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

Recent appointments, presentations and publications include the following:

New appointments

New department chairs in the College of Arts and Sciences, effective Sept. 1, include Kami Silk, who joined the Department of Communication as professor and chair from Michigan State University where she was a professor of communication and senior associate dean of research, and Joel Pust, philosophy. Appointed as interim chairs, effective Sept. 1, are Paul Head, music, and James Brophy, history. Returning to their chair positions after a year’s sabbatical are Lu Ann De Cunzo, anthropology, and Annette Giesecke, languages, literatures and cultures.

Julie McGee, associate professor of Africana studies and of art history, has been appointed director of the College of Arts and Sciences’ Interdisciplinary Humanities Research Center.

Donna Woulfe, associate professor of biological sciences, has been named interim director of educational efforts in the Patrick T. Harker Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering Laboratory.

Another new College of Arts and Sciences department chair, Velia Fowler, currently a professor and associate dean of graduate studies in the Department of Molecular Medicine at the Scripps Research Institute, will begin her position in UD’s Department of Biological Sciences in January 2019.

Presentations

Rudi Matthee, John and Dorothy Munroe Distinguished Professor of History, speaking in his capacity as president of the Persian Heritage Foundation, delivered a eulogy at the memorial service for Prof. Ehsan Yarshater in New York City on Sept. 12. The last of Iran’s 20th-century intellectual giants, Prof. Yarshater (1920-2018) for 40 years served as professor of Iranian language and literature at Columbia University. He was the founder of the Persian Heritage Foundation, an organization created to support and promote research on all aspects of the Persianate world in the pre-Islamic as well as the Islamic period, which he founded in 1983 and headed until 2016. His most important legacy is the celebrated Encyclopaedia Iranica, a monumental repository of knowledge about the Iranian universe, which he created in the early 1980s and edited almost until the end of his life.

Publications

Ready, Set, Improvise! A Nuts and Bolts Approach to Improvisation, by Suzanne L. Burton, professor of music education and interim associate dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and Alden Snell, has just been published by Oxford University Press. Ready, Set, Improvise! addresses improvisation in a cogent, clear, practical and sequential manner that gives music teachers the necessary tools with which to plan the next steps for students to become independent musicians.  

Rudi Matthee, John and Dorothy Munroe Distinguished Professor of History, published “Zar-o Zur: Gold and Force: Safavid Iran as a Tributary Empire,” in Uyama Tomohiko, ed., Comparing Modern Empires: Imperial Rule and Decolonization in the Changing World Order (Sapporo: Slavic Eurasian Research Center), pp. 35-64.

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