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Two history faculty honored as named professors
2:52 p.m., Feb. 9, 2007--Provost Dan Rich has announced the appointment of two named professors in the history department--Christine Leigh Heyrman, Distinguished Professor of History, will become the Robert W. and Shirley P. Grimble Professor of American History, and Rudi Matthee will be named Unidel Distinguished Professor of History. Effective Sept. 1, the appointments recognize outstanding scholarship, teaching and service to the University, Rich said. Christine Leigh Heyrman specializes in early American and cultural history. She is the author of Southern Cross, The Beginnings of the Bible Belt, which was awarded the 1997 Bancroft Prize by the Columbia University Library for the best book about American history. It also was named a Notable Book by The New York Times. She also is the author of Commerce and Culture: The Maritime Communities of Colonial Massachusetts, 1690-1750, and Nation of Nations, a survey of Colonial times, now in its third edition. Her current research focuses on the first cohort of American Protestant missionaries in the Middle East and their encounters with Islam from 1820-50. Heyrman also chairs the committee developing the Advanced Placement U.S. history test for the Educational Testing Service and is cochairperson of a College Board commission to redesign both the Advanced Placement U.S. history course and test. Among her honors, Heyrman was elected a member of the Society of American Historians in 1999 and was named a fellow of the Shelby-Cullom-Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University in 1994. She also received a Guggenheim fellowship in 1993-94 and a grant from the American Council of Learned Societies in 1993-94. In 1998, she was named Outstanding Faculty Scholar at UD. A graduate of Macalester College, Heyrman received her doctorate from Yale University, where she received the Theron Rockwell Field Dissertation Prize. Before joining the UD faculty in 1990, Heyrman served on the faculties of Brandeis University and the University of California Irvine, and she was the Cardozo Visiting Associate Professor of History at Yale. Rudi Matthee is an authority on Middle Eastern history, focusing on early modern Iran and the Persian Gulf.
He also is the author of The Politics of Trade in Safavid Iran: Silk for Silver, 1600-1730, which received the Iranian Ministry of Culture's award for the best non-Persian book on Iranian history in 1999. He is co-editor of Iran and Beyond: Essays in Honor of Nikki R. Keddie and Iran and the Surrounding World: Interactions in Culture and Cultural Politics. Matthee, who is from the Netherlands, is a graduate of the University of Utrecht, where he majored in Arabic and Persian language and literature, studying at the University of Tehran and also in Egypt. Matthee received his doctorate from the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). A member of the UD faculty since 1993, Matthee was a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University in 2002-03 and has served as president of the Association of Persian-Speaking Societies. Shirley and Robert Grimble Robert Grimble, who died in 2006, was a graduate of Case Western Reserve University and had a long career with the Du Pont Co., where he headed Du Pont International, South America, and later all international operations, retiring in 1979 as chairperson of Du Pont Europe. A founding member of UD's Academy of Lifelong Learning, where he taught history and served as chairperson of the ALL Council and capital campaign, Grimble received UD's Medal of Merit in 1992. He and his wife, Shirley, who died in 2001, established a charitable remainder trust with UD in 1996. Grimble's son, Stephen, a 1966 alumnus, served as vice president and treasurer at UD from 1995-2002. The Unidel Foundation Established in 1939 by Amy Elizabeth du Pont, the Unidel Foundation has given generous support to University of Delaware programs, including a gift to endow faculty chairs and professorships. Article by Sue Moncure
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