UD faculty and staff announce honors, presentations, publications

9:48 a.m., June 22, 2012--For the Record provides information about recent professional activities of University of Delaware faculty, staff, students and alumni.

Recent honors, presentations, press, publications, staff announcements and service include the following:

Campus Stories

From graduates, faculty

As it neared time for the processional to open the University of Delaware Commencement ceremonies, graduating students and faculty members shared their feelings about what the event means to them.

Doctoral hooding

It was a day of triumph, cheers and collective relief as more than 160 students from 21 nations participated in the University of Delaware's Doctoral Hooding Convocation held Friday morning on The Green.

• Doctoral hooding
• Old Swedes
• Summer SAT, ACT prep
• 'Opus 13' pre-sale

Honors

Peter Rees, associate professor of geography, received the Delaware Geographic Service 2012 Award from the Delaware Geographic Data Committee. The recognition is given to an individual or group demonstrating outstanding service to the Delaware geospatial community. The award is presented in memory of the late Vernon C. Svatos, former geographic information system (GIS) coordinator with UD’s Water Resources Agency. 

Presentations

Michael Gutierrez, associate librarian, Reference Department, and Hannah Lee, assistant librarian, Student Multimedia Design Center, University of Delaware Library, presented "Collaborative Partnerships for Learning: Two Approaches to Information Literacy" at the Lilly Conference on College and University Teaching on June 2, Bethesda, Md.

Farley Grubb, professor of economics, presented "Is Paper Money Just Paper Money? Experimentation and Local Variation in the Fiat Paper Monies Issued by the Colonial Governments of British North America, 1690-1775: Part I" in the Colloquium on Money, Power & Print: Interdisciplinary Studies of the Financial Revolution in the British Empire, 1688-1776, The Citadel, Halifax, Canada, June 14-16.

Press

Travis Longcore, a UD alumnus and associate professor of spatial sciences at the University of Southern California, was featured in a June 13 National Public Radio All Things Considered story about bird collisions with communication towers. Longcore received a bachelor of arts degree in geography in 1993 from UD, where he was a DuPont Scholar and an Honors Program student.

Publications

Sheldon D. Pollack, professor of law and legal studies in the Department of Accounting and MIS, “Arenas of Federal Tax Policy,” in Tax Notes, volume 135, pp. 1499–1514, June 18.

Staff announcements

The College of Arts and Sciences has announced several new or newly reappointed department chairs and program directors for the 2012-13 academic year. New chairs and their departments are Ben Bruening, professor, linguistics and cognitive science; Kai Draper, professor, philosophy; John Ernest, new professor from West Virginia University, following a national search, English; Murray Johnston, professor, chemistry and biochemistry; and Ed Nowak, professor, physics and astronomy. Reappointed positions are Maria Aristigueta, professor and director, School of Public Policy and Administration, beginning 2013, and Gretchen Bauer, professor and chair, political science and international relations. Leland Ware, Louis L. Redding Professor, has been named interim director for the School of Public Policy and Administration for the coming year, and Jenny Lambe, associate professor, has been appointed acting chair for communication. New program directors in the college are Steve Bernhardt, Andrew B. Kirkpatrick Chair in Writing, Institute for Transforming Undergraduate Education; and John Jungck, director of Interdisciplinary Science Instruction, arriving from Beloit College following a national search.

Service

David J. Blacker, professor of education and legal studies, has been appointed the editor for English for Education Review, the multilingual journal of book reviews. He succeeds Gene V. Glass, who served in that capacity since the inception of the journal in 1998. Blacker's academic background is in the history of philosophy, and his writings pursue insights from that tradition within the context of contemporary education problems. His works include Democratic Education Stretched Thin: How Complexity Challenges a Democratic Ideal (SUNY) and Dying to Teach: The Educator’s Search for Immortality (Teachers College). He has also written widely on political, legal and ethical issues in education policy, including a continuing series of state-specific textbooks on educational law and ethics. His forthcoming book, The Falling Rate of Learning and the Neoliberal Endgame (Zero Books), analyzes educational possibility in an age of economic and environmental collapse. 

To submit information to be included in For the Record, write to ud-ocm@udel.edu.