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

Recent grants, presentations, publications, honors and assignments include the following:

Grants

The Center for Material Culture Studies has announced recipients of its 2017 grant awards. This fall CMCS awarded more than $20,000 total to faculty and graduate students pursuing projects in material culture studies. Grants from the Faculty Research Publication Fund went to Jon Cox, assistant professor of art and design; Carla Guerron-Montero, associate professor of anthropology and Black American studies and director of the Latin American and Iberian Studies Program; Sandy Isenstadt, professor of art history; and Thomas Rocek, acting chairperson of the Department of Anthropology. Graduate Research Presentation Fund awards went to Candice Candeto, a master’s student in the Winterthur/UD Program; Sarah Leonard, a doctoral student in art history; Erica Lome, a doctoral student in history; Kristen Nassif, a doctoral student in art history; Maria Joao Petisca, a doctoral student in preservation studies; and Trent Rhodes, a master’s student in the Winterthur/UD Program. Graduate Research Travel Fund awards went to Alex Ames, a doctoral student in the history of American civilization; Caitlin Hutchison, a doctoral student in art history; Harriette Lane, a doctoral student in the history of American civilization; Kiersten Mounce, a doctoral student in art history; Jacquelyn Peterson, a master’s student in the Winterthur/UD Program; and Hannah Segrave, a doctoral student in art history.

Presentations

On Nov. 14, Margaret Stetz, Mae and Robert Carter Professor of Women's Studies and professor of humanities, gave an invited lecture on Oscar Wilde, via Skype, at the University of Connecticut-Stamford. Her talk, about representations of Oscar Wilde in works for young readers and about the need for a full-fledged biography of Wilde for such audiences, was delivered to a seminar on Wilde that is currently being taught by Prof. Frederick Roden in the English department at UConn-Stamford. On Nov. 17, Stetz also gave a paper at the annual conference of the National Women's Studies Association, held this year in Baltimore. Her paper, titled “Making Ida B. Wells Matter: A Pop Culture Survey,” was part of a panel on "Black Feminist Histories Shaping Black Feminist Futures," moderated by Prof. Eve Lorane Brown, from the University of California, Santa Cruz. In this presentation, she discussed how Wells' anti-racist and pro-women's-suffrage activism has been depicted in films, comics, novels and plays, as well as in books for the children's market, and has been made to serve a variety of ideological purposes.

Trevor A. Dawes, vice provost for libraries and museums and May Morris University Librarian, participated in the closing panel discussion at the Access Services Conference on Nov. 17, at the Georgia Tech Global Learning Center in Atlanta. Dawes and his fellow panelists reflected on the contributions of library access service operations (such as circulation, interlibrary loan and stacks management) to their libraries and overall success of their universities.

Rudolph Matthee, John and Dorothy Munroe Distinguished Professor of History, presented “The Dutch East India Company and Asian Raw Silk: From Iran to Bengal via China and Vietnam” at Leiden University, The Netherlands, Nov. 24. ​He also attended a dissertation defense at the same university as a member of the committee. ​

Publications

The International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management has accepted the paper “Does technology adoption at home influence guest-technology evaluations?” by Sri Beldona and Zvi Schwartz, both professors of hospitality business management,  and  master of science in HBM alumna Xia Zhang. The paper will be published in 2018.

John G. McNutt and Jonathan B. Justice, both professors in the School of Public Policy and Administration, are coauthors of the paper “Changing Communities through Technology Led Voluntary Action:  Civic Hackathons and the Future of the Sector,” prepared for the 2017 ARNOVA (Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action) annual conference, Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Margaret D. Stetz, Mae and Robert Carter Professor of Women's Studies and professor of humanities, has had two new essays published in edited volumes, both issued in November 2017 by Palgrave Macmillan. Her chapter titled "Greater Than the Mystery of Death: Rewriting Oscar Wilde for Young Audiences," in Oscar Wilde and the Cultures of Childhood, edited by Joseph Bristow, is a study of some late-20th and early-20th-century versions of Wilde's work that have been targeted either to audiences of children or of young adults. In this essay, she considers the politics that have led to censorship for these markets, not only of certain aspects of Wilde's original texts, but of the details of his life. The essay is based on an invited lecture that she delivered at a symposium on Oscar Wilde, hosted by Prof. Bristow in May 2015 at UCLA.  Another chapter, titled "'To Amuse Intelligently and Cleverly': Carolyn Wells and Literary Parody," has appeared in the volume Transgressive Humor of American Women Writers, edited by Sabrina Fuchs Abrams. This essay reconsiders the largely forgotten and unjustly neglected American poet, editor, novelist and humorist Carolyn Wells (1862–1942), focusing especially on her wickedly funny parodies of contemporary male writers' works, particularly those associated with transatlantic literary Modernism.  

Peter Weil, associate professor emeritus of anthropology, is the author of “Typewriters at the Exposition — Part 2:  Writing Machines at The Pan,” ETCetera, no. 119, fall, 2017, pp. 10-14.

Honors

A paper by Sheng Lu, assistant professor of fashion and apparel studies, on “Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP): Impact on the Integration of Textile and Apparel Supply Chain in the Asia-Pacific Region” received the Paper of Distinction – International Track award at the 2017 International Textile and Apparel Association (ITAA) annual conference in St. Petersburg, Florida.