Thirteen University of Wisconsin Oshkosh faculty members will investigate, collaborate and create during sabbaticals in 2009-2010.

“While on sabbatical, UW Oshkosh faculty members have the opportunity to concentrate fully on their research studies or creative pursuits to further their expertise,” said Linda Freed, grants and faculty development director. “Upon their return, their work informs and enhances the classroom experience for our students.”

During a year-long sabbatical, environmental studies professor David Barnhill will complete a book about radical politics in American nature writing, critically analyzing the political views of five nature writers.

Carmen Heider, associate professor of communications; Charles Gibson, chemistry professor; and Marianne Johnson, associate professor of economics, also have been awarded year-long sabbaticals.

Heider will study how women incarcerated in Wisconsin perceive their prison experiences by interviewing approximately 30 female prisoners at the John Burke Correctional Center and the Taycheedah Correctional Institutions. She then will analyze the interviews and begin writing a book based on her findings.

Gibson will explore a major new research area, applying his expertise in nanotechnology to create improved electrodes for pseudocapacitors, which are advanced electrical energy storage devices.

Johnson will become familiar with the archival research methodology as she studies the American economists of the Wisconsin Institutionalist and Chicago Schools from 1890 to 1940. Based on this work, she plans to draft academic papers and develop a book proposal.

During the fall 2009 semester, the following faculty members will be on sabbatical:

• Julie Henderson, journalism professor, to study how public relations ethics has evolved over the past 50 years;

• Nadejda Kaltcheva, associate physics/astronomy professor, to improve the way stellar distances are derived for A-F-G giants and supergiant stars;

• Ana Kapelusz-Poppi, associate history professor, to research the scientific work conducted on Chagas disease in Argentina between 1910 and 1946;

• Michelle Michalski, associate biology/microbiology professor, to identify filarial worm components that correlate with mosquito infectivity;

• Saadat Moussavi, mathematics professor, to develop a textbook for a numerical linear algebra course appropriate for both undergraduate and graduate student;

• Kenneth Price, associate mathematics professor, to develop a scholarly partnership with the math faculty at the Atlantic Algebra Center, Memorial University, Newfoundland, Canada;

• Ron Rindo, English professor, to write the first five stories of a book-length, short-story cycle, which is a genre that combines the narrative power of the novel with the autonomy and conciseness of the short story.

During the spring 2010 semester, two faculty members — Alice Kyburg, associate philosophy professor, and Robert Stelzer, associate biology/microbiology professor — will be on sabbatical.

Using two models of perception from the neurosciences, Kyburg will explore the nature of pain and the cognitive processing that produces it. Stelzer will determine the spatial extent and mechanisms of nitrate retention in Emmons Creak, a nitrate-rich steam in Wisconsin’s Central Sand Plains.

For more about faculty development opportunities at UW Oshkosh, visit www.uwosh.edu/grants.