Sabbaticals Awarded for 2013-14

Seventeen faculty members have been awarded sabbaticals to conduct research and pursue projects in a wide range of disciplines.

President Walter Harrison and Provost Sharon L. Vasquez are pleased to announce that the following faculty members have been awarded sabbaticals for the 2013-14 academic year:

Professor Edward Bolkovac (Fall Semester 2013)
Division of Vocal Studies
The Hartt School
Bolkovac will use his sabbatical, with colleague Robert Barefield, to accelerate the writing of a college textbook titled The Self-Aware Singer, that addresses the long-overlooked needs and concerns of young singers in college music programs─learning the art of practicing.

Associate Professor Sherry Buckberrough (Fall Semester 2013)
Department of Art History
College of Arts and Sciences
Buckberrough will use her sabbatical to co-author a book manuscript on the topic of Carl Andre’s Stone Field Sculpture, an internationally recognized work of public art in downtown Hartford. Stone Field Sculpture is a prime example of site-specific exterior installation art, an important genre of avant-garde art of the 1960s and 1970s. It was also the cause of a major scandal when it was installed in 1977 as a result of its unorthodox aesthetics and its hefty price tag. The book will address both Stone Field Sculpture’s aesthetics and its political context.

Professor Robert Carl (Academic Year 2013-2014)
Division of Academic Studies (Composition)
The Hartt School
Carl will use his sabbatical to compose two radically different works: his fifth symphony, which will be premiered by the Hartt Symphony Orchestra under Edward Cumming; and a new work for harp and interactive computer electronics, written for the virtuoso new music harpist Victoria Jordanova, that will also be recorded on her Arpaviva label. The second portion of the sabbatical will be devoted to the editing for eventual publication of the final manuscript of the great musical thinker Jonathan Kramer, "Postmodern Music, Postmodern Listening," which was left unfinished at Kramer’s death.

Professor Andrew Craft (Fall Semester 2013)
Department of Chemistry
College of Arts and Sciences
Craft will use his sabbatical to conduct a research study investigating changes that exposure to hydrogen cause in the strength, brittleness, and hardness of a series of palladium-copper alloys. The ultimate goal of the study is to help identify hydrogen exposure conditions that cause minimal embrittlement in the alloy.

Associate Professor Barbara Crane (Fall Semester 2013)
Department of Rehabilitation Sciences
College of Education, Nursing and Health Professions
Crane will use her sabbatical to complete advanced analysis of data collected over the past six years in the areas of posture measurement and buttock pressure associated with sitting in a wheelchair; and to work with professional colleagues in Utah and Georgia on planning, data collection, and data analysis skills in the area of wheelchair seating research, particularly in the use of pressure mapping data in research. She plans to prepare three to four publication-ready journal articles based on the work completed and present the results at a minimum of two professional conferences.

Professor Daniel Davis (Academic Year 2013-2014)
Department of Architecture
College of Engineering, Technology and Architecture
Davis will use his sabbatical to develop a manual that students or professionals can use to assist them in incorporating sustainable or greener measures into their buildings. Sustainable/green design has been recognized as fundamental to the mission of the department’s upper-level design studio curriculum. Formal training on sustainability is required to ensure that future architects and engineers are knowledgeable of sustainable design and can integrate sustainable concepts in real-world design projects. The publication will be organized in a sequence that reflects what is employed in a typical design process, so it can be used as a real-world guide. Multiple case studies will be incorporated to provide concrete examples of successfully integrated design implementations.

Professor Demaris Hansen (Spring Semester 2014)
Division of Music Education
The Hartt School
Hansen will use her sabbatical to finalize a revised edition of her text, A Handbook for Leadership and Administration (MENC, 2002). She also plans to write and submit articles related to the ongoing research being conducted at The Hartt School that links music learning to language, reading, and prosody in normal functioning as well as autistic children.

Associate Professor James Lee (Fall Semester 2013)
Printmaking
Hartford Art School
Lee will spend a five to six-week portion of the sabbatical period in Ireland on the west coast in County Mayo, doing visual research on the landscape. He will make on-site drawings of the coastline and surrounding rural environment that will later become larger drawn works and color woodcut prints for exhibition. He will also use the time to record visual information from which to develop and produce a limited-edition printed artist’s book. The remainder of the sabbatical period will be spent in his studio working from the visual research gained in Ireland to produce a new body of work for eventual exhibition.

Associate Professor Yu Lei (Fall Semester 2013)
Department of Economics, Finance, Insurance
Barney School of Business
Lei will use her sabbatical to engage in two research projects concerning the medical malpractice insurance industry. The first project will focus on the cyclical nature (if any) of medical malpractice insurers’ underwriting strategy, and the second project will examine the impact of different contract types offered by malpractice carriers on the market conditions. These two projects share a common goal, which is to extend Professor Lei’s existing published research on medical malpractice insurers and broaden her knowledge of the malpractice industry.

Professor Kathy McCloskey (Spring Semester 2014)
Department of Psychology
College of Arts and Sciences
McCloskey will use her sabbatical to investigate gender biases in the treatment of Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) by the criminal and civil/family courts. Specifically, she will target IPV gender biases relative to the ability to obtain protection orders, the enforcement of protection orders, the penalties for violating a protection order, arrest and conviction rates for IPV perpetration, post-conviction sentencing type and length, contested child custody cases, presence of documented IPV perpetration within custody hearings, frequency of court-ordered psychological evaluations, and final disposition of custody rulings. The results will be used to document the present status of gender bias within the courts today and aid in designing public policy interventions to reduce such biases in the future.

Professor James McDonald (Fall Semester 2013)
Department of Physics
College of Arts and Sciences
McDonald will use his sabbatical to prepare and edit a manuscript of a physics textbook for students in the radiologic technology program. The book will be copyrighted as an open-source text and will be available in paperback, Kindle, Nook, and iBook formats. In addition to serving the needs of the radiologic technology program, the publishing experience will prove useful for future projects involving e-reader formats.

Professor Charles Ross (Academic Year 2013-14)
Department of English
College of Arts and Sciences
Ross will use his sabbatical to finish a suite of hypertext programs, collectively called Hypertext Explorer, which will enable users to investigate the processes by which texts come into existence, and then to create new texts of all sorts. The suite will be made available to both students and teachers as an iPad app and an OS X application on the Macintosh. The application is being authored in “Live Code,” which is an X-Talk interpretive programming language descended from Apple's HyperCard and Pascal.

Professor Paul Rutman (Spring Semester 2014)
Division of Instrumental Studies (Keyboard)
The Hartt School
Rutman will use his sabbatical to complete a recording of works by the late Chinese composer Soong Fu Yuan. These pieces for solo piano have never been performed and will be an important addition to this composer’s recorded repertoire, as well as an important contribution to the contemporary piano solo performance repertoire.

Associate Professor Bryan Sinche (Academic Year 2013-14)
Department of English
College of Arts and Sciences
Sinche will use his sabbatical to support a book project tentatively titled "Shining Like New Money: Economics and African American Literature, 1789-1914." In this book, Sinche argues that African-American writers wrote with awareness of the tension between commodity and human being that shaped black life in the United States and, in so doing, tried to argue for new standards of value by which black men and women might be judged by others and judge themselves. He further argues that African-American writers were constantly negotiating intertwined concerns of professional authorship and economic "success" in order to develop a viable and acceptable basis for personal valuation.

Associate Professor Matt Towers (Spring Semester 2014)
Ceramics
Hartford Art School
Towers will use his sabbatical to create work for an installation/performance project in conjunction with Real Art Ways in Hartford. This project, an interdisciplinary, interactive installation and performance entitled “Reaction Bubble,” will involve LoVid (video and sound artists Tali Hinkis and Kyle Lapidus) and Debora Goffe’s Scapegoat Garden Dance Theater.

Professor Otto Wahl (Fall Semester 2013)
Department of Psychology
College of Arts and Sciences
Wahl will use his sabbatical to investigate how psychotherapists and psychotherapy are depicted in mass media, which may influence viewers’ inclinations to seek or avoid psychotherapy and/or influence their vulnerability to exploitation by unethical therapists. The sabbatical project involves identification, viewing, and systematic rating of recent films that depict psychotherapy and psychotherapists.

Professor Donn Weinholtz (Spring Semester 2014)
Department of Education
College of Education, Nursing and Health Professions
Weinholtz will use his sabbatical to complete an edited book manuscript tentatively titled "Quaker Perspectives in Higher Education." He will cull through 14 previous issues of Quaker Higher Education, selecting appropriate articles and organizing them into chapters according to a set of themes to be agreed upon by the collaborating editors. He will also communicate with all of the participating authors regarding inclusion of their articles and about possible article revisions; draft an introduction to the book; collaborate with the co-editors on the revisions of the introduction; draft introductions to each chapter of the book; and collaborate with the co-editors on the revisions of these introductions.