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

Recent honors, presentations and publications include the following:

Honors

Meghan Rydell has been selected to join this year’s cohort of Newman Civic Fellows. Rydell is a senior Honors double-major in public policy and international relations who is on track to complete an accelerated 4+1 master's degree in public administration by May 2028 and a Community Engagement Scholar. The Newman Civic Fellowship is a yearlong program that recognizes students who stand out for their leadership potential and commitment to creating positive change in communities. The fellowship honors the late Frank Newman, one of Campus Compact’s founders and a tireless advocate for civic engagement in higher education. 

On Aug.17, 2026, Chris Huffman, electrical manager for the Maintenance and Operations Department, earned the Certified Educational Facilities Professional (CEFP) credential through APPA – Leadership in Educational Facilities. The CEFP credential is recognized across the industry as a standard of excellence in educational facilities leadership. Furthermore, this achievement recognizes Huffman’s proven expertise, dedication and commitment to the University of Delaware’s facilities, which in turn helps ensure the success of its students, faculty and staff.

Presentations

On Aug. 27, 2026, Ed Freel, senior fellow at the Institute for Public Administration (IPA), joined Gov. Matt Meyer and Lt. Gov. Kyle Evans Gay to present the Delaware Early Education Childhood Council (DECC) 2026–2030 Vision and Strategic Plan, “Scaling Early Success.” DECC promotes the development of a comprehensive and coordinated early childhood system, from birth to age 8, while providing the highest quality services and environment for Delaware’s children and their families. Freel has been a member of DECC since 2010, contributing decades of expertise in early childhood education to the Council, culminating in his receiving the Delaware Association for the Education of Young Children Lifetime Achievement Award last year. IPA is a research and public service center in the Joseph R. Biden, Jr. School of Public Policy and Administration.

Publications

A poem titled "Statue" by Margaret Stetz, Mae and Robert Carter Professor of Women's Studies and professor of humanities, has been published in Issue 42 (August 2026) of Colloquy: Text, Theory, Critique, an online journal sponsored by the Literary and Cultural Studies Graduate Research Program at Monash University, Australia. Stetz's poem is the first selection in this special issue, which is dedicated to the theme of "Resistance." As Anriena Zen, editor-in-chief of the journal, writes in the accompanying "Editorial": "Margaret D. Stetz's 'Statue' opens the issue because it states the problem in its most naked form. The poem is a catalogue of prohibitions: what the Statue of Peace [dedicated to the Korean ‘comfort women’ of WWII] must not do, must not show, must not say, ventriloquizes the demand for silence so precisely that the demand indicts itself. Stetz has spent three decades in the movement seeking justice for survivors of Japan's wartime system of military sexual slavery, and the poem carries that duration in it: the recognition that the sculpture's power lies precisely in its refusal to be finished with the past, and that this is exactly what makes it intolerable to those who would prefer the past finished.  Here resistance is not a gesture but an endurance, and its medium is a body that cannot be made to stop meaning."

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