Category: Alumnus

Professor, English

Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs

University of Delaware
Newark, DE 19716

Biography

​Matt Kinservik (B.A. & M.A. University of Wisconsin-Madison; Ph.D. Penn State University) has taught at Delaware since 1997. He teaches courses in literature and theatre, with emphasis on 18th-century Britain. His most recent book, Sex, Scandal and Celebrity in Late Eighteenth-Century England was published by Palgrave MacMillan in 2007. He has published articles on drama, literature, and theatre history in Theatre Survey, PQ, The British Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies, Huntington Library Quarterly, Harvard Library Bulletin, and elsewhere.

Professor

Biological Sciences and Mathematical Sciences

University of Delaware
Newark, DE 19716

jungck@udel.edu

Biography

​John R. Jungck is Director of the Dupont Interdisciplinary Science Learning Laboratories in the Harker Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering Laboratory at the University of Delaware. He is a tenured full professor of Biological Sciences and holds joint appointments in the Department of Mathematical Sciences, the Bioinformatics/ Computational Biology Program, and the Delaware Environmental Institute (DENIN). He is a national leader in biology education reform, a mathematical molecular evolutionary biologist, and a computer software developer of biological simulations, tools, and databases. His research interests are in mathematical and theoretical biology (bioinformatics, genetic codes, image analysis and simulation of patterns in nature, and evolutionary analysis of complex data sets), art and science, and interdisciplinary education.

Dr Jungck is the former editor of four different journals: Biology International; BioQUEST Library; Bioscene: Journal of College Biology Teaching; and the American Biology Teacher. He serves on the editorial boards of several journals including the Bulletin of Mathematical Biology, Evolutionary Bioinformatics, CBE Life Science Education, and the American Journal of Undergraduate Research.

He is the immediate past vice president of the International Union of Biological Sciences, immediate past president of the IUBS Commission on Biology Education, former chairperson of the U. S. National Academy of Science’s National Committee of IUBS, former chairperson of the Education Committee of the Society for Mathematical Biology, and former president of the Association of College and University Biology Educators (ACUBE).

His international commitments include long-term relations with NECTEC in Thailand, the Allan Wilson Centre for Molecular Evolution and Ecology in New Zealand, and BIOMAT – a consortium of primarily South American mathematical biologists. He is the founder of the BioQUEST Curriculum Consortium (http://bioquest.org), and the principal investigator (PI) of several major funded initiatives: BEDROCK (Bioinformatics Education Dissemination: Reaching Out, Connecting, and Knitting-together), Cyberlearning at Community Colleges, the SELECTION Working Group of the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent), and of a subcontract for NUMB3R5 COUNT! (Numerical Undergraduate Mathematical Biology Education …) from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

His service on numerous boards include NIMBioS (National Institute for Mathematical Biology Synthesis Center), CIRTL (Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching, and Learning), EBICS (Emerging Behaviors of Integrated Cellular Systems – MIT, Georgia Tech, and the University of Illinois), and the Institute for Transforming Undergraduate Education. His awards/honors/offices include AAAS Fellow, Honorary Doctorate from the University of Minnesota, American Society for Cell Biology Bruce Alberts Award, American Institute of Biological Sciences Education Award, Honorary Life Membership in the Society for Integrative and Comparative EDUCOM Educational software and curriculum awards, Sigma Xi Scientific Honor Society, Phi Beta Kappa, and a Fulbright Scholar in Thailand.

Professor

English

University of Delaware
Newark, DE 19716

Biography

Thomas Leitch, trained as a literary scholar at Columbia and Yale, drifted into cinema studies when he discovered a love of storytelling that transcended literature. Even before he came to Delaware to teach film studies, he had already begun to explore this love in his first book, What Stories Are: Narrative Theory and Interpretation. Since then he has taught undergraduate courses in film, specializing in popular Hollywood genres from romantic comedy to film noir, and graduate courses in literary and cultural theory. Leitch has continued to move back and forth between literature and cinema studies in ten books and over a hundred essays. Since preparing an annotated bibliography of his teacher Lionel Trilling, he has published extensively on narrative theory, genre theory, and popular culture. In addition to Perry Mason and Crime Films, which was nominated for an Edgar Allan Poe Award in 2003, he has written two books on Alfred Hitchcock and coedited a third. For the past ten years, most of his work, especially Film Adaptation and Its Discontents: From Gone with the Wind to The Passion of the Christ, has focused on the process of textual adaptation and its broader implications for the teaching of English. His most recent books are Wikipedia U: Knowledge, Authority, and Liberal Education in the Digital Age, The Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies, and,The History of American Literature on Film.

A two-time alumnus of the Salzburg Seminar, Leitch has taught as a Fulbright Lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He serves on the steering committee of the Delaware Teachers Institute and on the editorial boards of Literature/Film Quarterly, Adaptation, Journal of Adaptation in Film and Performance, Hitchcock Annual, Studia Filmoznawcze, the Contemporary Film and Media Studies series published by Wayne State University Press, and the Adaptation and Visual Culture series published by Palgrave Macmillan. He regularly reviews mystery and suspense fiction for Kirkus Reviews, where he is Mystery Editor.

Professor

English

University of Delaware
Newark, DE 19716

Biography

​Kevin Kerrane (Ph. D., University of North Carolina ) has edited several anthologies of drama and has co-edited (with Ben Yagoda) The Art of Fact: A Historical Anthology of Literary Journalism. He is the author of Dollar Sign on the Muscle: The World of Baseball Scouting, cited by Sports Illustrated as one of the “100 Best Sports Books of All Time.” He is also the editor of a critical anthology about the Irish writer Billy Roche. 

Many of Professor Kerrane’s course focus on drama, especially Irish drama, and he often coordinates his classes with theatrical productions on or near campus. He also teaches courses on documentary film, and is an advisor for the annual Newark Film Festival as well as the regular Sunday night International Film Series on campus.

Professor, Anthropology

University of Delaware
Newark, DE 19716

Biography

Carla Guerrón Montero is a cultural and applied anthropologist trained in the United States and Latin America and specialized in the anthropology of tourism, the anthropology of food, and the African diaspora. Professor Guerrón Montero is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Delaware, with joint appointments in Latin American and Iberian Studies, Africana Studies, and Women and Gender Studies. She received a Ph.D. degree in Cultural Anthropology and Latin American Studies from the University of Oregon; a Master of Arts degree in Applied Anthropology from Oregon State University (United States), and a Licenciatura degree in Socio-cultural Anthropology from the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador (Quito-Ecuador)

Professor  Guerrón Montero studies the complex and multiple meanings and representations of identity among marginalized populations in modern Latin American and Caribbean nation-states (Brazil, Ecuador, Grenada, and Panama). She is the author of The Color of the Panela: Study of Afro-Ecuadorian Women in the Afro-Ecuadorian Andes (Centro Cultural Afro-Ecuatoriano, 2000) and From Temporary Migrants to Permanent Attractions: Tourism, Cultural Heritage, and Afro-Antillean Identities in Panama (University of Alabama Press, 2020).  She is editor of Careers in Applied Anthropology: Advice from Academics and Practicing Anthropologists (NAPA, 2008) and co-editor of Why the World Needs Anthropologists (Routledge, 2020). In addition to authoring several book chapters, she has published in English and Spanish in professional journals such as Anthropological Quarterly, Bulletin for Latin American Research, Ethnology, Human Organization, the Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change, and Ecology of Food and Nutrition, among others.  She currently serves as Associate Editor of the Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology (JLACA).

Her research and studies have been funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the Fulbright, the Ford Foundation, the Inter-American Foundation, the Nippon Foundation (Japan), the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the National Secretary for Higher Education, Science, and Technology (SENESCYT, Ecuador). She has been a fellow at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (New York), Senior Researcher and Lecturer at the Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (Quito, Ecuador). Additionally, Professor Guerrón Montero has been a Visiting Researcher at the Centre for Latin American Research and Documentation’s (CEDLA) in Amsterdam (Netherlands); the Catalan Institute for Research on Cultural Patrimony (ICRPC) in Girona (Spain); the Museu Nacional of the Universidade Federal de Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil); the University of Ljubljana and Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts (ZRC SAZU) in Ljubljana (Slovenia), and the Institut des Hautes Etudes de L’Amérique Latine IHEAL, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle 3 (France).

Professor Emerita

English

University of Delaware
Newark, DE 19716

Biography

Joan DelFattore writes about the choice to live single, with emphasis on what’s involved in handling a serious illness while living alone. Her guest blog posts have appeared at the Washington Post, the Herald Tribune, KevinMD, Psychology Today, Psych Central, and more.

Her earlier publications include three books with Yale University Press and dozens of articles, mostly about freedom of speech. Her work has won awards from the American Library Association, the American Educational Research Association, and the Spencer Foundation, among others. In addition to speaking at conferences and events throughout the country, she’s appeared on dozens of talk shows, notably 20/20, Radio Times, Fresh Air, Talk of the Nation, and the Diane Rehm Show.

She holds a Ph.D. in English and an M.S. in clinical psychology from Penn State University, and was a professor at the University of Delaware for more than thirty years.

After retiring in 2014, she established a Writing as Healing program at the Christiana Care Health System in Delaware, teaching research-based techniques for using writing to reduce stress. The program has served more than 600 patients, caregivers, and staff, and sessions for physicians will begin in 2017.

DelFattore currently holds an appointment as a scholar in residence at the New York Public Library. She’s also an active member of the Cosmos Club, the Wilmington (Delaware) Rotary Club, the International Women’s Forum, Mystery Writers of America (New York chapter), Visible Ink, and the Authors Guild. She divides her time between her home in Newark, Delaware, and New York City.

Professor

Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering

University of Delaware
Newark, DE 19716

Biography

​Dr. Bhatia is both a licensed professional engineer and a physician. The goal of her work is to improve human health through the application of engineering analysis. Her background spans industry and academia, and her experience includes medical device and biotechnology product development, clinical trials, and intellectual property. She believes that an engineer’s work must be motivated by societal benefit, and therefore is motivated by stopping the world’s leading killers.

Research areas: Advancing healthcare; biomedical and biochemical engineering for clinical applications; biomaterials for medical devices; innovative teaching models for clinical immersion and product design

Professor Emeritus

History

University of Delaware
Newark, DE 19716

rac@udel.edu

Biography

Ray Callahan taught at UD for 38 years and served as director of the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies program and as associate dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. He held the John F. Morrison Chair of Military History at the U.S. Army’s Command and General Staff College and is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. 

An expert on military history, Callahan has authored six books. His most recent work, Triumph at Imphal-Kohima: How the Indian Army Finally Stopped the Japanese Juggernaut, was named one of the five best new books in World War II history in 2017. His doctoral and master’s degrees are from Harvard University; bachelor’s degree is from Georgetown University.