For the Record, March 6, 2026

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

Recent presentations, publications and honors include the following:

Presentations

Margaret Stetz, Mae and Robert Carter Professor of Women's Studies and professor of humanities, was invited by UCLA's William Andrews Clark Memorial Library to give the annual Oscar Wilde lecture. Her talk, which was delivered in person in Los Angeles on Feb. 21, 2026, but was also livestreamed on YouTube, was titled "Fantasies, Fantasias and Fangirls: Wilde's Fairy Tales and New Women Writers." Stetz focused on the influence of Wilde's The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888) and A House of Pomegranates (1891) on works by rebellious "New Women" of the 1890s. Irish and English writers such as "George Egerton" (Mary Chavelita Dunne), Mabel Nembhard and Ella Erskine, as well as the African American author Alice Dunbar Nelson (whose papers are in UD's Library), followed his lead in this form, while often turning their own storytelling in different political directions. Stetz's lecture emphasized, moreover, Wilde's continuing importance to both 20th and 21st century fantasy writing by women.

Matthew Trevett-Smith, director of the Center for Teaching and Assessment of Learning and assistant professor of anthropology, moderated an online Town Hall, "Teaching Evaluation Reform: The State of the Art," for the Association for Undergraduate Education at Research Universities on March 5, 2026. The Town Hall panel included Ann E. Ausitn (Michigan State University), Noah D. Finkelstein (University of Colorado-Boulder), Andrea Follmer Greenhoot (University of Kansas), Doug Ward (University of Kansas) and Gabriela Cornnejo Weaver (University of Massachusetts-Amherst) for a discussion of their new and arguably definitive statement on the subject, bolstered by years of research and experimentation at U.S. research universities and grounded in leading-edge theory.

On Feb. 20, 2026, Martha Narvaez, associate director of UD's Water Resources Center (UDWRC), led a presentation titled "Water Science: Uncovering Hidden Risks" at the seventh annual Youth Environmental Summit (YES!). The YES! conference is a statewide summit bringing together over 750 Delaware high school students passionate about protecting the Earth. During this conference, the UDWRC team led a session on water quality, water supply and their impacts on public health. Narvaez began the presentation by providing an overview of federal, state and local regulations and laws to protect the water supply and water quality. Cooper Feeny, a master of science student in the Water Science and Policy Program, discussed the impacts of lead pipes on drinking water and a collaborative effort with the city of Wilmington to develop a lead pipe inventory. Megan Wassil, a doctoral candidate in the Water Science and Policy Program, discussed PFAS health impacts and her research efforts to detect and remediate PFAS in drinking water supplies. The presentation concluded with a discussion about academic and job opportunities in the water resources field. UDWRC is part of the Institute for Public Administration (IPA), a research and public service center in the Joseph R. Biden, Jr. School of Public Policy and Administration.

On March 4, 2026, Tricia Wachtendorf, professor of sociology and criminal justice and the Joseph R. Biden, Jr. School of Public Policy and Administration, and director of the Disaster Research Center, was a guest on Connecticut Public Radio/WNPR's The Colin McEnroe Show, speaking about the role of neighbors during crises.

Publications

Margaret Stetz, Mae and Robert Carter Professor of Women's Studies and professor of humanities, continues to publish poetry that reflects her scholarship and expands her research in creative ways. The latest example is her poem "Oscar, Nightingale, Rose," which appears, accompanied by a brief "Commentary," in Volupté: Interdisciplinary Journal of Decadence Studies, Vol. 8: 2 (Winter 2025), in a special issue devoted to "The Decadent Fairy Tale." (Volupté is an online scholarly journal produced and published by Goldsmiths, University of London, UK.) Stetz's poem links the story of the self-sacrificial artist-figure, the Nightingale, in Oscar Wilde's 1888 fairy tale, "The Nightingale and the Rose," to the fate of Wilde himself, while emphasizing how he has transcended that seemingly tragic end.

Honors

The University's Department of Art History ranked sixth among 784 international institutions to receive major fellowships, according to a new study conducted by the Association of Research Institutes in Art History (ARIAH). ARIAH's Scholars Data Project compiled data from 1961-2024 from four prestigious residential scholars programs: The Clark in Williamstown, Massachusetts, the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts in the National Gallery of Art. UD earned a total of 87 awards, with a large portion given to early stage scholars. Jessica Horton, professor of art history, has the distinction of being the only art historian out of almost 4,000 recipients to be awarded funding from all four institutions.

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