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

Recent presentations, awards and publications include the following:

Presentations

Heinz-Uwe Haus, professor of theater, presented under his pseudonym Jean Bodin his first collection of poems in Greek (edition lulu, Mayenne, France) under the title Mouths of the Wind, translated by Marianna Papastephanou, on Feb. 8, 2023 at Diachroniki Gallery, Nicosia, Cyprus. The reading, with prominent Greek actors Despina Bebedeli, Erika Liras, Dinos Liras, Stelios Kafkarides and Neophytos Neophytou, brought to life a political poetry of heightened awareness of old and new plagues of humanity that invite thoughtful individual and global change,” as the translator described the basic goals of the work. The philologist Kostas Hadshidimitriou commented: “The poems create a faded memory in the listener, a memory which crosses generations to become part of the human experience as a whole.” The evening ended with a standing ovation by the audience.

Lynn Ferro, a graduate student in the Department of Health Behavior and Nutrition Sciences, presented a portion of her dissertation, a study titled “Effects of an Apiaceous or Cruciferous Vegetable on the Infant Gastrointestinal Microbiota and MicroRNA Expression: A Randomized Controlled Feasibility Study,” at the American Society for Nutrition’s NUTRITION 2023 in Boston, Massachusetts. Under the supervision of department chair and associate professor Jillian Trabulsi, Ferro examined how carrots and broccoli, members of the apiaceous and cruciferous vegetable families, respectively, alter the infant microbiota when introduced early in children’s diets. With a short-term feeding duration of only three days, differences in microbiota diversity and relative abundance were still seen. Ferro utilized these data to design a clinical trial she is currently running at UD, the First Foods Study, which spans across a two-week period, providing further insights into the overall impact of introducing different singular first food types, examining their differential microbiota signature and the duration of the signature once other foods are introduced. Ferro hopes to add to a body of literature that contributes to the guidance on preferential first foods and their potential programming effect on the gut microbiome.

Awards

Amy Cherry, a communication specialist for the College of Health Sciences, was recently recognized by the Delaware Business Times as one of 2023’s 40 Under 40. The DBT40 annually identifies promising and successful leaders, all under the age of 40, who commit to reshaping Delaware with innovation and community engagement. At UD, Cherry captures the stories of groundbreaking research and accomplishments of faculty, staff and students at CHS within publications such as UDaily, UD Magazine and the CHS News page. For over a decade prior to joining UD, Cherry spent her career as assistant news director and senior enterprise journalist for WDEL, where her investigative journalism held government officials accountable and sparked legislation that led to solutions. Outside of UD, she is working to launch Spotlight Delaware, a nonprofit newsroom dedicated to covering public policy statewide through her role as Board Chair of the Local Journalism Initiative of Delaware. Cherry also contributes to other local organizations and programs, such as the Delaware Press Association, New Castle County’s Dial-a-Story program and the Delaware Burger Battle, which supports the Food Bank of Delaware and Delaware ProStart.

Kisha Porcher, assistant professor in the Department of English, and Shamaine Bertrand, assistant professor at The College of New Jersey, received the George Orwell Award from the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) for their podcast Black Gaze. The selection committee noted the podcast’s outstanding contribution to the analysis of public discourse: “Through Black language, Dr. Kisha Porcher and Dr. Shamaine Bertrand bring the Black body to light and speak on its lived experiences in public discourse. Exploring topics from fatphobia to rest, the podcast amplifies how the Black body, especially the Black woman body, works hard in a country structured around racism. Black Gaze’s focus on loving your body and protecting yourself first explicitly speaks back to harmful implicit capitalist logics.”

Publications

David Shearer, Thomas Muncy Keith Professor of History, published a book titled Stalin and War, 1918-1953: Patterns of Repression, Mobilization, and External Threat. Routledge is the publisher and the book is in both hardback and paperback. This is an interpretive history of Stalin and Stalinism based on a thirty-five year career of research and synthetic reading as well as new archival material. The book explains the recurring patterns of mass repression in the Soviet Union under Stalin (1930s to the 1950s) not in terms of domestic politics, the standard interpretation, but in terms of the dictator’s perceived threats of invasion. This is the first book to connect domestic politics of terror with fears of foreign threat.

Matthias Fleckenstein, associate professor of finance in the Alfred Lerner College of Business and Economics, and his co-authors had their working paper, “Do Municipal Bond Investors Pay a Convenience Premium to Avoid Taxes,” cited in the Sept. 3 edition of The Wall Street Journal. The study initially appeared in a National Bureau of Economic Research in June.

Kristen Poole, Ned B. Allen Professor of English, serves as the general editor of Routledge Resources Online: The Renaissance World, a unique, large-scale digital humanities project offering engaging, digitally enhanced essays that illuminate a wide range of topics in the arts, politics, social history, religion, material culture, cultural geography and media of the period known as the “Renaissance” (roughly 1300-1700). The platform emphasizes the period’s movement and intersections, tracing the travel and interactions of people, ideas and objects. It offers a global vision and diverse voices of the period, with a geographic scope reaching beyond Europe to Asia, Africa, the Ottoman Empire and the Americas. Many UD faculty and graduate students have contributed to the interdisciplinary and collaborative project as editors or authors. Mónica Domínguez Torres, professor of art history, serves as the subject editor for Art; Meredith Ray, Elias Ahuja Professor of Italian in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures, has served as co-subject editor for European Literature; and Julian Yates, H. Fletcher Brown Professor of English, serves on the Advisory Board for English Literature and Drama.

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