Congratulations to the 19 full-time faculty who have been awarded sabbatical leave for the 2025-2026 academic year. This group includes 10 full-year sabbaticals, four sabbaticals for Fall 2025, and five sabbaticals for Spring 2026. Below are summaries of the sabbatical projects. Please join us in wishing them well on their scholarly pursuits!
Professor Fran Altvater (Spring 2026)
Department of Humanities
Hillyer College
Professor Altvater will use her sabbatical to work on a book project, tentatively entitled:
The Visual Culture of Christianity. This book aims to sketch a history of Christianity and to examine the art made in service to the religion. Balancing more widely seen objects with singular works, Professor Altvater hopes to demonstrate how larger ideas were visualized for a wider audience. Each chapter will have a short essay that introduces the main themes of the historical period, followed by three to five works of art. This work has potential for use in cross-disciplinary courses and to further develop a rich digital platform to extend the material into new media.
Professor Joyce Ashuntantang (AY 2025-26)
Department of English
Hillyer College
Professor Ashuntantang plans to complete a hybrid writing volume inspired by her personal journey with breast cancer. Through a unique blend of poetry, short stories, and creative non-fiction, Dr. Ashuntantang will draw on her personal experience, research African women’s engagement with breast cancer, and include experiences from other women who have gone through this journey. This volume aims to shed light on the often-overlooked narratives of breast cancer, particularly in the context of African women’s experience. This work will further build her scholarship on minority discourse, Africa, African diaspora, African oral culture, and human rights.
Associate Professor Paige Bray (Fall 2025)
Department of Education
College of Education, Nursing and Health Professions
Professor Bray will use her sabbatical to complete her Montessori education book, entitled:
Critical Introduction to Montessori Pedagogy: Educational Agility for Unconventional Times. This book is a critical guide to Montessori pedagogy, covering the human development origins, interdisciplinary practices, and enduring implications for responsive, human-centered education. This work meets an unfilled gap in the literature, one where Montessori is introduced to those who resonate with the fundamentals of Montessori pedagogy and practice, but have not yet had an appropriately scaffolded and accessible introduction. She will present 16 chapters with contemporary and relatable information, primary and secondary sources, illustrative vignettes, and end-of-chapter inquiry prompts.
Professor Clara Fang (Spring 2026)
Department of Civil, Environmental, and Biomedical Engineering
College of Engineering, Technology, and Architecture
Professor Fang will use her sabbatical to advance and harness the power of artificial intelligence
(AI) and simulation for enhancing Connecticut’s infrastructure management and resilience. Her
research will focus on: 1) employing artificial neural networks to analyze driver behavior; 2) integrating AI with simulation modeling to assess vehicle emissions based on driver behavior; and 3) advancing AI-based predictive models for bridge deterioration, offering a more accurate and efficient approach to infrastructure maintenance. These research activities will complement a corresponding education plan which is aimed to develop learning modules to strengthen AI and simulation as emerging topics in the Civil Engineering curriculum.
Professor Mary Gannotti (Fall 2025)
Department of Rehabilitation Sciences
College of Education, Nursing and Health Professions
Professor Gannotti’s sabbatical will allow her to train and perform research at the University of Alabama-Birmingham School of Health Professions Research Collaborative. The Collaborative includes several centers all focused on disability, health, and inclusion. Additionally, Professor Gannotti will receive training about program development, granting writing, and implementation processes. She will co-create the National Center for Health and Physical Activity for People with Disabilities (NCHPAD) for children to be implemented through clinical sites affiliated with the Cerebral Palsy Research Network (CPRN). Professor Gannotti will collaborate with both CPRN and NCHPAD to disseminate project outcomes and to develop funding proposals for related projects.
Associate Professor Suhash Ghosh (AY 2025-26)
Department of Mechanical, Aerospace, and Acoustical Engineering
College of Engineering, Technology, and Architecture
Professor Ghosh plans to use his year-long sabbatical to write a monograph on the practical challenges in applying some of the advanced concepts of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers Geometric Dimensioning and Tolerancing (GD&T) standard in engineering design, manufacturing, and quality inspection. GD&T is a design approach and manufacturing mechanism that helps engineers, designers, and inspectors communicate how to build a part that exactly matches its on-paper plans. He plans to disseminate the results through industry training workshops, conference proceedings, publications and implementation in the curriculum.
Associate Professor Dan Liu (AY 2025-26)
Department of Physics
College of Arts and Sciences
Professor Liu will spend the academic year conducting a theoretical study of internal interventions in collective behaviors of insect swarms. The main research goals in this project are: (1) to develop and calculate models for swarm systems with internal interventions, and (2) to investigate the optimal solutions for implementing internal interventions. Internal intervention consists of introducing agents into an insect swarm to control the behaviors of the swarm. These agents are insect controlled by technical means such as tiny drones that influence the behavior of the insects. This research has the potential to contribute to an environmentally-friendly solution for insect infestation by controlling swarm behavior.
Associate Professor Claudia Oakes (AY 2025-26)
Department of Health Sciences
College of Education, Nursing and Health Professions
This year-long sabbatical will allow Professor Oakes to return her focus to Age Friendly University (AFU) initiatives. AFUs work to prepare students for an aging population and likewise make efforts to meet the needs of the local aging community. Professor Oakes will assess the University’s status toward meeting AFU objectives and will identify and collaborate with faculty and staff who support the mission to advance further AFU initiatives. Additionally, she will complete a needs assessment of professionals who work with older adults in the local community to better understand how the University of Hartford can meet their needs. Finally, she will develop an Honors seminar focused on global aging.
Katharine Owens (AY 2025-26)
Department of Politics, Economics, and International Studies
College of Arts and Sciences
The arts are frequently used to communicate scientific principles and information. Though the arts and the sciences are often treated as wildly different fields, scientists and artists have a great deal in common. They share traits including curiosity, creativity, and keen observation skills. For this year-long sabbatical, Professor Owens will examine where art and science meet. She will investigate how artistic exploration can yield scientific discovery, through the expansion of her Entangled and Ingested project, wider dissemination of her Svalbard journal, and traditional library research on the liminal art/science space.
Associate Professor Onur Oz (AY 2025-26)
Department of Accounting and Taxation
Barney School of Business
Professor Oz plans to explore whether an independent auditor’s adverse opinion on internal control effectiveness of a financially distressed client might contribute to the auditor’s decision-making model to resign from their engagement with financially-distressed clients. The results of this research project are expected to be relevant to the managerial concepts that are taught in accounting courses, further contributing to students’ comprehension of how an adverse opinion on internal controls impacts the cost of capital and financial risks of the distressed firm.
Professor Natalie Politikos (Spring 2026)
Department of Psychology
College of Arts and Sciences
Professor Politikos will dedicate her sabbatical to the study of social justice as it interfaces with school psychology graduate training. The goals of this project are to engage in research that will inform pedagogy in courses taught as well as assist with program evaluation of the school psychology program. In addition to examining the University of Hartford’s school psychology program and creating content and assignments that enhance knowledge, understanding, and cultural competence regarding working with diverse populations, Professor Politikos will publish her findings to inform application throughout the field.
Associate Professor Michelle Rabideau (Spring 2026)
Department of Mathematics
College of Arts and Sciences
Calculus I is generally known as a ‘gatekeeper’ course. Within the mathematics community, many educators are working towards solutions to this issue such as investigating the effects of curriculum adjustments, teaching innovations, interventions, and placement tests. During this sabbatical, Professor Rabideau will analyze the data from the Mathematical Background Survey to longitudinally track student success in math courses via final letter grades. The first goal is to measure how successful the Mathematical Background Survey has been. The second goal is to determine if the predictive ability of the Mathematical Background Survey can be improved, and to implement any improvements for incoming students in Fall 2026.
Professor Carolyn Pe Rosiene (Fall 2025)
Department of Computing Sciences
College of Engineering, Technology, and Architecture (beginning Fall 2025)
Professor Rosiene’s sabbatical will focus on expanding the investigation of artificial intelligence (AI) code generation tools to include a broader spectrum of programming languages with diverse idioms. She will explore and implement methods for integrating these language-specific idioms into a Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) framework, thereby improving the generation of code that aligns with the idiomatic conventions of the programming language. The hypothesis driving this research is that leveraging RAG to incorporate domain-specific knowledge during the retrieval process can mitigate this bias and enhance the generation of code that adheres to the idioms of various programming languages
.
Professor Ingrid Russell (AY 2025-26)
Department of Computing Sciences
College of Engineering, Technology, and Architecture (beginning Fall 2025)
During her year-long sabbatical, Professor Russell plans to research recently developed Deep Learning algorithms, apply them to her earlier research work in pattern recognition, and compare the performance of these Deep Learning algorithms against the Adaptive Resonance Theory neural network model she had used previously in her pattern recognition work. In addition, Russell plans to expand upon a prior successful National Science Foundation funded curricular project titled
Machine Learning Experiences in Artificial Intelligence, which focused on the problem-based approach to teaching introductory artificial intelligence courses using the unifying theme of machine learning. These projects will stimulate student interest, motivation, and retention.
Associate Professor Erin Striff (AY 2025-26)
Department of English and Modern Languages
College of Arts and Sciences
Professor Striff will spend the 2025-26 academic year continuing her work on a collection of
twelve short stories entitled
Fire Family. The stories explore how climate change and our impact on the environment affect a group of interlinked everyday people from different regions of the
United States. Striff’s interest in the growing field of “cli-fi,” or climate fiction, is informed by
environmental justice—how climate change disproportionally affects marginalized or otherwise vulnerable populations. Though most of the stories are set in the present, the collection is bookended by two stories featuring unhoused protagonists in the past and the future.
Associate Professor Karen Tejada (AY 2025-26)
Department of Social Sciences
Hillyer College
Professor Tejada will spend her year-long sabbatical working on her book:
“Putting them on ICE: Policing Salvadoran Communities on Long Island.” This research examines how policing of immigrants on Long Island changes 1) when political power transitions and local politics become more conservative, 2) with policy directives to reform policing such as Executive Order 203, and 3) through a global pandemic that saw crime rates drop. Moreover, this book intends to fill a much-needed gap in ‘crimmigration’ research by accounting for criminalizing practices that align with anti-terrorist efforts to quell gangs and increase border enforcement in the interior parts of the nation.
Professor Matt Towers (Spring 2026)
Department of Ceramics
Hartford Art School
Professor Towers’ ceramic vessels deal with the preciousness of porcelain, social hierarchy, flesh, hair, clothing and his personal sensibilities that get mixed in the creative hopper with his forming processes. During his sabbatical, he will work with Linda Roth, Director of Special Projects-Curatorial and Charles C. and Eleanor Lamont Cunningham Curator of European Decorative Arts at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, researching Taxile Doat’s work. He will also continue to develop his “
Crush” series, creating new forms and seeking more exhibits nationally and internationally. Both projects will provide critical advancement for his profile as an artist and professional in ceramics and the greater art world.
Associate Professor Rachel Walker (AY 2025-26)
Department of History and Philosophy
College of Arts and Sciences
Professor Walker will spend her sabbatical year working on her second book project:
Free Radicals: Fringe Thinkers & the Fight for Liberty in Nineteenth-Century America. Abolitionists and women’s rights activists are heroic figures in the public imagination. Scholars and popular writers alike lionize them as political crusaders who fought for liberty and defended human dignity. Yet standard accounts rarely consider these reformers in their full complexity. By exploring the variety of interests and causes that absorbed the attention of nineteenth-century reformers,
Free Radicals will not just sketch more accurate portraits of these figures but also show how their unorthodox practices altered the landscape of American politics.
Associate Professor Shirley Wang (Fall 2025)
Department of Management, Marketing, and Entrepreneurship
Barney School of Business
Professor Wang will spend Fall 2025 completing a manuscript related to the implications of affirmative action policies for non-minority students on college campuses. When the Supreme Court ruled against affirmative action in June 2023, it opened the possibility for less diverse college campuses. Her research explores the downstream effects of such policies for all students. Drawing on social identity, diversity, and impression management theories, her research finds that non-minority students generate less integratively complex arguments in the absence of minority students. This work aims to better understand the full educational cost – on both minority and non-minority students – if college campuses become less diverse.