Sabbaticals and Leaves

Faculty Members to Travel, Write and Conduct Research

August 4, 2009

Sabbatical leaves for projects ranging from authoring books and creating exhibits of artwork to research and international travel have been granted for the 2008-09 academic year. President Milton A. Gordon granted 40 leaves, including five for a one-year term. The following is a list of those awarded sabbatical leave, according to Faculty Affairs and Records.

One Year

Anne M. Houtman, Biological Science, will work on an environmental science textbook written in science magazine format to engage students: article-length chapters with an approachable writing style, topical story line and informational graphics.

Stacy L. Mallicoat, Criminal Justice, will delve into the culture of capital punishment — including what role culture plays in shaping the role of law, what role media depictions of capital punishment have and the role international practices play in the maintenance of the death penalty.

Helen N. Mugambi, English, Comparative Literature and Linguistics, will work to complete a manuscript titled “Crisis in African Postcolonial Masculinities.”

Philippe R. Perebinossoff, Radio-TV-Film, will examine how television programming strategies are developed, implemented and adapted internationally.

H. Jochen Schenk, Biological Science, will conduct National Science Foundation-funded research on the hydraulic systems of shrubs, and their resistance and repair capability with increasing habitat aridity. Schenk will spend part of the leave in South America and Australia.

Fall Semester

Louise C. Adler, Educational Leadership, will be analyzing a Southern California school district as a case study.

Michelle R. Arsneault, Political Science, will continue work on a co-authored book titled “Nonprofit Management In A Policy World.”

Rahul Bhaskar, Information Systems and Decision Sciences, will be delving into the health insurance preferences of employers and employees to identify insurance attributes and their importance to each.

Radha M. Bhattacharya, Economics, will research housing prices across the country to find out why prices rose so high, how much of the rise was sustained by strong economic fundamentals, which regions were most affected by the housing bubble and how to improve methods of forecasting housing prices.

Gayle K. Brunelle, History, will spend the semester researching and writing a study of the ‘founder of Canada’ Samuel de Champain and his opponents in the struggle to construct a French empire in the Atlantic world.

April A. Bullock, Liberal Studies, will explore the world of Victorian cooks and cookbooks to find out what it reveals about class relations, the practices of gender in households, and the nature of social aspirations in 19th-century England.

Greg Childers, Physics, will study electron scattering from hydrogen molecules. He will conduct experiments on a low-incident-energy, high-resolution electron spectrometer on campus.

Cliff G. Cramp, Art, will spend the semester updating his skills set by developing a story pitch, character description and illustrations to propose a 32-page children’s book.

Kathryn A. Dickson, Biological Science, will focus on reviewing literature and learning new techniques to apply to her studies on the feeding, swimming performance and muscle development in larval and juvenile fishes. She also will seek grant support and write on research.

Katrin R. Harich, Marketing, will continue research into social entrepreneurship and the incorporation of the new field into marketing and business curriculum.

Steven R. James, Anthropology, will investigate prehistoric hunting, fishing and animal domestication in the North American Southwest toward writing a book on the subject.

Jeff Kuo, Civil and Environmental Engineering, will be an invited guest lecturer at his alma mater, the Environmental Engineering Graduate Institute at National Taiwan University, and has been invited to participate in a research project — involving absorption kinetics and mechanism — with one of the institute’s faculty members and students.

Zhuangjie Li, Chemistry and Biochemistry, will study free radicals in atmospheric and combustion chemistry.

JeeLoo Liu, Philosophy, will be working on a monograph titled “Metaphysics, Mind and Morality: An Analytic Approach to Neo-Confucianism” — an analysis of nine representative Chinese Neo-Confucian philosophers form the 11th-18th centuries —under a grant from the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange.

Robert A. McLain, History, will use his leave to finish a proposed book on how World War I affected colonial identify formation, and reformation, along the axes of gender and ethnicity in British India.

Dipankar Purkayastha, Economics, will explore the role of parental inputs in the development of children’s functional literacy in poor countries. Specifically, how household educational resource allocation decisions — such as sending a child off to work instead of to school or educating a son and not a daughter — are made in households with income below the poverty line.

Maijian Qian, Mathematics, will be working to complete a textook titled “Business Calculus.”

Hakan Rosengren, Music, will study the music of Johannes Brahms through a collaboration with Hungarian pianist Peter Nagy, and will study and prepare a new concerto for solo clarinet with orchestra/wind symphony composed by Frank Ticheli. Both are slated for live performances in Europe.

David M. Sandner, English, Comparative Literature and Linguistics, will research and begin writing a novel based on the life of Mary Shelley, author of “Frankenstein.”

Kristin K. Stang, Special Education, will be working on a book about improving student writing by improving the academic and professional writing of K-12 teachers.

Linda K. Stanton, English, Comparative Literature and Linguistics, will be working on a study of Shakespeare’s treatment of three female figures — Venus, Cleopatra and Joan of Arc — and the relevance of his work to contemporary socio-political issues.

Lenny D. Wiersma, Kinesiology, will be studying the experiences of big-wave (those that exceed 20 feet) surfers from a phenomenological perspective, focusing on the aspects of sensation-seeking, risk-taking and competitive anxiety.

Spring Semester

Nathan T. Carr, Modern Languages and Literatures, will continue an analysis of common errors language teachers make when writing test questions to assess reading and listening comprehension and what training, guidance or other assistance can help avoid these errors.

Barbra E. Erickson, Anthropology, will continue work to complete a textbook on the anthropology of aging.

Markus Fischer, Liberal Studies, will conduct a study of literature on thinkers such as the Greek Sophists, Thucydides, Machiavelli and Hobbes, determining what they have in common, their essential assumptions and propositions and how they constitute political realism as a coherent political theory.

Joseph A. Forkan, Art, will serve as a resident fellow with the Ballinglen Arts Foundation in Ireland. During the six to eight week residency, Forkan hopes to create a number of paintings focusing on the structure of light, color and design.

Shahin D. Ghazanshahi, Electrical Engineering, will spend her sabbatical developing a noninvasive optical temperature-sensing technique that will assure a damage- and contamination-free test of laser systems.

Barbara J. Glaeser, Special Education, will conduct an analysis of co-teaching pre-service training, using six years of video, audio and written data collected from educations classes, and surveying education graduates to determine the extent that they are using team teaching skills learned in the credential program.

Javette G. Hayes, Human Communication Studies, will research social allergens — behaviors and situations created by one person that may be unpleasant but not strongly aversive to objective observers but that can cause an overly sensitive response in others. Hayes seeks to determine what behaviors students regard as social allergens in the university setting and how their allergies develop. The research will include how students cope and resolve such situations that develop.

Sara E. Johnson, Anthropology, will examine how generational residence patterns influence the interaction of social, human and financial capital to produce variations in demographic characteristics, such as age at first reproduction and fertility.

Matthew E. Kirby, Geological Sciences, seeks to use sediment collected in core samples from Lake Elsinore to reconstruct past abrupt climatic change 10,000 to 15,000 years ago.

Debra G. Lockwood, Theatre and Dance, will investigate the impact of technology in stage design toward the development of a book titled “The Language of Collaboration: Theatrical Design Concepts, Foundations in Tradition and the Impact of Technology.”

Terry R. Patchen, Elementary and Bilingual Education, will research the impact of federal educational policy on classroom participation practices and educational equity at the elementary school level.

Ying-Chiao Tsao, Human Communication Studies, will be completing two projects: promoting culture and language readiness or competence through a web-based course, and developing ways to recruit and retain bilingual and/or multilingual students interested in speech-language pathology.

Jim Volz, Theatre and Dance, will be completing a manuscript on Shakespeare festival throughout the world, assist the Australia Shakespeare Festival, attend the international Shakespeare Theatre Association gathering in England and negotiate student apprentice and internship opportunities with international arts companies.

Kenneth J. Walicki, Music, who is coordinator of the music composition program, plans on using his sabbatical to compose an opera. He will be working with Irena Praitis, English, Comparative Literature and Linguistics, in the creation of a montage or opera composed of a series of parables.

Robert Watson, Music, will study European and American composers with connections to Christmas to broaden and deepen his research into multicultural solo piano repertory. As part of the sabbatical, Watson will be arranging for local and international performances, as well as the creation of a CD.

Leila C. Zenderland, American Studies, will be writing chapters for a book tentatively titled “Class of 1933: Studying Culture, Personality, and Nationality in an Age of War,” focusing on a 1932-33 project in which 13 social scientists from 11 European and Asian countries worked together at Yale University. The goal of the project, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, was to promote international understanding.