Congratulations to the 20 full-time faculty who have been awarded sabbatical leave for the 2024-25 academic year. This group includes 11 full-year sabbaticals, five sabbaticals for Fall 2024, and four sabbaticals for Spring 2025. Projects include research, creative activity, curriculum development, and laboratory upgrades. Below are summaries of the projects.
Associate Professor Kristin Comeforo (Academic Year 2024-25)
School of Communication, College of Arts and Sciences
Professor Comeforo plans to produce a podcast called Kamp Krystal Killjoy, which reimagines the “final girl” (the female survivor who assumes victory over the killer in slasher films) as a radical queer feminist or “killjoy.” Podcasts are on-demand audio recordings focused on specific themes that bring together people of common interests and build community around a particular topic of interest. By replacing the “final girl” with a feminist killjoy in the classic film Friday the 13th, the project weaves feminist theory and practice to confront the systemic “killers” that plague society, and (re)writes the story towards an equitable lens of a liberated future. Professor Comeforo anticipates that this podcast will also result in published scholarly work and the development of a new First-Year Seminar course that serves as a radical queer feminist intervention against prevailing systems of racism, sexism, and antisemitism.
Associate Professor Matthew Costello (Academic Year 2024-25)
Department of Psychology, College of Arts and Sciences
Professor Costello will spend the 2024-25 academic year expanding his research on cognitive aging through two streams of research. His work is grounded in the Embodied Cognition Framework, which argues that cognitive processes are fundamentally grounded in body physiology and bodily action. During his sabbatical, he will continue his Brain-Bladder project, which seeks to determine whether bladder interoception in older adults varies as a function of the cognitive stressors in automobile driving. He will collect pilot data, present at conferences, and apply for federal grant funding. Second, he will develop his existing theoretical work on embodiment and aging by publishing a paper on the philosophical underpinning of embodiment and aging and developing a theory paper on the lifespan dynamics of embodiment. Cognitive aging is a key subfield in gerontological psychology and has many practical implications for our nation as the older adult population rapidly expands.
Professor Robert Davis (Fall 2024)
Theatre Division, The Hartt School
Professor Davis will spend the fall semester conducting research into the life and work of Gerrit Smith (1797-1874), resulting in a theatrical solo piece intended for live performance and audio recording. Mr. Smith was a legendary American abolitionist whose home in upstate New York served as a station on the Underground Railroad. His life-long commitment to the elimination of slavery and causes that would later support the people who had suffered through slavery, made him an iconic political figure and philanthropist. His life and work speak, with great relevance, to present-day issues in the United States, specifically concerning racial justice and the history of slavery. His story is not known to many, but offers a compelling window into a life spent in the service of racial justice. This project brings theatrical artistry into a story that illuminates a subject and the causes to which he devoted his life.
Professor James Fairfield-Sonn (Fall 2024)
Department of Management, Marketing, and Entrepreneurship, Barney School of Business
Professor Fairfield-Sonn will spend the Fall 2024 semester researching how well contentious social and environmental issues were addressed at the Paris 2024 Summer Olympic Games. Using an institutional theory perspective, this research will focus primarily on the actions taken by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the Paris 2024 Local Organizing Committee in response to controversial events that emerged during preparations for or in the conduct of these games. This research adds to the literature on corporate responsibility by analyzing and reporting on how organizers of this elite, international mega-sporting event addressed growing worldwide demands to increase the positive and decrease the negative societal impacts of hosting these ever more popular games in a major metropolitan area.
Professor Mari Firkatian (Academic Year 2024-25)
Department of Humanities, Hillyer College
Professor Firkatian will spend 2024-2025 translating and contextualizing Dzhasher ev hnchoyk’ hin Hayastani mech [Meals and Feasts in Ancient Armenia], by Vardan Hatsuni. Published in 1912 in Vienna, Meals and Feasts in Ancient Armenia is written in Western Armenian, which is now an endangered language. This book is a rare example of work in the genre that relies on contemporary, medieval, and ancient sources, and it combines historical context with medieval recipes and practices. Firkatian will translate and annotate this text from Western Armenian to English to increase access and readership. The translation of this book will aid scholars who specialize in a variety of fields, as culinary history is a rich field of research that serves many areas of inquiry such as history, anthropology of food, sociological studies of the ancient world, gender studies, and political and economic relationships between states.
Professor Maria Frank (Spring 2025)
Department of English and Modern Languages, College of Arts and Sciences
In Spring 2025, Professor Frank will focus on the Divine Comedy: the infernal experience of Dante the Pilgrim when he and his guide Virgil reach the very bottom of Hell, a location that – in the Florentine poet’s imagination – coincides with the center of the earth. Her study focuses on the first leg of the journey (Hell), and is therefore concerned with movement and progression through Hell, as presented in the first canticle of the poem. The study identifies threads that weave together events in Dante’s and Virgil’s experiences while in Melebolge, the three deepest circles of Hell, with their subdivisions. Her findings point to new understandings of passages that mark the wayfarer’s spiritual ascent. Upon completing her work, she will send her final draft to Speculum or Dante Studies for potential publication.
Associate Professor Amanda Freeman (Fall 2024)
Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice, College of Arts and Sciences
Professor Freeman will spend the fall semester advancing her research on low-income mothers’ pursuit of higher education and the obstacles they face. She will conduct a qualitative research project on a pilot program of the Aurora Foundation for Women and Girls of Greater Hartford. This pilot program provides support to low-income mothers who are students enrolled in bachelor’s degree programs in colleges around the state including the University of Connecticut and Charter Oak State College. She will design a qualitative study that includes in-depth, on-site interviews with participants and staff, as well as focus groups and observation of cohort activities. The research will result in a program evaluation report for the Aurora Foundation, an academic journal article, and news articles aimed at general public audiences, which will be distributed through the Scholars Strategy Network.
Associate Professor Thilagha Jagaiah (Spring 2025)
Department of Education, College of Education, Nursing and Health Professions
In the Spring of 2025, Professor Jagaiah will work on two manuscripts for publication. The research examines the progression of sentence complexity (complex sentences) among third- and fourth-grade writers by analyzing various features that represent distinct stages of complexity. This analysis will be conducted using syntactic complexity measures (SCMs) available through Coh-Metrix, an automated text analysis tool. By identifying the different developmental stages of sentence complexity in each student’s writing, the research aims to offer valuable insights to educators. Professor Jagaiah aims to broaden her research scope by obtaining longitudinal data from school districts, allowing for a more comprehensive and in-depth investigation of the topic. This research can provide teachers with the necessary information to design and implement targeted intervention programs, thereby enhancing students’ abilities to construct more advanced and sophisticated sentences.
Professor Saleh Keshawarz (Academic Year 2024-25)
Department of Civil, Environmental, and Biomedical Engineering, College of Engineering, Technology, and Architecture
Professor Keshawarz will examine the effects of water reduction on downstream countries and the increase in water flow into Northern Afghanistan from a water distribution and irrigation point of view. Afghanistan has historically been excluded from the water distribution treaties of Central Asia, and in March of 2022, the Taliban Government in Afghanistan inaugurated the largest human-made river (canal) in Afghanistan, which will be completed in 2025. While this diversion will not affect the upstream countries, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, it will significantly impact the downstream countries of Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. These countries must adjust to the new reality and create new water-saving strategies. Professor Keshawarz will conduct an in-depth literature review and collect data via personal interviews, questionnaires, field visits, reports, and publications. He will then analyze the local impact of the canal, as well as conduct a comparative analysis with other canals.
Professor Aime Levesque (Spring 2025)
Department of Biology, College of Arts and Sciences
Professor Levesque will complete data analysis and manuscript writing for two scholarship of teaching and learning projects. One project focuses on the effectiveness of flipping the classroom methodology in a Genetics lecture course. In a flipped classroom, course content is covered outside of class time, while class time is used for the application of that content. The second project aims to develop a new bioinformatics activity for the Genetics laboratory. The project involves the analysis of a patient in the Undiagnosed Diseases Network (UDN). Students will choose a patient of interest from the UDN data bank, perform a bioinformatic analysis of the causative gene, and write a lab report on their findings. Pre- and post-tests will be used to measure learning outcomes. Employing such teaching methods and technologies improves student learning outcomes, especially the development of problem-solving and critical-thinking skills.
Associate Professor Karla Loya (Academic Year 2024-25)
Department of Education, College of Education, Nursing and Health Professions
During the 2024-2025 academic year, Professor Loya will write a book, tentatively entitled: Creating Inclusive, Learner-Centered College Classrooms: Foundations and Strategies for Novice and Experienced Faculty. The book focuses on ways of teaching that are anchored in diversity, equity, inclusion, justice, and belonging (DEIJB) and is unique in that it combines instructional knowledge and practice at the higher education level with an inclusive approach. Grounded in theoretical foundations, the book will provide a toolbox for practitioners who teach or seek to teach at the undergraduate or graduate levels, regardless of their experience or area of expertise. It responds to a need to prepare instructors who might be uninformed on DEIJB-oriented pedagogies and assessments to support inclusive higher education instruction.
Associate Professor Colleen Muñoz (Fall 2024)
Department of Health Sciences, College of Education, Nursing and Health Professions
Professor Muñoz will use the fall semester to create educational materials for the preparation of undergraduate students seeking research exposure through UHart’s newly formed Hydration Center (HHC), a research center created in Fall 2022. This will allow her to create a pipeline of prepared research assistants by creating online-based, asynchronous “fast-track” materials to bring students to a level of knowledge appropriate for work in the HHC. The fast track promotes the successful completion of externally funded projects, facilitates greater marketability for students, and attracts more high-quality students to the program. Professor Muñoz will also prepare two scientific manuscripts for publication, tentatively entitled: “Exploration of Hydration Practices and Prolonged Endurance Exercise Effects on Plasma Apelin Concentration,” and “Apelin-sarcopenia Mitigation Profile Characterized by Hydration Status.”
Professor Sundeep Muppidi (Fall 2024)
School of Communication, College of Arts and Sciences
During the fall semester, Professor Muppidi will travel to Asia to carry out research for a book project tentatively entitled: “Media, Communication Technology and Progressive Social Change: Exploring an Innovative Cross-Disciplinary Understanding of Participatory Communication using Complexity Theory.” This research is a cross-disciplinary critique of participatory communication through the lens of complexity theory. It critiques the established understanding of development communication concepts, theories, and models while attempting to develop a deeper theoretical understanding through an innovative complexity theory perspective. It builds on the argument that Social Systems are complex adaptive systems. By acknowledging dynamic social interaction, his research uses complexity theory to offer a new perspective to understand the complexities of participatory social change and the role communication can play in it.
Professor Stephen Pier (Academic Year 2024-25)
Dance Division, The Hartt School
Professor Stephen Pier will draw upon his extensive experience and knowledge in the professional and educational worlds of dance to explore the science and art of partnering. Partnering is an elusive art to master or teach due to the mechanical, physical, psychological, and human complexities involved. It is also a rapidly evolving and expanding area of professional practice. The research will involve interviews with leading choreographers, performers, coaches, instructors, and directors in the dance field. He will also expand his study on sensory science, psychological affective communication, and current systems of teaching partnering and analyzing contemporary choreographies. Few, if any, reliable sources are available for understanding these complexities and developing the practice in terms of current sensibilities. His work will provide the basis of a book and DVD to share the outcomes of his research.
Associate Professor Ines Rivera Prosdocimi (Academic Year 2024-25)
Department of English and Modern Languages, College of Arts and Sciences
Professor Rivera Prosdocimi plans to continue her work on a collection of poems that will result in the completion and eventual publication of a manuscript titled “How to Swallow a River.” These poems emerged from her ongoing literary, history, and sociological research on François Makandal, a Haitian prerevolutionary leader. Her work expands Dominican imaginaries particularly with race, as she looks at the Dominican Republic and Haiti as one in the same. She also analyzes maroon women (enslaved individuals who resisted the institution of slavery) as prominent figures of their own stories. The collection will offer several poems focusing on individual rebel women in the author's family and will draw on oral history as well as her research in literary studies. Professor Rivera Prosdocimi will join her contemporary writers to expand the depth and breadth of Dominican diasporic literature.
Professor Chittaranjan Sahay (Academic Year 2024-25)
Department of Mechanical, Aerospace, and Acoustical Engineering, College of Engineering, Technology, and Architecture
Based on his experience teaching Gauge Quantification (ME 515) for many years, Professor Sahay will spend the 2024-2025 year writing a book on Principles and Applications of Measurement System Analysis. This is a very important topic, assuring that the production system is capable of producing parts and products within the specification limits. On many occasions, it has been found that the errors produced by measurement systems are of the same order as the specifications. It is required that variations in the measurement system be 10 percent or less than the variance obtained in production (process capability) or the variance permitted by designers (tolerance). The vendors will not qualify the production line if the errors in the measurement system are one order lower than the product or process requirement. Currently, there are no good resources on this topic and a practical text is needed. This book will help advance the profession and economic competitive position of US industries.
Assistant Professor David Shuman (Academic Year 2024-25)
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, College of Engineering, Technology, and Architecture
During the 2024-2025 academic year, Professor Shuman will complete the development of a new audio recording facility using two different computer software packages to analyze and develop the room shaping, tuning, and construction. When finished, the audio production environment will be larger than any currently on campus and will be a valuable resource for faculty and student professional development, as well as artists and authors from the greater Hartford area. The rooms will accommodate musical ensembles of a fairly large size, including live sessions for film and TV soundtracks, small orchestral recordings, and a variety of group recordings in Jazz, Classical, Folk, and World Music. The rooms can also be used for mixing broadcasts, music, and spoken word/audiobooks.
Professor Michele Troy (Academic Year 2024-25)
Department of English, Hillyer College
Professor Troy plans to research and draft a book on the partnership between Albatross Press and the Italian publishing house Mondadori in the 1930s and 1940s. The directors of both publishing houses, John Holroyd-Reece and Arnoldo Mondadori, were innovative thinkers, ready to seize on new trends in publishing. They also actively reached across national borders, developing the transnational publishing networks that had sprung up since the First World War, after the influx of British and American soldiers provoked curiosity on the content about Anglo-American culture. While the book will open as a tale of two publishers, it will quickly become a story of the transnational networks they brought into being to further their own cultural, financial, and political agendas. With censorship alive and well today, Professor Troy hopes her findings will lead to a compelling story that still speaks to our times.
Clinical Teaching Associate Professor Kelly Weber (Academic Year 2024-25)
Department of Psychology, College of Arts and Sciences
Professor Weber will dedicate her sabbatical to supporting the Graduate Institute of Professional Psychology (GIPP) with curriculum review, programmatic course sequence changes, and program redesign. She will also update her technical skills in evidence-based psychotherapy treatments. Activities during the sabbatical will include preparing a proposal that summarizes recommendations for pragmatic curricular revisions, formal study, self-directed study, and travel to attend clinical training. She will create updated lectures and instructional materials for the benefit of her students and GIPP. Conference attendance and consultations will provide current information and best practices enabling her to propose a program redesign compliant with American Psychological Association requirements and standards of accreditation for health service psychology training programs.
Professor Daniel Williamson (Spring 2025)
Department of Humanities, Hillyer College
Professor Williamson will spend the spring semester working on a book, tentatively entitled, “Anglo-Irish-US Relations and the H-Block Hunger Strikes, 1980-1981.” This project examines the period of the hunger strikes carried out by Irish republicans imprisoned in Northern Ireland in 1980 and 1981 to force the British government to grant them prisoner-of-war status. The book looks at the impact the hunger strikes had on diplomatic relationships between British and Irish governments as well as the role that American government played in these events. To complete this project, Professor Williamson will review thousands of photographs of official documents from the period that have been collected on research trips to the archives in Dublin, London, and the Reagan Library in California. He plans to finish the analysis of these documents, continue to read secondary materials and prepare chapter outlines for the book manuscript.