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

In March, the Delaware Center for Civics Education (DCCE) in UD’s Institute for Public Administration (IPA) hosted the annual Project Citizen Program showcase. DCCE’s project director, Fran O’Malley, coordinated the event at UD’s Trabant Center with support from assistant director Scott Abbott and IPA senior fellow Ed Freel. Each year, state coordinators of the program send one outstanding student portfolio to the Project Citizen National Showcase, where evaluators officially judge the level of achievement attained by each portfolio. This year’s showcase involved first-year high school students from Newark Charter School. Students were tasked with identifying a local policy issue and developing a four-panel display and a five-section documentation binder that adequately proposed a solution. Students identified the problem, proposed alternative solutions, identified and explained their chosen policy, and then formulated an action plan on how to get the policy adopted. During the event, staff and faculty from the Biden School, IPA, the Center for Economic Education, and the Department of Education served as judges for the portfolios and offered feedback on each group’s display. The Institute for Public Administration is a research and public service center in the Joseph R. Biden, Jr. School of Public Policy and Administration.

Natalija Mijatovic, professor and chair of the Department of Art and Design, recently held a solo exhibition at Judith Rae Solomon Gallery at Cliffe College of Creative Arts, Youngstown University. The exhibition, titled “The Covenant Of Snow,” showcased her paintings and drawings. The concept of the exhibition is poetic and metaphorical, symbolizing the unique and transient beauty of snowfall and the silent agreement between nature and the world it blankets in white. Every snowflake is a unique crystalline masterpiece that descends from the heavens to blanket the earth in a hushed and ethereal stillness, creating a pristine canvas upon which the world is invited to be reborn. During the exhibition, Mijatovic also gave an artist lecture and conducted studio visits with seniors from the Department of Art.

School of Nursing graduate students Sanaz Taherzadeh, Janice James-Webb and Anthony Gariba were recently recognized for their research presentations at the 36th Eastern Nursing Research Society (ENRS) Annual Scientific Conference in Boston, Massachusetts. This year’s event theme was Trailblazing Innovative Models of Care in Population Health through Nursing Science. Taherzadeh demonstrated a podium presentation that earned her to be among six recipients for this year’s ENRS Student Conference Scholarship award. Her research analyzed the connection between physical activity characteristics and pain severity in adults with arthritis. Additionally, James-Webb and Gariba led school-selected poster presentations to showcase their research. James-Webb explored methods for implementation of screening tools for obstructive sleep apnea in patients with unhealthy weights. Gariba's research studied factors that ultimately enhance or hinder the transfer of simulation-based learning for nursing students into clinical practice.

Stephen Metraux, Alaina Robinson and Sarah Marshall represented UD at the Consortium of University Public Service Organizations (CUPSO) annual conference hosted by the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Metraux, an associate professor in the Joseph R. Biden, Jr. School of Public Policy and Administration and director of the Center for Community Research and Service (CCRS), presented his work on homelessness and housing needs in Delaware as part of a panel titled “Public Service Research and the Affordable Housing Predicament: Problems, Options and Solutions.” During the conference poster showcase, Robinson, a policy specialist II at the Institute for Public Administration (IPA), used her educational research and policy work with the Redding Consortium for Educational Equity as a case study for improving policymaking through evidence-based research and evaluation. Marshall, an IPA associate policy scientist, moderated a panel on “Collaborative Approaches to Intractable Challenges.” This breakout session discussed how university public service centers collaborate with government and nonprofit partners to address grand challenges through convening community conversations, providing training for public servants, and developing and implementing program evaluation tools. CCRS and IPA are research and public service centers in the Biden School.

Awards 

The Calidore String Quartet received the BBC Music Magazine 2024 Chamber Award for its recording of The Late Quartets of Beethoven. The three-disc set of Beethoven’s Quartets Nos. 12-16, released in February 2023 on Signum Classics, was lauded by BBC Music Magazine with this March 2023 five-star review: “The New York- based Calidore Quartet gives meticulously detailed performances of Beethoven’s late string quartets, with playing of quite remarkable technical accomplishment. I’m not sure, for instance, that I’ve ever heard the tremendously challenging Op. 133 Fugue (the original finale of the Quartet Op. 130) done with greater precision and clarity, and it makes for quite overwhelming experience… The players have clearly thought long and hard about these masterpieces of the string quartet repertoire, and they have produced performances that can stand comparison with the best.” The Calidore String Quartet accepted its award at King’s Place in London on April 18, performing the Cavatina movement from Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 13 in B-flat Major.  

Three UD School of Nursing (SON) faculty members won awards at the International Society of Psychiatric Mental Health Nursing 2024 Annual Conference in Providence, Rhode Island, in April. Jennifer Saylor, associate dean of faculty and student affairs for SON, received the ISPN Psychiatric Mental Health Advocacy Award. The honor is bestowed upon a non-psychiatric nursing individual or organization for outstanding service, advocacy work or policy change for persons with mental illness. Saylor was recognized for her fierce advocacy and servant leadership for vulnerable populations in Delaware through her work with SON and with RespondDE, part of the Delaware Behavioral Emotional Support Team (BEST) at UD. Caren Coffy-McCormick, assistant professor in SON, who owns a small outpatient psychiatric mental health practice with offices in Newark and Middletown, was awarded the ISPN Clinical Practice Award. This honor recognizes a psychiatric-mental health nurse who has made outstanding contributions to advancing the care of people with mental illness and their families. Jennifer Graber, associate dean of academic affairs and practice initiatives, presided over the awards ceremony as an ISPN Awards Committee member. Graber, who has been a member of ISPN since 2017 and has been on the Awards Committee since 2021, received an ISPN Foundation scholarship to attend the conference.

Publications

Philip Goldstein, retired professor of English at the UD Associate in Arts Program’s Wilmington campus, recently contributed the book chapter “The Politics of Literary Criticism” to the Encyclopedia of Critical Political Science, published by Edward Elgar Publishing in 2024. The chapter examines how literary criticism is affected by cultural and political shifts over time, citing drastic changes in critical perspective on works by Jane Austen, Richard Wright and Zora Neale Hurston, among others.

Trevor A. Dawes, the vice provost for libraries and museums and May Morris University Librarian, along with Russell Michalak from Goldey-Beacom College and Jon Cawthorne from Wayne State University, are co-editors of a new book, Toxic Dynamics: Disrupting, Dismantling, and Transforming Academic Library Culture, published by the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL). In the book, the authors identify the characteristics of a toxic work culture in academic libraries and address practices that may turn a toxic work environment into a high-functioning organizational culture. 

Margaret Stetz, Mae and Robert Carter Professor of Women's Studies and professor of humanities, has had two new scholarly essays published. The first, "Ella Erskine, Elkin Mathews, and the 'Long Aesthetic Century,'" appears in the journal Women's Writing. In it, Stetz discusses how and why the British Aesthetic Movement, which is usually associated with the late-Victorian period, continued to interest both readers and publishers in the early 20th century. The second, "Class and Classrooms: Teaching Jane Eyre with Adele Grace and Celine," was an invited contribution to a forum on pedagogy, titled "How We Teach Today," for the journal Victorian Review. There, Stetz talks about the importance of examining not only issues of race in Charlotte Brontë's classic fiction, but the representation of class, doing so with the aid of a recent novel by Claire Moïse that brings attention to the forgotten working-class women characters in Jane Eyre.

Heinz-Uwe Haus, professor of theatre, published in the recent issue of Lumina Lina/Revista de spiritualitate si cultura romaneasca an article titled "EU between federal state and confederation of states.” The author concludes: "to 'think continentally,' as Hamilton convinced his fellow Americans, is the EU's blueprint too, the only model of survival and success."

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