Beth Abdella, Department of Chemistry
This sabbatical will consist primarily of editing the Integrated Introduction to Chemistry and Biology textbook. I am in the process of collecting comments from both student and faculty users of this book. Additionally, some chapters would benefit from a wider array of end of chapter problems and the answer keys for end of chapter problems should be word-processed.
Anthony Bateza, Department of Religion
Over my sabbatical I will complete a book manuscript entitled Political Freedom in a Fallen World: Martin Luther’s Account of Flattery, Domination, and Civic Virtue. This book excavates and interrogates Martin Luther’s understanding of political leadership, showing how he draws upon ancient and medieval traditions in his understanding of liberty, domination, and political formation. This project is a work of intellectual history and political theology. The questions that drive it concern our reading of a past figure, Martin Luther, and his own engagement with traditions of religious and political thought. What is revealed is Luther’s complicated relationship with political leadership, whereby he simultaneously embraces and recoils from the ideal of freedom as the absence of domination. Thinking with and beyond Luther, we can reexamine both the reformers legacy and our own views on Divine activity, human capacities, and what is possible and desirable in the political realm.
Anthony D. Becker, Department of Economics
For my half-year sabbatical, I propose to complete two scholarly papers and continue work on a textbook manuscript. The first paper is an application of John Nash’s “The Bargaining Problem” (1950) to duopoly markets (competition between two firms) in both symmetric (identical costs) and asymmetric (differing production costs) situations. This paper will be submitted to the Journal of Economic Education. The second paper is to be coauthored with a recent alumnus and looks at the influence of transportation infrastructure on Argentine farmers’ decisions to plant soy versus corn. This paper will be presented at the 2022 annual conference of the Eastern Econ. Assoc. (Feb. or March 2022) and then submitted to their journal. The textbook manuscript is for classes in introductory econometrics – the application of statistical models to economic data – using modern methods and open-source software. I have several chapters completed and plan to finish enough additional material to form a proposal for a publisher.
Jessica Benson, Department of Psychology
During my semester sabbatical leave, I plan to complete three key projects: 1) prepare and submit a manuscript on my research with St. Olaf students examining the effect of a brief mindfulness training session on reducing racial essentialism and stereotype endorsement; 2) collect data for new and ongoing research exploring potential psychological mechanisms for reducing essentialist beliefs and reducing identity-based threat; 3) apply for external funding to support 2022-23 data collection for research projects centered on reducing racial bias and coping with discrimination.
Grace E. Cho, Department of Psychology
I will work on four projects during my sabbatical that will enrich my professional development. (1) My Emotion Socialization Project examines parents’ emotion-related beliefs, behaviors, and interactions with children, with a comparative focus on South Korean families. I will write up and disseminate findings from this project. (2) I will complete data analyses for my Narratives and Emotion Wellbeing Project. This study examines how young adults recollect, narrate and make meaning of their past experiences, and the extent to which themes in their narratives are associated with facets of their emotional well-being. (3) I will travel to Seoul, S. Korea to discuss extending my cross-cultural work on children’s emotion and self development with colleagues at Yonsei University and the Catholic University of Korea. (4) I will also spend time gathering and culling research materials for an Ole First Year Seminar proposal on “Childhood in Time and Place”, which I will consider offering when I return from sabbatical.
Eric S. Cole, Department of Biology
I hope to make progress on five projects. Four of these involve my ongoing research into the cell biology of a freshwater protozoan: Tetrahymena thermophila. These include curating a collection of live cell lines in which various subcellular structures and compartments have been decorated with fluorescent molecular probes. Another project involves completing and publishing research on how single cells create pattern as they organize their subcellular architecture. Another project involves completing and publishing research on how these organisms communicate with one another to promote sexual reproduction. The 4th is to build an online, “Searchable Ciliate” website allowing students and researchers to access resources related to the Cell Biology of Tetrahymena thermophila. Finally, I plan to create an online, searchable Google-Earth based resource that allows researchers to archive data on the marine organisms (including critically endangered hawksbill sea turtles) that live in saltwater ponds on the island archipelago of the Bahamas.
Arthur Cunningham, Department of Philosophy
I propose to write three articles, using the classic problem of free will and divine foreknowledge to show that some widely-held assumptions about libertarian free will are mistaken. First, I will articulate and defend a novel solution to the foreknowledge problem, a solution inspired by an idea found in Boethius: the necessity implied by foreknowledge poses no threat to free will. Second, I will argue that the notion of “alternative possibilities” tends to run together the two distinct concepts of ability and possibility. That tendency vitiates some arguments that include the “principle of alternative possibilities” as a premise. In the third article, I will argue that the widely-held picture of libertarian free will as the ability to choose among multiple possible paths into the future is potentially misleading, and that some common arguments based on this picture sneak in a problematic assumption.
Charles Gray, Department of Music
My sabbatical will include attendance at two national conventions (NCAA and ASTA); visiting numerous colleges and universities to observe pedagogy in large class and individual lesson settings; and a week of performances and HS visits in El Paso, TX. In addition I have many ongoing tasks that I must continue to nurture here on campus and in the Twin-Cities area.
Martin Hodel, Department of Music
I will use my sabbatical to survey and catalog contemporary modes of jazz trumpet pedagogy, finding practical ways to implement those in the St. Olaf trumpet studio. I will travel to Indiana University, the University of Miami and the University of North Texas, observing jazz courses and best practices at these prestigious schools, with a focus on the teaching of improvisation. I plan to observe how instructors use compositions and performances by BIPOC composers as central material in their pedagogy. I also plan to study the influence of Southeast Asian traditional music on jazz. I will survey the contemporary jazz scenes in major cities in China, Japan, Vietnam, and Thailand, traveling to two of the cities to interview current jazz musicians and see first-hand how traditional and contemporary music performance and study there have influenced the expression of jazz in those countries, and more broadly, on jazz in the US.
Rebecca Judge, Professor of Economics
I propose to spend my sabbatical completing a manuscript currently titled, Principled Economics: Economic Principles Informed by Considerations of Nationality, Race, Religion, Gender and Class. This effort responds to the well documented need to expand the coverage of the typical principles of economics course to reflect the experiences of an increasingly diverse undergraduate population. The text will serve as a companion text for use in a standard, undergraduate principles of economics course. This proposed companion text will provide a summary of the critiques of the canonical treatment of the topic in question, and as well as appropriately edited versions of published research to demonstrate how economists themselves engage in thoughtful explorations, applications, and challenges to economic models. The goal is to help undergraduates recognize economics as a lively, dynamic, and inclusive field of study, capable of self-criticism, open to new ideas, and empowered to help societies advance.
Heather Klopchin, Department of Dance
“Reflecting on My Past, Performing in the Present, and Exploring for the Future”
The main activities of my sabbatical leave project include: PAST – I will be developing, curating, rehearsing, and performing a retrospective concert of diverse solos created for me and by me over the last 20 plus years entitled “Standing Alone – Solos at a Distance.” PRESENT – I will be performing as a company member with the Minneapolis based dance companies Stuart Pimlser Dance and Theater, STARK DANCE and Off-Leash Area. FUTURE – I will be furthering my dance education specifically by studying somatic practices including Laban/Bartenieff through the Laban/Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies (LIMS) and continuing to expand my dance practice beyond the Western Concert dance canon through classes, workshops, and intensives. If live dance performance is possible then my focus for this sabbatical will be on PAST and PRESENT activities. If live performance is not possible then my focus for this sabbatical will be on PAST and FUTURE activities.
Jennifer Kwon Dobbs, Department of English
I will research archival materials on Ku Klux Klan activities in Tulsa, Oklahoma in order to write poems for a third book-length collection of poetry. Under contract with White Pine Press, this collection will combine lyricism with docupoetics to construct alternative ways of feeling and knowing a transracial, transnational adoptive kinship’s white supremacist legacies. By constructing a documented context to write around a white adoptive family’s silences about its white settler colonial history of anti-Black violence, the poems will aim to reckon with an Asian American adoptee’s white adjacency and privilege and expand representations of Asian American subjectivity in U.S. literature. My research and writing will further support my future course development in creative writing and critical race and indigenous studies.
L. DeAne Lagerquist, Department of Religion
I intend to continue with projects already begun, reflect upon my teaching, and begin new research. During my previous sabbatical I conducted archival research in the papers of Gertrude Sovik, St. Olaf graduate and faculty member, whose career included teaching at her alma mater in China and social service in the USA and post-WWII Europe. I’ve published two articles based on that work. Next year I will return to her extensive notes from the months she worked with the Red Cross at a military hospital in Texas to examine how her upbringing in the Scandinavian-American missionary community in China informed her response to conventional American views and practices related to race, class, gender, and religious identity. I hope also to return to oral history transcripts housed at the Evangelical Lutheran Church in American (ELCA) archives to investigate the effects of women’ ordination (begun in 1970) on the formation of the ELCA in 1988 and its subsequent social teaching statements. Second, I will write a personal essay based on my experience teaching Religion 121, particularly the current version which employs visual exegesis. Finally, I will begin investigating Rev. Paul Boe’s work with the leaders of the American Indian Movement, both before and during their occupation of Wounded Knee, South Dakota in 1973.
Timothy Mahr, Department of Music
I plan to begin two large creative efforts and a complete a focused experience in the public schools. One project involves creating my second symphony, a commission offer from Carthage College to celebrate the 150th anniversary of their band program. I’m also in the final negotiations for a commission from Roosevelt High School in Des Moines, Iowa — a trio of works (band, choir, orchestra) to celebrate the centennial of that institution. With both of these major efforts, I intend to accomplish serious amounts of the required conceptualization and sketching for the full works, with hopes of perhaps creating the complete full score for a portion of at least one of the works. Additionally, I plan to arrange site visits (a few each month?) to tri-state area schools, offering my services as a guest clinician and composer, as well as simply an observer.
Emily Mohl, Departments of Biology and Education
Investigating local adaptation in common milkweed, Asclepias syriaca, using research and education networks
As people have increasingly greater impacts on our environments, we need more information about the best ways to restore damaged populations, communities, and ecosystems. This project aims to gather data about patterns of adaptation in milkweed plants to inform efforts to restore milkweed populations in order to support the migrating population of the monarch butterfly, a species of cultural significance. Our approach to this question involves a widespread collaborative network of educators and their students who contribute data to the project as part of their classroom learning. During the sabbatical, I will be able to fully focus on establishing a new experimental component of the project, I will analyze data that have already been gathered, and I will work with colleagues to prepare for an educator workshop.
Stephanie Montgomery, Departments of History and Asian Studies
My project examines state penal reform and actual living conditions of incarcerated women in Shanghai and Tianjin, China from 1928 to 1958. During these thirty tumultuous years of regime change, war, and revolution, the vulnerability of women and the impoverished were key issues of social and government reform. By reading archival court and police documents through the lens of gender, I analyze how changes in the criminal justice systems across different regimes sought to help, but often hurt, lower-class women charged with non-political crimes. Published sources also show that these incarcerated women’s lives became research material for government reformers, penologists, criminologists, revolutionaries, and even popular writers who were concerned with criminality, citizen-making, and the fate of the Chinese nation-state. These findings have implications for larger issues in the humanities, including our understanding of historical prison conditions, the lives of women inmates, and the treatment of vulnerable populations in modernizing societies.
Amanda Randall, Department of German
My sabbatical research centers on a community ethnography of archiving and scientific knowledge production based in Freiburg, Germany. The case study centers on the late folklorist Hannjost Lixfeld who taught and researched there. Lixfeld was a driving force in a second wave of critical research on National Socialist-era folklore studies in the 1980s. The international scholarly network in which he played a key role in connecting crossed Cold War political boundaries and straddled the end of Communism in Europe. For my sabbatical, I will work in Lixfeld’s personal archive, which documents the full exchange surrounding the production and reception of the research. My project focuses in particular on the preparation of a collected volume, Völkische Wissenschaft (1994), co-edited by Lixfeld, which presents an exhaustive historiographic documentation and critical assessment of National Socialist-era folklore studies. Yet, it was ultimately rejected by the Volkskunde community and nearly erased from the discipline’s institutional memory. During my sabbatical, I will make two research trips to Germany to gather archive data and conduct further interviews, process the data, and prepare an article for publication.
Steve Reece, Department of Classics
The Classical Education of the Author of Luke-Acts
This is a monograph-length project on Classical influences on the author of the Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles. The project begins with an examination of the educational system of the Eastern Mediterranean world during the Hellenistic and Roman periods. The educational curriculum was very homogeneous, and children growing up anywhere in the Eastern Mediterranean could expect to receive quite similar educations, at least at the primary and secondary levels. My close examination of the Greek text of the Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles has turned up echoes, allusions, and actual quotations of the very authors that were most prominently studied in the school curriculum. It is therefore my contention that Luke experienced a typical Greek education through the primary and secondary levels, but that he probably did not continue through the tertiary level, which concentrated either on rhetoric or philosophy.
Matthew Richey, Department of Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science
The primary focus of my sabbatical during the 2021/20 academic year will be the production of a draft of a textbook reflecting the content of the St. Olaf mathematics course entitled Math 242: Modern Computational Mathematics. I will do this work in collaboration with my St. Olaf colleague, Matthew Wright. In this course, St. Olaf students have seen how modern computing can allow them to see and interact with mathematics in a way that reflects the amazing advances in computers, computing, and algorithms. At this time, there are few, if any, comparable courses nation-wide. One reason for the reluctance of other institutions to offer such a course is a lack of a suitable textbook. The production of our textbook will fill that void.
Catherine Rodland, Department of Music
Catherine Rodland will pursue two focuses during her sabbatical project in the spring of 2022. The first will be to learn and perform the chorale preludes from J.S. Bach’s Clavierubung III and the Leipzig collection. Catherine will spend a few weeks at the Eastman School in Rochester, NY to coach these with the professors there and play them on an organ that is similar to what J.S. Bach might have had access to when he composed the works. She will also observe studio classes and lectures. The second focus will be to travel to Germany to prepare for the St. Olaf organ student tour of Central and Northern Germany in spring of 2022. She will meet with organists over there and set up a tour that will allow St. Olaf students to experience the organs of J.S. Bach and his contemporaries.
Rodrigo Sánchez González, Department of Chemistry
Perovskite nanocrystals: application-inspired structures that illuminate the path toward sustainable energy
Perovskite nanocrystals are crystalline solid structures with remarkable optical properties. This sabbatical leave project will focus on the development of a new research path that employs perovskite nanocrystals as optical tracers to provide quantitative information aimed to understand environments related to combustion and other energy-related applications. This work will build on an existing research program in the field of applied laser diagnostics to continue involving St. Olaf College undergraduate students in learning and developing competence in an exciting and socially relevant area. Prof. Sanchez-Gonzalez will also foster professional relationships with colleagues in the materials and laser diagnostics community in order to establish future collaborations and secure internship and job opportunities for St. Olaf students. Additionally, this work will include planning, writing and submitting a grant proposal to an appropriate funding agency.
John R. Saurer, Department of Art and Art History
It is my intention to use the spring semester of the 2021-22 academic year to further my artistic study in the three major areas I routinely work: drawing, printmaking, and sculpture. The timing of this sabbatical is ideal in many ways – I have recently broadened my aesthetic to include both abstract and realistic ways of working; I have acquired new commercial gallery representation; and I am anticipating a final enhancement of both art and service as I anticipate retirement from teaching (spring 2024) with a final retrospective exhibition in the Flaten Art Museum (fall 2023).
David Schalliol, Department of Sociology and Anthropology
I have three primary objectives for my full academic year sabbatical. First, I will finish my next book, a monograph under contract with the architecture and design publisher Mas Context, which will unite two decades of photographs to explore how shifts in the global economy and government policy have transformed the built environments of cities from Chicago, Illinois to Ishinomaki, Japan. Second, I will also work on two related projects in Europe, pandemic response permitting. First, I will continue my work on community identity and resilience in former French and Belgian coal mining cities during a one-month residency in Charleroi, Belgium supported by BPS22, the art museum of the Province of Hainaut. Secondly, I will work with a team from the University of Luxembourg on a hybrid geography, visual sociology, and theater project in Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg for the 2022 European Capital of Culture. The outcomes of these two projects will include academic papers, pedagogical experimentation, photographic exhibitions, public discussions, and more. Third, I will initiate a Minnesota-based mixed-methods research project that will link my ongoing work in France and Belgium with similar issues in Minnesota’s Iron Range. This research will combine interviews, photography, and video to investigate the tensions between regional identities and actions linked to mining and environmentalism. Outcomes of this initiative will include academic papers, a film, and future opportunities for St. Olaf students to connect with arts, labor, and environmental organizations in the Iron Range. Combined, these projects will allow me to articulate what I have heretofore created while organizing the next phase of my career.
William Sonnega, Department of Theater
This sabbatical project involves drafting a new full-length play, Suppression, based on the ways voting rights have been, and are currently being, intentionally suppressed in the United States by partisan political officials. The story follows the investigatory work of a contemporary female journalist, who with her team is producing a documentary film about voter suppression efforts in a contested electoral battleground state in the upper Midwest. As the journalist uncovers the backroom machinations of a group of state legislators and their fixer, she is forced to reckon with the racism of their plot to limit the influence of minority voters, including plans for staging violent protests in minority neighborhoods on election day to prevent voters from coming out to the polls. In exposing this plot, the journalist’s life is threatened as she outmaneuvers a powerful political lobby to ensure the vote is not suppressed.
Matthew Wright, Department of Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science
My sabbatical will consist of two projects. First, I will work with Professor Matthew Richey to draft an undergraduate computational mathematics textbook. This text will expose mathematics students to the ways that computers and computing can allow them to access fascinating areas of mathematics, including explorations of prime numbers, complex functions, probabilistic simulation, and computational geometry. Furthermore, this text will help students develop their own agency, enabling them to ask their own questions about mathematics, conduct their own experiments, and occasionally make mathematical discoveries. Second, I will continue developing the theory and applications of Hadwiger integrals, which are topological and geometric notions of size for real-valued functions. I will study open questions about these integrals, working to prove convergence properties and approximation theorems. This work will lead to new mathematics and projects in which I can involve undergraduate students.