For the Record

Article by UDaily staff June 11, 2021

University community reports presentations, publications, exhibitions, honors

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

Recent presentations, publications, exhibitions and honors include the following:

Presentations

Theodore Braun, professor emeritus of French and comparative literature, read two papers at the virtual meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies in March 2021: “Voltaire's Debt to Dryden? Consider the Case of The Indian Emperour and Alzire” and “What did Cyrano de Bergerac suggest to Voltaire, and did Voltaire follow up on this lead?”

Two faculty members from the Alfred Lerner College of Business and Economics were chosen to host a webinar for the American Accounting Association (AAA) on Friday, June 11. In this webinar, Jennifer Joe, Whitney Family Professor of Accounting, Cohen Family Lerner Director of Diversity and chief diversity advocate, and Anuradha Sivaraman, assistant professor of marketing and faculty director of assessment, provided an overview of their innovative course, “Race in Business.” The objective of this course is to allow students to make independent assessments of past practices and contributions to viable strategies aimed at an inclusive business community of the future. The course addresses, from a historical perspective, the impact of centuries of racist practices in business, like branding, promotional methods, entrepreneurial investment decisions, etc. AAA is registered with the National Association of State Boards of Accountancy (NASBA) as a sponsor of continuing professional education on the National Registry of CPE Sponsors, and this webinar allowed attendees to earn 1.2 CPE credit hours.

Publications

Jennifer Van Horn, professor of art history and history, and Catharine Dann Roeber, Brock W. Jobe Associate Professor of Decorative Arts and Material Culture, co-edited a special issue of Winterthur Portfolio: A Journal of American Material Culture. The first of a new series, this issue covers the rich connections between materiality and enslavement.

Exhibitions

The cover of the exhibition catalog for 'David Driskell: Icons of Nature and History'

Julie L. McGee, associate professor of Africana studies and art history and director of the Interdisciplinary Humanities Research Center, is the curator of “David Driskell: Icons of Nature and History,” which will be on view from June 19-Sept. 12, 2021, at the Portland Museum of Art, in Portland, Maine. This traveling exhibition includes work by Driskell from the University of Delaware Museums collections. This month, McGee and former Portland Museum of Art Chief Curator Jessica May will participate in a virtual conversation on the exhibition to kick off Member Preview Day on June 18 and Member Appreciation Weekend June 18-20. Previously, this exhibition was on view at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, and during that stop, McGee discussed it with Tyler Green on the Modern Art Notes Podcast, episode 490. After Maine, the exhibition will travel to the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., and the Cincinnati Art Museum. The exhibition catalogue, published by Rizzoli Electa, is available from Indiebound and Amazon.

Honors

The University of Delaware Library, Museums and Press has been awarded a 2021 Leab Exhibition Award for its online exhibition Votes for Delaware Women: A Centennial Exhibition by the Rare Books and Manuscripts Section (RBMS) of the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL). The award is for "winner" of the digital category and was announced at the annual RBMS conference on June 7, 2021. Guest-curated by historian and Professor Emerita Anne Boylan, the exhibition examines Delaware’s part in the long struggle to secure voting rights for all women. L. Rebecca Johnson Melvin, coordinator of special projects, manuscripts librarian and curator of the Joseph R. Biden Jr. Senatorial Papers for the Library, Museums and Press, and Dustin Frohlich, processing archivist for the Library, Museums and Press, designed and installed the online exhibition using the Library's instance of WordPress. The 2021 Leab Exhibition Committee cited the exhibition's digital presentation and content as “digestible,” “comprehensive” and inclusive “of the often undervalued contribution of Black women’s leadership in this historic movement.”

A duo composition for percussion titled “360” -- written by Gene Koshinski, professor of percussion, and Tim Broscious, assistant professor of percussion -- was performed by students from the Professional Conservatory of Molina de Segura in Murcia, Spain, when they won first prize in the chamber music competition “Entre Cuerdas y Metales” in Cartagena, Spain.

Alumnus Nicholas Calabrese, a baritone who earned his bachelor of music degree at UD in 2020, is a 2021 winner of the Manhattan School of Music Lillian Fuchs Competition in Chamber Music for his interpretation of Beethoven’s “An die ferne Geliebte,” with pianist Shun Yeen Hoi. Calabrese was accepted this year into the Manhattan School of Music studio of Metropolitan Opera soprano Shirley Close.

Alumna Courtney Porter, a mezzosoprano who earned her master of music degree in 2019, was accepted into the Doctor of Musical Arts program at the University of Kentucky, where she is the winner of the Lyman T. Johnson Fellow Award that covers tuition and includes a stipend. Porter will serve as teaching assistant to Everett McCorvey, who is the current artistic director of the National Chorale of Lincoln Center and founder of the American Spiritual Ensemble.

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