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

Recent publications, presentations, honors and media mentions include the following:

Publications

Suzanne Burton, associate dean for the arts and professor of music education in the College of Arts and Sciences, has just released a co-edited and -authored book entitled, Creative Music Making at Your Fingertips: A Mobile Technology Guide for Music Educators. In her chapter, Burton addresses "digi-play" and provides thoughtful techniques for the incorporation of mobile technology in early childhood music. The book is published by Oxford.

Margaret Stetz, Mae and Robert Carter Professor of Women's Studies and professor of humanities, is the author of an essay, "Gertrude Käsebier, Photographer: The New Woman in Black and White," published in the open access e-journal Humanities Bulletin, 3:2 (2020). Her essay celebrates Käsebier as both an artist and as a woman who was ahead of her time, while also looking at the role of her disability as an influence on her early-20th-century photographic methods. 

Presentations

Rachael Hutchinson, associate professor of Japanese studies, gave a talk for the SOAS University of London Japanese Seminar Series, titled “Japanese Culture Through Videogames: Games as Texts and Discursive Practice.” The talk focused on the cultural content of globally popular games such as SoulCalibur, Final Fantasy and Metal Gear Solid. Delving into character design, background setting and environment, aesthetic style, thematic content, and games dynamics and goals, Hutchinson points to ways in which Japanese role-playing games serve as popular entertainment narratives that tackle big issues like social anxiety, absentee parents, nuclear power and war memory. Video games are not only texts with aesthetic value but may also be read as part of contemporary discourse, while gameplay itself can be understood as discursive practice. The talk is archived on the SOAS website and on YouTube.

Daniel Green, associate professor of political science and international relations, presented a paper on Dec. 10, 2020, entitled “The British Mid-Century Imperial Crisis (MCIC) and International Relations Theory-Building,”  at a one-day virtual conference on “Charting the Contours of the Empire-System, 1856-1955.” The conference was organized by the 19th Century Working Group (NCWG) of the International Studies Association’s HIST (Historical IR) section. The paper pulls together the key elements of a crisis in British empire thought and policy around 1857-1868 and considers how this should impact four major theories of international relations. The conference was in preparation for a more intensive three-day session that will be held at the European Workshops in International Studies (EWIS) gathering, planned in in Thessaloniki, Greece, in July 2021.

On Dec. 9, 2020, Margaret Stetz, Mae and Robert Carter Professor of Women's Studies and professor of humanities, gave an invited Zoom lecture to an international audience of 80 in the "Zooming Decadence Seminar Series," sponsored by the Centre for Victorian Studies at the University of Exeter, United Kingdom. Her talk, which was titled “Anna, Comtesse de Brémont: Decadent Women’s Poetry on Trial in 1895,” examined how the published work of an American-born writer was used against her in a London courtroom, during her libel case against W. S. Gilbert (librettist of operettas written with Sir Arthur Sullivan). As this lecture demonstrated, the attempt to discredit her for writing poetry that was called "voluptuous" and "erotic" uncannily mirrored some aspects of the proceedings in Oscar Wilde's libel suit, earlier the same year. At a symposium on Dec. 1, 2020, Stetz was also the invited chair and presenter of a response paper for a panel on artists' responses to the subject of military sexual slavery during World War II. The symposium, organized by the University of California, Irvine’s Center for Critical Korean Studies, brought together a variety of international scholars to consider the topic “War, Women’s Human Rights and Comfort Women: Reparation, Reconciliation and Restoration.”

Honors

Sarah Wasserman, assistant professor of English, has received the 57th annual William Riley Parker Prize for an outstanding article published in PMLA, the Modern Language Association’s journal of literary scholarship. Her article “Ralph Ellison, Chester Himes and the Persistence of Urban Forms” appeared in the May 2020 issue of PMLA. The award will be presented Jan. 9, 2021, during the association’s annual convention.

In the media

Kate Kafonek, a Ph.D. candidate in criminology and graduate research assistant at the Center for the Study and Prevention of Gender-Based Violence, was prominently quoted in an article from The Lily responding to a recent op-ed in The Wall Street Journal suggesting that Jill Biden drop the "Dr." from her name. The op-ed has prompted a conversation about gender inequality in professional careers such as academia, especially for Black, indigenous and people of color.

To submit information for inclusion in For the Record, write to ocm@udel.edu and include “For the Record” in the subject line.