented "Mapping the Regional Institutional Context of the Cybersecurity Industry" on March 17 as part of the 57th meeting of the Southern Regional Science Association in Philadelphia. This research was supported by a grant from the University of Delaware Cybersecurity Initiative and conducted with two students -- Eli Turkel and Mesut Karakoc -- in the School of Public Policy and Administration's Ph.D. in urban affairs and public policy program.

On March 22, Margaret Stetz, Mae and Robert Carter Professor of Women's Studies and professor of humanities, and Mark Samuels Lasner, senior research fellow at the UD Library, Museums and Press, gave invited lectures at Cardiff University, Wales, United Kingdom. Their lectures were sponsored by the Centre for Editorial and Intertextual Research and held at the Cardiff University Library. Stetz's lecture, "Exhibiting the Late Victorians," discussed how recent exhibitions related to Victorian print culture at libraries and museums -- including several on Oscar Wilde and his circle that she and Samuels Lasner have curated in the U.S. and U.K. -- fit with the growing scholarly and public interest in the materiality of authorship. Samuels Lasner's lecture, "Collecting the Late Victorians," focused on the principles that have guided him in  the building of his own collection (now part of the Morris Library's Special Collections department), which features important Pre-Raphaelite and British Aesthetic Movement material, including manuscripts, letters, first editions, association copies of books and works of art.  

Honors

Pam Cook, Unidel Professor of Mathematical Sciences and associate dean of engineering, has been awarded the 2018 Julian Cole Lectureship by the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), an international organization of more than 14,000 individual and 500 institutional members. Cook, who joined the UD faculty in 1983 and holds a secondary appointment as professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, will present the lecture at SIAM’s annual meeting in July. The lectureship is awarded every four years to an individual for an outstanding contribution to the mathematical characterization and solution of a challenging problem in the physical or biological sciences or in engineering. Cook and Prof. Cole, who taught at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and died in 1999, co-authored the 1986 classic book Transonic Aerodynamics.

Tiffany Gill, associate professor of Africana studies and history and UD’s inaugural Cochran Scholar, has been selected as one of 25 top women in higher education by the publication Diverse Issues in Higher Education. The magazine, which honored the 25 as “women in the academy who are making a difference,” highlighted them in its March 22 issue. Gill’s research and teaching interests include African American history, women’s history, the history of black entrepreneurship, fashion and beauty studies, and travel and migration throughout the African Diaspora. She is the author of Beauty Shop Politics: African American Women’s Activism in the Beauty Industry, which was awarded the 2010 Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Book Prize by the Association of Black Women Historians.

Publications

The Center for the Study of Diversity has published the second report in its new series, “Diversity Discourse,” an online publication that offers brief reports on research and analysis emanating from or supported by the center, designed to inform the University community of the status of diversity at UD. Posted March 30, “Achieving the 'Demographic Imperative': Barriers and Possibilities for Diversifying Teacher Education at UD” is written by UD faculty members Jill Ewing Flynn and Lynn J. Worden, with Deborah Bieler, Hannah Kim, Rosalie Rolón Dow and Carol Wong. Reports will be posted twice a month in the new series and available for download.

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