Celeste

Storage areas in the School of Music hold hundreds of ordinary items – flutes, drums, trumpets – along with a few instruments that general audiences would be surprised to find, like the celeste, or celesta, which on first glance is easily mistaken for a small piano.

You’ve likely heard the unique sound of a celeste, even if you didn’t know where the delicate, tinkling notes were coming from.

It is famously part of the “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy” in Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker, and John Williams used the celeste to compose “Hedwig’s Theme” for the Harry Potter film franchise.

Audiences can hear, and see, the mysterious instrument in Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5 performed by the University of Delaware Symphony Orchestra on October 24 at 8 p.m. in Puglisi Orchestra Hall, part of the School of Music’s fall season.  

Planet Walk

Sprinkled across campus are 10 granite markers that will take you out of this world.

The markers make up the campus Planet Walk, a scale model of the solar system. It begins with the sun near Old College, and stretches to Pluto, the Ice Planet, appropriately located in front of the Fred Rust Ice Arena on South Campus.

The walk was the brainchild of the late astronomy professor Harry Shipman, a national pioneer in the study of white dwarf stars who taught at UD for 45 years. He, former UD museum director Belena Chapp and sculptor David Meyer collaborated on the project, combining their mutual interest in space to create the artistic salute to the solar system.

You can explore the universe in an afternoon, with the accurate scale, albeit reduced, really driving home how far away the outer planets are. And when you get to Earth, near McDowell Hall, measure three inches from the marker - that’s where our moon is on this scale.

Scene Shop

Next time you walk into the Thompson Theatre for a REP show, take a careful look at the set and props, because much of what you see has been designed, built and painted by the production team in a warehouse space on Wyoming Avenue.

When an item needs to have a certain look, or be used in a particular way on stage, the REP production team takes charge, coordinating each step in the process to bring a vision to life.

Audiences at spring’s production of King Lear may have noticed the spiked chandeliers hanging above the stage, adding a feeling of danger to the set.

Creating these custom pieces was a multi-step process that included 3D printing the spikes, adding the prop candles, preliminary painting, electrical wiring, second painting, then finally being rigged on the set – all to achieve a “modern medieval” effect.

And for 2023’s Medea, rather than ask young actors to endure a death scene night after night, the prop shop molded their faces for dummies that could be covered in fake blood and dragged through a trap door.

As the Department of Theatre and Dance expands the undergraduate program, more students have the opportunity to work with and learn about the theatre magic created in a building on the east side of campus.

Raven Press

Smartphones, e-readers and digital textbooks have all but eliminated the need for printing, yet UD maintains a fully functioning printing press tucked in a room in the Studio Arts Building. Now used for artisanal crafts more than a means of mass communication, the printing press was the leading print technology for nearly 500 years, spawning political and religious changes worldwide.

UD students visiting Raven Press learn about the hands-on technique and trial-and-error process, while gaining perspective on the speed and ease of modern communication, and experiencing the joy of creation.

Fashion and Textiles Collection

Tucked away on the second floor of Alison Hall, in the middle of the Department of Fashion and Apparel Studies, is a very special closet.

It’s home to UD’s Fashion and Textile Collection – more than 4,000 women’s, men’s and children’s garments, accessories and textiles. The oldest piece, an embroidered chasuble or outer vestment worn by an Italian or Spanish priest, dates back to the 1500s, while the youngest is a pair of Ugg sheepskin boots from 2010.

The collection includes works by fashion designers including Charles Worth, Christian Dior and Arnold Scaasi, who designed former First Lady Barbara Bush’s inaugural ball gown. Garments come from around the world, representing a variety of cultures and ethnic groups. Curated by professor Dilia Lopez-Gyosh, the highlights include a 1845 wedding dress, men’s yak hair boots, a pre-Columbian child’s hat and a dress made out of paper from the 1960s.

And Blue Hen spirit is on display through one of several UD jackets that were all the rage on campus from the 1950s through the 1970s.

In spring 2026 an exhibition of dresses from the collection will be on display in Mechanical Hall celebrating the centennial of the Roaring 1920s.

The XRF Machine

Vibrant colors were all the rage in the Victorian era, but the dyes used to create those colors often contained toxic chemicals like arsenic, asbestos or lead, turning something as innocent as a box of chocolate or book of card game rules into a hazard.

But thanks to a piece of equipment revolutionized in the Winterthur University of Delaware Program in Art Conservation (WUDPAC) labs, organizations like the Library Company of Philadelphia can safely test objects in their collections

Using portable X-ray fluorescence (XRF) machines, faculty from WUDPAC and the Department of Art Conservation visited the library to identify books containing arsenic-infused emerald green dye, a bright, but dangerous, pigment. vic

XRF spectrometers had been used in industry since the 1940s, but when retired DuPont scientist Victor F. Hansen helped open the WUDPAC labs in 1969 he reimagined the technology – creating a large open-architecture XRF machine that could test objects of various shapes and sizes.

This marked a turning point in the field of art conservation as the XRF provided a non-destructive method for elemental testing.

Today’s handheld XRFs are one of several diagnostic tools used worldwide to help art conservators and museums determine how to conserve and care for items, including pretty - but poisonous - old books.

To learn more about each of these treasures, check out the CAS Instagram account.