The Partnership for Public Education (PPE), in collaboration with UD’s Center for Research Use in Education, is working with UD researchers and Delaware educators to translate research into practical tools and resources for teachers in an effort to support English teachers' use of quad text sets to foster a deep understanding of social justice. Recognizing a need to more clearly incorporate issues of equity into the curriculum, the research team, led by Dr.Jill Ewing Flynn (UD English Education), created a publicly available website of resources and resource optimization toolkits developed by the Gates Foundation as part of its Advancing Actionable Knowledge initiative. The site has had nearly 3,000 visits since its inception, and the team also discusses the work in an episode of the Evidence4Education podcast. Flynn and Dr. Bill Lewis (UD School of Education) are currently working with teams of teachers in the Appoquinimink School District to integrate equity-focused quad text sets. They presented with Appoquinimink English teachers and a district leader at the 2023 National Council of Teachers of English Annual Convention and the 2024 Delaware Policy and Practice Institute.

Researcher(s): Dr. Jill Flynn
Collaborators: Dr. Jill Flynn, Dr. Bill Lewis, Taria Pritchett (UDXEE '12), Casey Montigney (UDXEE '12).

Podcast link

Website/Toolkit

Professor Lowell Duckert's current book project asks a simple question: what is cold? Natural philosophers, explorers, and artists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries offered a variety of responses. Cold was a material substance comprised of “frigorifick atoms”; it was the elemental force behind freezing, or, “conglutination”; it pierced bodies and plugged up its pores; it was a shapeshifter that appeared as icebergs, snowflakes, and sheets; it lived in the “frozen zone” of the upper globe, but it also rode the north wind and spread out across glaciers; it took, prolonged, and gave life; it was intensely pleasurable. At a time in which popular climate studies obsess over the "end" of a planet headed for meltdown, or a world "after" or “without” ice, I believe that the various doings of early modern cold assist in counter-apocalyptic thinking: they ask us to identify what has been lost and who is at risk in the thinning cold, but they also urge us to imagine alternate futures focused not on inevitable collapse but on ethical obligation and care.

Researcher(s): Lowell Duckert

nti-Blackness is woven into the fabric of the U.S., and more specifically, in English Education programs. In order to enact social justice, we have to explicitly acknowledge the presence of anti-blackness. The research study explores how Black English Education faculty center Blackness in their courses, to develop a framework to determine how centering Blackness can be the foundation of English Education programs. This shifts from just stating that Black Lives Matter, to action. 

Researcher(s): Kisha Porcher

Modelwork: The Material Culture of Making and Knowing.  Edited with Martin Brückner and Sandy Isenstadt, Eds. University of Minnesota Press, 2021. With entries on Sensing, Knowing, Making, and Doing, this volume makes clear that regardless of time period or physical media, modeling invokes particular registers of phenomenology and epistemology; as a facsimile of a thing or a process, it inevitably creates ways of sensing, knowing, and operating in the world. The volume points toward larger conceptual debates about the way in which models of the past as well as new digital ones—models within models—profoundly shape the world around us. Contributors include Johanna Drucker, Peter Galison, Lisa Gitelman, Annabel Wharton, and several others.

Researcher(s): Martin Brückner, Sandy M. Isenstadt, Sarah Wasserman

Collaborators: Johanna Drucker, Peter Galison, Lisa Gitelman, Annabel Wharton, and several others

McKay Jenkins and his Environmental Humanities students are central partners in The Stillmeadow Peace Park project,  an environmental justice, reforestation and community restoration project in West Baltimore being conducted in partnership with the U.S. Forest Service; local watershed restoration nonprofits; and the congregation of a local African-American church. With a tree nursery already growing some 1,100 trees; teams of UD volunteers removing invasive species; and Forest Service Hot Shots preparing to drop close to 100 dead ash trees, the ecological restoration project is already well underway. Along with the restoration of a diverse and robust forest ecosystem, the 10-acre Stillmeadow Peace Park will also ultimately include hiking trails; meditation gardens; and performance and outdoor educational spaces for the church and its surrounding community. Scientists and other researchers are exploring the benefits of forest-based physical, mental, cultural and spiritual health for  individuals and households suffering from trauma, such as citizens returning from incarceration, and those who have experienced crime or racial oppression. An overarching goal is to provide new ways for urban communities to think of themselves in relation to natural systems, such as rivers, trees, and biodiversity; to rebuild both cultural and ecological infrastructure; and to expand the way we think about urban ecological and cultural restoration, so that the Stillmeadow project can ultimately serve as models for similar projects in cities across the United States.

Researcher(s): McKay Jenkins

Collaborators: U.S. Forest Service

The Planetary Estate: Environmental Agency in the 19th Century Transatlantic argues for the crucial role played by nineteenth-century texts in forging an understanding of human environmental agency – the capacity of human beings to intervene in ecological systems.  Conceptions of human environmental agency are key to our current understanding – or denial – of the human role in phenomena such as climate change. Yet, as Dipesh Chakrabarty famously remarked of the Anthropocene, there is a “question of… human collectivity” that accompanies any discussion of large-scale environmental agency at the level of the human species. Rather than sidestepping this question, this investigation unpacks the history of how certain kinds of natural engineering came to be associated with imperial power, while others – such as the agencies of Scottish Highlanders, Native Americans, and African slaves – were repressed in imperial discourse. Attending to human environmental agency in the works of writers such as Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, Walter Scott, Mary Prince, Kah-ge-ga-gah-bowh, and H.G. Wells also means attending to the means by which certain environmental agencies were excluded from, while others came to define, the category of “the human.”

Researcher(s): Siobhan Carroll

ThingStor is an interactive digital database designed to find objects in literature and the visual arts. Showcasing over 100 objects, the current prototype connects objects, texts, and images, illustrating how students and scholars can recognize, understand, and ultimately conduct new research on or teach with material objects found in works of fiction or visual art. Conceived and developed by Martin Brückner (PI), ThingStor is a work of collaboration between graduate students from the Humanities at the University of Delaware and the DH staff from the University of Delaware Library. The ThingStor Team welcomes your participation, comments, or suggestions! Once you are on our landing page, use the tab "About ThingStor" to learn about our vision. You can participate by using the tab "Suggest an Object" where you will find instructions and a submission form.

To view ThingStor, visit the website.

Researcher(s): Martin Brückner

Common Destinations: Maps in the American Experience is a path-breaking exhibition that charts objects and imagery related to America’s historical fascination with maps.   Created by Martin Brückner, Professor in English and American Literature at the University of Delaware, assisted by Winterthur’s Catharine Dann Roeber, Alana Staiti and Heather Hansen, Common Destinations was displayed in the Winterthur Galleries (April 20, 2013 to January 5, 2014) and is now permanently available online.  Presenting over 100 items from the Winterthur collections, the exhibition shows how long before there was a National Geographic magazine or Google Earth, maps were central to the social and commercial activities of Americans. In six sections featuring giant wall maps and tiny pocket globes, hefty folio atlases and fragile map handkerchiefs, the exhibition shows the rise of American maps from rare collectibles to popular object available to American citizens of all backgrounds. Visitors of the online exhibition will see how men used maps at home and abroad; how women and children engaged with maps to foster family ties; and how maps became the social glue that would bind a people of strangers into a community during times of change and development. Emphasizing everyday habits and material culture, each of the exhibition’s section highlights particular map genres and map users, asking the basic question: how would you—based on education, gender, age, and even race—engage with maps in early America?

View the Common Destinations website. 

Researcher(s): Martin Brückner

​The Reverend William Jackson was a radical writer, an Anglican clergyman, and a spy for the French revolutionary government at the height of the Reign of Terror. He was arrested while on a spy mission to London and Dublin in April, 1794, was convicted of high treason the following year, and committed suicide at his sentencing hearing. The importance of the Jackson Affair has been noted by Irish historians, but my research shows that its impact was felt much more broadly in the Atlantic world in the 1790s, and has a significant relation to the infamous trials of the London Radicals and to the Alien and Sedition Acts in the United States. It offers us the opportunity to see how print and political discourse was affected by the Pitt ministry’s counter-terror measures in a new way because Jackson (unlike so many others targeted by the British government) actually was a traitor bent on the violent overthrow of his government.

Researcher(s): Matthew Kinservik

His current research comes in two parts, both of which concern the nature of religious experience as it is embodied in literary texts. My focus is on texts which we as writers create and also texts in which writers attempt to embody or provoke a religious experience. The first book, in progress now, blends together medieval meditative practices used in lectio divina with modern composition and cognitive theory to explore a series of ways in which readers can respond to spiritual texts. Each chapter outlines and explores a different discovery strategy, provides sample models of how to apply the strategy, and concludes with a suggested series of texts that might be fruitfully explored. The second study examines selected texts that teach and explore the mysteries of faith. Some are intended for a wide audience who are in need of basic teaching; some seem intended only for those who are initiated. What is expected of a reader of such texts? How do these texts “teach”? Do reader expectations and experience differ as you move from genre to genre, from printed text to art and architecture? Readings include medieval interpretations of the Hebrew Bible’s “Song of Solomon,” the morality play Everyman, the York crucifixion play, Julian of Norwich’s mystical writings, Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, George Herbert’s The Temple, Donne’s Devotions on Emergent Occasions, and Milton’s Paradise Lost.

Researcher(s): George Miller

Gabrielle Foreman, in collaboration with Sarah Patterson, James Casey ; and many others too numerous to list here.  In the decades preceding the Civil War, free and fugitive Blacks gathered in state and national conventions to advocate for justice as Black rights were constricting across the country. ColoredConventions.org recovers and shares information about delegates and associated women whose civic engagement, political organizing and publications have long been forgotten. The Colored Conventions Project, which features graduate students as leaders across its committees, has been covered in the New York Times and was selected as an NEH Digital Humanities grant winner.

To learn more, visit the Colored Conventions website.