Welcome Back! to our faculty returning from sabbatical/leave of absence:

Aaron Best, Biology, spent the 2010-2011 academic year as a Research Scientist at the Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute (SBMRI) in La Jolla, CA. During his time at SBMRI, he focused on two primary projects: (1) studying the transcriptional regulatory network (TRN) of the human pathogen Staphylococcus aureus and related species, and (2) studying the effects of a novel antimicrobial compound on the metabolism of the model organism, Escherichia coli. The Staphylococcus project was performed with a leading expert in regulatory network prediction from genome sequences as part of an NSF funded project (to Hope College) to produce integrated software tools allowing analysis of genomes, transcription regulatory data, and metabolic models of sequenced microbes. The E. coli project had two main goals. First, to gain a better understanding of the mechanism of a novel antimicrobial compound that targets the critical area of NAD + metabolism; mechanistic understanding is critical in bringing a new antimicrobial to clinical use. Second, this project gave Dr. Best the opportunity to learn leading edge technologies in metabolomics used to trace how chemicals are processed in the cell. Techniques from both projects will be applied in undergraduate research projects in Dr. Best’s research laboratory and classroom-based laboratories. Over the past year, Dr. Best has co-authored 4 peer-reviewed publications and has been funded recently as part of an interdisciplinary team at Hope College through the Department of Energy Knowledgebase program in collaboration with colleagues from Argonne National Laboratory. Dr. Best and his family took full advantage of living in Southern California during his sabbatical. They took many trips to beaches, deserts, and cities. They wore shorts in January. There were surfing lessons, golf lessons, dance lessons and performances, piano and organ lessons and recitals, playground time, tide pool explorations, many books read, new friends found, and good times spent with family.

Jane Dickie, Psychology, spent her sabbatical on three projects: advancing global connections between Liverpool Hope University and Hope College, completing the final stages of writing research initiatives with students, and preparing for a new life post-retirement. For the first goal, she was awarded a Visiting Professorship in the Social Care and Justice Department of Liverpool Hope University - In this context she met with 15+ professors in psychology, social work, education, religion, and business. Much of the learning at Liverpool Hope came from individual conversations with these scholars. For the second goal, Jane completed two manuscripts on research done with students and submitted them for publication. The third goal is perhaps the most interesting. Completing her sabbatical successfully and launching her last year before retirement were important goals. Learning how to gracefully exit the college and to find places where her gifts for teaching and learning would be welcomed were also goals for this her last sabbatical. Throughout the second half of her sabbatical and continuing into next year she plans to work for a campus and regional climate which is welcoming, inclusive and affirming of all people regardless of gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, race, religion, age or ability/disability. Finally, sabbatical allowed Jane to travel, to be with family including grand children, and most importantly to be full-time together with her life partner Larry. All of this requires new learning as well so that she might carry the college’s mission of concern for the whole person: mind, body, and spirit into the years beyond Hope. She is grateful for the opportunity to conclude 40 years of living, learning and being in this academic community.

Liliana Dorado, Spanish, traveled to Uruguay where she finished one article that was published this summer in the annual special volume of the Spanish Journal, Letras Femeninas, that she co-edited with Claudia André. While there, she worked in collaboration with an 88-year old Galician exile who was a pivotal figure among the Spanish refugees in Uruguay after the Spanish Civil War. She recorded his life story and worked with him interviewing people and researching life stories in journals, newspapers, and bulletins of Spanish organizations in Uruguay with the goal of creating a future work about the Galician and Spanish immigration and exile in Uruguay. She gave a conference in the Spanish Club of Montevideo about the exiled writer Mercedes Pinto. In the second part of her sabbatical, she traveled to Galicia, Spain, with a New Directions Grant provided by GLCA. She spent six weeks in Santiago de Compostela where she took a course in Galician Language and Literature in order to refresh her Galician skills . She worked on the elaboration of the annual Literature Reports at the Center Ramón Piñeiro for Research in the Humanities, under the direction of Professor Blanca Roig. She interviewed writers, and others who lived in exile in Latin America, and became a member of the Network "Children's and Juvenile´s Literature of the Iberian and Iberoamerican World", participating in the annual meeting of this organization.

Janis Gibbs, History, spent three months in residence as a Stipendiatin (research fellow) at the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel, Germany. The fellowship, funded by the German state of Lower Saxony, allowed her to investigate sixteenth-century published works by and about Archbishop Hermann von Wied of Cologne. The most interesting thing Janis learned on her sabbatical was that the Archbishop, who died in 1552, had two funerals—a Protestant one and a Catholic one. In the course of her research, she also spent three days at the State Archive for Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf, Germany, refreshing her skills at reading sixteenth-century manuscripts. She is currently working on an article analyzing the reasons for the Archbishop’s two funerals. She presented her work-in-progress findings at the fellows’ colloquium in Wolfenbüttel in April and will present a more complete version of the paper at the New College Conference on Medieval and Renaissance Studies in Florida next March. The library sponsored a terrific exhibit on Germany before the Reformation, and Janis was excited to see the exhibits, which included a Gutenberg Bible and a stunningly beautiful Wycliffe Bible. In February, she attended her Doktorvater’s (doctoral advisor’s) fellowship address, “The Fear of Free Thinking in Germany, 1650-1750,” at the American Academy in Berlin. She also attended a rehearsal of the Berlin Philharmonic with the Fellows. She also spent a lovely weekend with former colleague James Kennedy and his family in the Netherlands, and took a day trip to Belgium with James, during which they visited Lièges and Waterloo. She finished her trip with a week in London after the term of her fellowship. There, she visited friends, saw the National Theatre’s production of Hamlet, and heard Mozart’s Requiem at St. Martin in the Fields. She did not, however, attend the royal wedding, or acquire a hat.

Curtis Gruenler, English,drafted the longer of two chapters on theology that will bring to a close the book that has grown from his dissertation:Riddles, Rhetoric, and Theology: The Medieval Poetics of Enigma in Piers Plowman and Its Contemporaries. He also tried out material from another chapter of the book at the Fifth International Piers Plowman Conference at the University of Oxford. An extra day in Oxford gave him opportunity to make his pilgrimage to sites associated with C. S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, including the Eagle and Child pub and Addison’s Walk at Magdalen College. His visit to Oxford came after a family trip to Tuscany and Paris, where he played Frisbee in the Boboli Gardens, won a game show in the ruins of a Roman amphitheater, and of course climbed Florence’s Duomo and the Eiffel Tower. His Italian lessons during the winter, under the gracious tutelage of colleague Ion Agheana, stood him in good stead as he guided his family indefatigably through churches and museums in pursuit of all things medieval and sustained them with an occasional stop for gelato.

Brigitte Hamon-Porter, French, spent two months of her sabbatical doing research at the National Archives for Overseas Territories in Aix-en-Provence, France.  A grant from the GLCA (New Direction Initiative Grant) funded the study.  She researched writers from New Caledonia who span the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century.  She spent the rest of her sabbatical working on the research accumulated in two articles on Jean Mariotti and relationships between Canaques and Europeans as recorded in the early century novels.  She also read the work of Maïssa Bey, a prominent Algerian writer, to prepare a session on the Maghreb literature she will be chairing at the M/ MLA conference in Saint Louis in November 2011.  She is now working on an article on Maïssa Bey.  

Steve Hoogerwerf, Religion, focused almost exclusively on drafting 5 new chapters for a book on Christian Sexual Ethics.  The new chapters covered topics such as:  theological foundations for a Christian sexual ethic, a relational model of Christian sexual ethics, examining contemporary models of Christian sexual ethics, healing from sexual hurt, and male-female friendship.  The book is designed to help people (primarily in their teens through 20s) think about sexual practices in the context of Christian faith and develop a sexual ethic that integrates a life of faith with sexual practice. Over spring break Steve spent a week on the Pine Ridge Reservation.  In addition to accompanying a Hope Immersion Trip, Steve spent some time renewing contacts with people who are a part of his Pine Ridge May term course “Learning and Serving Among the Oglala Lakota: Conversations About Faith, Culture, and World View.”  While there, he met some residents of the reservation who will likely be additional participants in the course next May.  A tribal activist will take his students to the “stronghold” – a short hike through a remote area of the Badlands; a tribal storyteller offered to provide a sweat lodge ceremony, and a single mother will talk with students about raising children on the reservation. For a change of pace:  (1) In conjunction with his ongoing Pew Society mentoring, Steve also took up reading in a new area: neuroscience research and its potential challenges to Christian theology. The larger issues of science and faith have arisen regularly in Steve’s senior seminar course, and he plans to develop a unit that addresses this topic.  (2)  Steve spent some time this spring and summer restoring a 35 year old sailboat (an Islander 28) and learning some new sailing skills.

Yooyeun Hwang, Education, completed four main tasks during her sabbatical in addition to miscellaneous projects. First, in January, the data from the graduate survey of the Education program at Hope College were analyzed. This annual survey by Education graduates was conducted to assess the effectiveness of the education program. After the analysis, the summarized results were presented to education faculty at a department meeting. Second, two projects were completed by members of Education Department committees to prepare documents that were used in the brief for the review of the Hope Education program by the Teacher Education Accreditation Council (TEAC). Specifically, a report was written based on the data collected through an audit of the Hope education program; and, a set of papers written by a number of Hope graduates were reviewed to assess the qualitative changes in their understanding of liberal arts experiences between their freshman year and senior year. Third, at the end of January and the beginning of February, as a part of a research project, four math classes at the Holland New Tech high school were observed, and the math teacher was interviewed. Finally, three courses were taught at the Catholic University of Korea during their spring semester. The three courses were Educational Psychology for undergraduate students and two sections of Reading and Cognition for graduate students.

Joseph LaPorte, Philosophy, substantially reworked a book manuscript for the last time before turning it over to Oxford University Press to begin the process of copyediting.  The book is on theoretical identity statements, which identify a kind or property that we recognize as a subject of investigation with what it ultimately amounts to from a scientific perspective.  An example of a scientific identity would be 'water is identical to H2O'.  Joe also started on an article on the closely related topic of designation.  And he has begun work updating a long entry for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on designation, first written by him in 2006, but which now better reflects philosophical work done between the years 2006 and 2011.  All of these works fall in the subdisciplines philosophy of language and philosophy of science.  The most substantive work on these projects that Joe did with the sabbatical time was on the mind-body problem, which concerns itself with whether mental events like pains and tickles are part of the physical world and how we might know that.  

Huw Lewis, Music, completed twelve arrangements of hymn tunes commonly sung in churches where such things can still be heard. Together with Aaron Tan, his Organ Scholar at St. John’s, Detroit, he finished a revised edition of the complete cycle of Minor Propers sung at the Solemn Eucharist in many Anglo-Catholic churches around the world. Huw also did a little traveling: He led the annual Organ Study Tour to Europe where his students studied and played historic instruments in the Netherlands. He also visited Seoul, Korea where he lectured, taught, and performed at Seoul Theological University and at Yonsei University. Huw also managed a few ‘fun’ trips: one to Shanghai and one to Singapore where he spent time with friends. Finally he traveled to Australia where he joined a large family gathering convened to celebrate the wedding of his nephew Gareth.

Herb Martin, Accountancy, did research regarding e-learning in general and online homework products specifically.  As a result of finding that few resources exist for accounting faculty to decide on which online homework products are better than others, he worked on setting up some resources.  A database of publisher products was compiled and a survey was prepared, sent and analyzed. A blog is in process to provide a central location for these resources and it will allow other professors to post their comments and suggestions.   A presentation on the results is planned for the Michigan Accounting Educators in the fall of 2011.

Steve Nelson, Art, expanded his photographic portfolio "The Gardens of Post-Industrial Michigan" to include the fall and winter seasons.  His travels to various remote areas of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan focused on the visual evidence of decay and rebirth within the landscape of past industry.  The large format black and white photographs for this project will be featured in a sabbatical exhibition in the De Pree Art Center Gallery in the fall of 2012. Nelson participated in a one week residency at the New York Center for Arts and Media Studies this past spring and during the fall he presented a session on his work at the Regional Conference of Society for Photographic Education at Western Michigan University.  His sabbatical photographs have been featured recently in group exhibitions at the Urban Institute for Contemporary Art in Grand Rapids and the Black Cloud Gallery in Chicago.

Jeff Polet, Political Science, spent his sabbatical researching and beginning the process of writing a book on political theology, with specific emphasis on America as a theological project. In addition to lighter thought pieces and editorials, and a couple of book reviews, he wrote three articles as either book chapters or for journal submission ("The Political Economy of the Papal Encyclicals"; "On Modesty in Education"; and, "Why Philosophy Still Matters: MacIntyre and Gadamer on Tradition"), and a conference paper entitled "Notting Hill Or Nowhere: On Subsidiarity in a 'Global Age.'" On the personal side, he made his first pilgrimage to Rome and also visited Florence and Constantinople.

Brian Porter, DEMA, looked at pedagogical issues in the teaching of finance, including computer simulations, integrating faith with investing, and finance as a tool to teach interfaith understanding. One paper from this research has been accepted for publication in Christian Higher Education and a second paper has been accepted for presentation at the national Financial Education Association Conference. A third paper is in progress. In another research project Brian examined the sustainability of benefit and legacy costs in the public sector and proposed adjustments that should be taken to lessen the burden to future generations. The difficulties of implementing changes were analyzed, such as resistance from those that benefit from the current system. A collaborative co-authored paper is being written. In addition, Brian wrote a book review that has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Biblical Integration in Business, and is completing a reflective paper on the music group U2 and Bono that will be submitted for publication. A preliminary study of the euro zone sovereign debt problem was also started.

Darin Stephenson, Math, submitted and received a GLCA New Directions Initiative grant to study graph theory (domination theory) and its applications.  He also began work on this project that will continue through the 2011-12 academic year.  One goal of this work was to prepare an extensive list of research questions in domination theory, many of which can be tackled in collaboration with undergraduate researchers.  Another goal is the development of software tools, and this is being carried out jointly with Dr. Cusack in the Computer Science Department.  In addition to this main project, Darin also read papers and monographs on toric varieties which will be helpful in his other research projects.  He completed a new draft of the book Multivariable Mathematics: Linear Algebra, Differential Equations, and Vector Calculus to be used in Math 231-232 at Hope and began to explore options for publishing this material.

Scott VanderStoep, Psychology, completed two chapters of a book on youth sports and started a third. Along with his students, he also drafted two manuscripts for research articles. One is reporting on data collected on collegiate athletes’ views of youth sports. The other is a report of in-depth interviews conducted of parents of youth athletes. His students also drafted three abstracts to submit this fall to the Psi Chi program at the Midwestern Psychological Association Meeting. Along with two of his students, Scott analyzed data from the samples of high school and college student athletes. A third student conducted interviews of parents of youth athletes, probing many of the same questions previously asked of athletes. This student also constructed a questionnaire, which Scott hopes to distribute to parents in the fall. He also continued his work on assessment, including administering the Collegiate Learning Assessment to seniors in the spring. He also began work on the Self-Study Steering Committee for the college’s Higher Learning Commission reaccreditation. Scott's sabbatical also allowed him to travel more than he otherwise would have. The trips were: reviewing the Dennis Teaching and Learning Center at Ohio State, conducting a workshop for faculty on assessment at Illinois Wesleyan University, attending the Senior Leadership Academy in Washington, DC, and going to an AAC&U conference and the Higher Learning Commission Annual Meeting (both in Chicago).

Charlotte vanOyen Witvliet, Psychology,worked on nine manuscripts and one op-ed piece. She gave four research talks (at summer conference in Oxford, and invited academic talks at Fuller, Westmont, and Rosemead). Charlotte completed a 5-year Pursuit of Happiness interdisciplinary project for the Emory University Center for the Study of Law and Religion funded by the John Templeton Foundation.  She also conducted research for and met with the Forgiveness Research Network funded by the Fetzer Institute, including a collaborative meeting at Richie Davidson, Ph.D.’s neuroscience lab at the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds. She also met with a long-standing collaborative research group, the Institute for Research on Psychology and Spirituality at the Rosemead School of Psychology. Charlotte attended graduate classes and research meetings at Fuller’s School of Psychology: Terry Hargrave, Ph.D.’s fall quarter class Forgiveness, Reconciliation, and Clinical Practice, and Alexis Abernethy, Ph.D.’s winter quarter Spiritual Transcendence and Health, for which Charlotte also taught a class. She participated in Dr. Abernethy’s research team meetings and attended School of Psychology research colloquia. Charlotte also attended conferences sponsored by the School of Psychology, School of Theology, and the Brehm Center for Worship, Theology, and the Arts.