University of Southern Maine

Emeriti Faculty

The University of Southern Maine takes great pleasure in honoring colleagues who have retired and on whom emeritus status has been conferred. Emeritus status recognizes significant contributions to the University and community and encourages continued service from these valued colleagues.

Nicholas D. Colucci, Jr.
Diana Crader
Joseph Grange
Walter R. Stump
Juris Ubans
Margo Wood

Associate Professor Emeritus of Education Nicholas D. Colucci, Jr., joined the College of Education and Human Development in 1969, and over the next 40 years earned a distinguished reputation in the field of teacher education.

His teaching and program responsibilities included courses on the exploration of teaching as a profession, the elementary school curriculum, and the supervision of student teachers. In addition, for 17 years Colucci served as coordinator for the minor in educational studies program.

His research interests spanned a wide range of topics, among them minimum competency testing, tuition tax credits, the Christian school movement in Maine, classroom management, and historical perspectives on wages and benefits for teachers. In 1979, he was co-author of Child Abuse and Neglect: A Guide for Educators and Community Leaders (Learning Publications, Inc.). Editors and reviewers of the American School Board Journal judged it one of the most important books published that year for classroom teachers and other educators.

Colucci was a founding member of the USM chapter of the international society of educators, Phi Delta Kappa, and in 2000 was named a recipient of the USM Faculty Senate Award for Excellence in Teaching. Colucci earned his bachelor’s degree from Gorham State Teachers College (USM), and his master’s and Ph.D. from the University of Connecticut.

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Diana Crader, associate professor emerita of anthropology, joined the Department of Geography-Anthropology in 1987, and has combined teaching, scholarship, and service in her academic life throughout her 22 years at USM. The evolving nature of her work on mammalian faunas, her interests in gender and human evolution, and her passion for her students have been the focus of her recent work at the University.

She held a position on the first Davis Education Foundation grant to restructure general education at USM, and began work with the University’s Honors Program, developing the new science curriculum strand focused on “The Body.”

Crader’s specific areas of expertise in anthropology include zooarchaeology, African prehistory, and human evolution. She has worked on projects examining faunal remains from Capalbiaccio, Italy, which required her to learn Italian. Other projects include examining faunal remains from Central Africa and Maine, and human skeletal remains from Haiti.

A passionate and demanding teacher, she has maintained an open door office policy at USM, allowing students to consult with her informally and to linger in her lab. Her goal has been to engage her students in their own learning, while helping them develop critical thinking, technical, and communication skills they will need for future success.

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Joseph Grange, professor emeritus of philosophy, retires after a distinguished career at the University of Southern Maine that began in 1970. Grange’s areas of specialization include the philosophy of culture, metaphysics, process philosophy, American naturalism and pragmatism, phenomenology, environmental ethics and philosophy, the history of Western philosophy, Buddhism, Chinese philosophy, and the philosophy of religion.

He served as chair of USM’s Department of Philosophy from 1977 through 1984. From 1976 to 1978, he worked on the National Endowment for the Humanities-funded interdisciplinary “City and Nature Curriculum Demonstration Project” with USM faculty, students, administration, and community leaders. He was a visiting research professor at University College, Galway, Ireland, from 1994-1995, and in 1995 was an invited professor at the Higher Institute of Philosophy at the University of Louvain, Leuven, Belgium.

Grange is the author of numerous journal articles and book chapters, and published five books, including John Dewey, Confucius and Global Philosophy (The State University of New York Press, 2004). He also lectured on John Dewey and Confucius at the Seminar for the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy held in 2004 at Oregon State University, Eugene. Grange is a member of the editorial board of The Journal of Chinese Philosophy (Blackwells, Oxford), and a member of the Council of the Metaphysical Society of America.

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Walter R. Stump, professor emeritus of theatre, retired last summer after a distinguished 40-year career as a faculty member in the Department of Theatre. He came to the University in 1968, prior to the formation of the Theatre Department, and was instrumental in the creation of a program that serves the needs of our students and the local theatre-going community. He originated numerous courses for the Department that have become staples of its curriculum.

Stump wrote the text, Imitation: The Art of the Theatre, and co-authored the text, Theatre: The Reflective Template. Recent work includes several original plays and numerous published adaptations for use in Readers Theatre. Covington’s Cave was awarded the national Jewel Theatre Playwriting award, and Cactus Charlie’s Saloon won the New Century Writers award, and was produced as a staged reading by the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York.

Stump regularly directed plays at the University, many of which were singled out for honors and awards. Most notably, his 1986 production of the original musical, Gynt, was performed at the National American College Theatre Festival as one of the six best college productions in the United States. Gynt also won the 1986 ASCAP award for musicals.

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Juris Ubans, professor emeritus of art, retires after a distinguished career at the University of Southern Maine, during which he helped to shape a generation of visual artists and art educators. Ubans primarily taught painting and drawing students, developing his own teaching methodology, “Cartesian Space,” through which drawings or paintings acquire spatial “depths.”

He came to USM in 1968 and served as Art Department chair from 1974 to 1979. He was instrumental in developing the Department’s curriculum after the merger of the University of Maine at Portland and Gorham State College. Ubans was the director of USM’s Art Gallery for several decades, where he worked diligently to mount exhibits that brought work by such American masters as Walker Evans and Todd Webb to USM, as well as internationally known contemporary artists such as Dale Chihuly.

Outside of USM, Ubans served as a consultant for the Latvian Council of Science and the Latvian Academy of Art, chaired the board of trustees of the American Folk Life Center at the Library of Congress, and was a member of the board of the Maine Commission of the Arts and Humanities. Throughout his career, he also exhibited his own art nationally and internationally. Last fall, USM’s Art Gallery mounted the exhibit, “Ubart: A Retrospective,” that showcased both Ubans’ private collection and his own work.

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Margo Wood, professor emerita of education, has served as a leader in the field of literacy education since arriving at the University of Southern Maine in 1979. Before coming to USM, she taught at the elementary level for nine years. Wood developed and taught undergraduate and graduate courses in literacy and literacy methods. She was coordinator of USM’s Literacy Education Program, and organized and managed the literacy education master’s program at USM’s Lewiston-Auburn College. Wood proposed and facilitated the graduate-level certificate program in early language and literacy. She served as the associate provost for Graduate Studies and Research from 1999 to 2002, and served as associate provost and dean of Graduate Studies from 2002 until the present.

Wood received research grants from the New England Reading Association and USM’s Faculty Senate. She also was recognized by her peers for excellence with the Commendation for Excellence in Teaching from USM’s College of Education and Human Development in 1996, and the USM Faculty Development Award for Research and Scholarship in 1998. Wood published on the subject of literacy extensively, presented workshops and oversaw in-service programs in Maine and New England, and served as a consultant to public schools and the Maine Department of Education.

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