University community reports exhibitions, presentations, publications
For the Record provides information about recent professional activities of University of Delaware faculty, staff, students and alumni.
Recent exhibitions, presentations and publications include the following:
Appointments
Joshua Enszer has joined the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering as assistant professor of instruction, where he will be responsible for teaching and academic innovation in the undergraduate program. His goal is to bring knowledge from the scholarship of teaching and learning to improve opportunities in the department’s undergraduate courses. He hopes to apply some of his earlier work in the areas of game-based learning and metacognition to his new position at UD.
Before starting at UD in August, Enszer was a lecturer in chemical engineering at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. Prior to that, he was interim program coordinator for first-year engineering at the University of Notre Dame. Enszer holds a bachelor of science degree in chemical engineering and mathematics from Michigan Technological University and a master of science degree and doctorate in chemical engineering from Notre Dame.
Dana Raftas, previously director of development for strategic initiatives in the University’s Office of the Provost, is now the director of development for the Alfred Lerner College of Business and Economics.
“With Lerner College’s 26,000 alumni and strong prospect pool, the outlook for development and supporting the college’s academic programs and scholarly initiatives is exceptional,” said Lerner College Dean Bruce Weber. “I look forward to enhancing support and expanding our resources to lift excellence for our students, departments, academic centers and industry collaborators.”
Raftas joins Sandy August and Neal Sherman, who both serve as associate directors of development for Lerner College.
Awards
Dustyn Roberts, assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and the
Biomechanics and Movement Science Program, is part of a team recognized for advancing the study of energy expenditure in robotic systems. Her graduate adviser, Joo Kim, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at the New York University Polytechnic School of Engineering, recently received the 2015 Freudenstein/General Motors Young Investigator Award.
Kim was recognized for the paper “Degree-of-Freedom-Based Instantaneous Energetic Cost of Robotic Biped Gait with Benchmarking Implications,” which he co-authored with Roberts and another former student, Joseph Quacinella. The paper outlines the development of an instrumentation system and program that enables energy expenditure to be measured, processed, and analyzed in robotic systems with an unprecedented level of accuracy.
The prize was bestowed by the Design Engineering Division of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) at its annual Mechanisms and Robotics Conference in Boston last month.
Exhibitions
Dennis Carr, a 1999 graduate of UD’s Winterthur Program in American Material Culture, is curator of a new exhibition, “Made in the Americas: The New World Discovers Asia,” on view through Feb. 15 at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, where Carr is the Carolyn and Peter Lynch Curator of American Decorative Arts and Sculpture. The show is the first large-scale, pan-American exhibition to examine the profound influence of Asia on the arts of the colonial Americas. It features more than 90 objects dating from the 17th to the early 19th centuries, including some from the collection of Winterthur Museum, where the exhibition will be on view from March 26, 2016, to Jan. 8, 2017.
Presentations
Margaret Stetz, Mae and Robert Carter Professor of Women’s Studies and professor of humanities, delivered a paper titled “Oscar Wilde and Philadelphia: The 1882 Lectures, the Legacies, and the 2015 Exhibition” on July 14 at a conference in Liverpool, United Kingdom. The conference, “Trans-Atlantic Dialogues on Cultural Heritage: Heritage, Tourism and Traditions,” was sponsored jointly by the University of Birmingham (UK) and the University of Illinois.
Publications
Rudi Matthee, John and Dorothy Munroe Professor of History, published “Relations between the Center and the Periphery in Safavid Iran: The Western Borderlands v. the Eastern Frontier Zone,” The Historian 77 (2015), pp. 431-463.
David Shearer, professor of history, was asked to contribute the commentary for a special journal issue about the history of the Soviet labor camp system, the so-called gulag. “Reaction. The Soviet Gulag — an Archipelago?” appears in Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, special issue, the Soviet Gulag: New Research, New Interpretations, Vol. 16, No.3 (Summer 2015), 711-24.
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