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

Recent new appointments, presentations and publications include the following:

New appointments

The University of Delaware Police Department (UDPD) has three new police officers who graduated from the 98th Delaware State Police and the 94th Municipal Police Class on Sept. 15. Joining the department are Samuel Culver, former UDPD cadet who was presented with the Delaware Association of Chiefs of Police Outstanding Recruit Award; Brenden Mile, former UDPD cadet who received the Outstanding Proficiency in Police Firearms Award; and Robert Pappa, former Talleyville firefighter and EMT who was presented the Outstanding Physical Fitness Award.

Presentations

Rudi Matthee, John and Dorothy Munroe Distinguished Professor of History, presented “Propaganda through Education: Foreign Schools in Early 20th-Century Iran,” at the 13th Biennial Conference of Iranian Studies, Salamanca, Spain, Aug. 31, 2022. 

Sharon P. Pitt, vice president of information technologies and CIO, discussed “Going Fast Without Breaking Things: Balancing the ‘Need for Speed’ with Intentional Digital Transformation Strategy” on a Top of Mind Podcast on Sept. 13, 2022. On the podcast, she shares a glimpse into the intentions behind UD’s growing digital transformation strategy. Pitt highlights UD’s innovative shared services efforts and the importance of collaboration and communication with stakeholders to reach top effectiveness.

Margaret Stetz, Mae and Robert Carter Professor of Women’s Studies and professor of humanities, gave two invited talks in London during summer 2022. On July 20, she delivered the plenary lecture at the University of Roehampton, U.K., for a conference on “Comic Verse of the 19th Century: Power, Politics, Poetics.” Titled “Partners in Rhyme: Carolyn Wells, Oliver Herford and Transatlantic ‘Whimsy,’” her presentation addressed the question of gender differences in humor, using as examples comic poems by the American writer Carolyn Wells and also by a British contemporary, Oliver Herford, with whom Wells  sometimes collaborated. On Aug. 21, Stetz was a participant at “Aubrey Beardsley 150: The Artist Resurgent,” where her paper, titled “Philip Core: The Boy Who Would Be Beardsley,” examined the career of a 20th-century American gay male artist who, from the early age of 14, published work inspired by Beardsley’s distinctive black-and-white style of illustration. This conference, which took place at the St. Bride Foundation in London, U.K., was jointly sponsored by the Aubrey Beardsley Society, the Decadence Research Centre at Goldsmiths University, the British Association of Decadence Studies and the Birkbeck Centre for 19th-Century Studies. In New York City on Sept, 7, 2022, Stetz also gave an invited talk on the art and writing of Aubrey Beardsley. This presentation occurred in conjunction with the opening of the exhibition Aubrey Beardsley, 150 Years Young, which she and Mark Samuels Lasner, senior research fellow, University of Delaware Library, Museums and Press, have curated. The exhibition, which displays 69 items drawn from the Mark Samuels Lasner collection, is open to the public and on view until Nov, 12 in the Second Floor Gallery of the Grolier Club, the oldest bibliophilic organization in the U.S. It has been included in The New York Times’s listing of Fall 2022 art shows nationwide.

Publications

Angela Hattery, professor in the Department of Women and Gender Studies and co-director of the Center for the Study and Prevention of Gender-Based Violence, and Earl Smith, professor in the Department of Women and Gender Studies, are the authors of the new book Way Down in the Hole: Race, Intimacy, and the Reproduction of Racial Ideologies in Solitary Confinement, to be published by Rutgers University Press in October 2022. Based on ethnographic observations and interviews with inmates, correctional officers and civilian staff conducted in solitary confinement units, Way Down in the Hole explores the myriad ways in which daily, intimate interactions between those locked up 24 hours a day and the correctional officers charged with their care, custody and control produce and reproduce hegemonic racial ideologies.

Margaret Stetz, Mae and Robert Carter Professor of Women’s Studies and professor of humanities, has continued producing poetry that reflects her scholarly expertise and brings the subject of her feminist work to new audiences. In July 2022, two more of her poems were published—“Gertrude Käsebier (1852–1934), American Photographer” and “Sylvia Plath, 1953”—under the title “Unbound: Two Herstories.” Both appeared in the Spring 2022 issue of Review Americana: A Creative Writing Journal and can be read here. In addition, during summer 2022, her poem “Robins” was published in the journal The Bluebird Word, and another poem, “Pets,” was published in The Cider Press Review.

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