University community reports recent appointments, books, presentations

1:51 p.m., Feb. 21, 2014--For the Record provides information about recent professional activities of University of Delaware faculty, staff, students and alumni.

Recent appointments, books and presentations 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

Appointments

Margaret D. Stetz, Mae and Robert Carter Professor of Women's Studies and professor of humanities, has been appointed to the editorial board of the scholarly journal Papers on Language and Literature, a generalist literary quarterly founded in 1965 and currently published under the auspices of Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville. She also serves on the boards of the journals Nineteenth-Century Studies, Journal of Neo-Victorian Studies, Victorian Periodicals Review, and Victorian Literature and Culture.

David Pong, professor emeritus of history and Asian Studies, will serve as Faculty of Social Sciences Scholar-in-Residence, Hong Kong Baptist University (HKBU) in March at the invitation of the departments of Chinese studies, history, sociology and geography at the HKBU. Duties include delivering a public lecture and a talk to undergraduate students, and being generally available to faculty, graduate students and undergraduate students.

Awards

Rudi Matthee, John and Dorothy Munroe Professor of History, received the prize for best foreign-language book on Iranian history, annually awarded by the Iranian Ministry of Culture, for his 2012 study, Persia in Crisis: Safavid Decline and the Fall of Isfahan. He traveled to Iran and attended the award ceremony in Tehran on Feb. 8. He also gave a presentation, in Persian, on the topic of the state of Iranian studies in Iran and outside of Iran, at al-Zahra University, Tehran.

Books

A book by David Shearer, professor of history, Policing Stalin’s Socialism: Social Order and Mass Repression in the Soviet Union, 1924-1953 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), has appeared in Russian translation, Staliniskii voennyi sotsializm: Repressii i obshchestvennyi poriadok v Sovetskom Soiuza, 1924-1953 gg (Stalin’s Martial Law Socialism: Repression and Social Order in the Soviet Union, 1924-1953) (Moscow: Rosspen, 2014). In December, Shearer also published an article in a conference collection, “Gosudarstvennoe nasilie, repressiia i vopros sotsial’noi inzhenerii v Sovetskom Soiuza v 1920-1950 gg” (“State Violence, Repression and the Question of Social Engineering in the Soviet Union, 1920s-1950s”) in Istoriia stalinizma: Zhizn’ v terrore: Sotsial’nye aspekty repressii (The History of Stalinism: Life during the Terror) (Moscow, 2013), 208-31. Shearer spent January working in archives in St. Petersburg, Russia, sponsored by the Department of History and a through travel grant from the Center for Global and Area Studies.

Media

Carlos J. Asarta, director of the Center for Economic Education and Entrepreneurship, and James O’Neill, founding director of the center, were cited in the “In the States” section of the Council for Economic Education winter 2014 newsletter. The report called the Delaware Council on Economic Education “a true gem in the Diamond State,” and specifically highlighted the council’s affiliation with the Center for Economic Education and Entrepreneurship. In particular, the article draws attention to the CEEE’s teacher-training programs and student-centered events, and highlights the transition in leadership from O’Neill to Asarta.

Presentations

David Pong, professor emeritus of history and Asian Studies, delivered a lecture “Liberal Arts Education: What Is It? What Does It Do?” at the University of Macau, Nov. 21, 2013.

Carlos Asarta, director of the Center for Economic Education and Entrepreneurship and associate professor of economics in UD’s Alfred Lerner College of Business and Economics, will speak about the importance of teaching economics and leadership to high school students at the Celebrating Economic Education dinner event in San Francisco on March 13, 2014. The event will celebrate the new strategic partnership between The Fund for American Studies (TFAS) and The Foundation for Teaching Economics (FTE), and will pay tribute to FTE’s outgoing leaders, Jerry Hume and Gary Walton. The evening also will feature keynote remarks by economist John B. Taylor, the Mary and Robert Raymond Professor of Economics at Stanford University.

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