For the Record, Friday, April 19, 2024

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

Recent awards and publications include the following:

Awards

Patricia Sloane-White, professor and chair of the Department of Women and Gender Studies, and Jennifer Naccarelli, associate professor and associate chair, received a $100,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation's new Affirming Multivocal Humanities initiative. The award supports three years of programming and curriculum development to advance the study of race, ethnicity, gender or sexuality. Funding was used this semester to create a series of programs and special events on the topic of wrongfully convicted people, exoneration,and criminalized victims of gender-based violence, including this year's Ida B. Wells lecture which featured former Central Park Five member and current New York City Council member Yusef Salaam. The department also developed a three-course integrated curriculum examining the issue, in which students were encouraged to take active and collaborative roles in creating digital and experiential material, including a student-led "mock trial" of Darryl Hunt. The grant also supports the creation of a digital archive addressing exoneration and social justice, primarily for the Black community, and the enormous cost of racial inequality.

Publications

A recently published manuscript by Lauren Genova, assistant professor of chemistry and biochemistry, was selected to be featured on the front cover of the April issue of the Journal of Chemical Education. The article, titled "ChemisTree: A Novel, Interactive Chemistry Game to Teach Students about Electron Configuration," describes a game conceptualized by Genova's former student Slade Goldman, an undergraduate construction engineering and management major, in which students use LEGO bricks to build the electron configurations of atoms and ions. The cover art, designed by former undergraduate Ellis (Trey) Brown, features the ChemisTree LEGO game board in the center, with LEGO tile pieces (representing electrons) in the periphery.

Columbia University Press published a new book by Laura E. Helton, assistant professor of English and history, tracing acts of collecting in Black public culture between 1910 and 1950. Scattered and Fugitive Things: How Black Collectors Created Archives and Remade History tells the stories of Black collectors who created the first enduring set of African American archives: bibliophile Arturo Schomburg, scrapbook maker Alexander Gumby, librarians Virginia Lee and Vivian Harsh, curator Dorothy Porter, and historian L. D. Reddick. Scattered and Fugitive Things highlights the social life of collecting and creatively draws on overlooked sources, such as book lists and card catalogs, to reveal the surprising risks collectors took to establish Black archives at a time when dominant institutions cast doubt on the value or even the idea of Black history.

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