Professor of Biology Daniel York will be spending next spring in a different ecosystem.
Each semester, groups of professors go on sabbatical, which consists of one or two semesters away from teaching in order to focus on other aspects of their discipline. Currently, five Hillsdale College professors are on sabbatical leave, while another seven plan to take a sabbatical during the spring of 2013.
“Some professors develop new classes, others work on books, and some do research, and basically all of them help develop the discipline because it forces you to talk about what you are doing and talk about cutting edge research that is going on,” said Professor of Biology Anthony Swinehart, who will be on sabbatical next semester.
York will spend part of his sabbatical in Africa, where he will work with the biology department at the University of Botswana to establish a collaborative research program with the professors there.
“We’re still going back and forth about info, so I will probably be there for about a month,” York said. “Botswana is an incredible country, one of the more stable countries, and politically and economically safe. We require a two-way road for the research of molecular biology.”
On top of his travels, York intends to compile a number of his past lectures into a book which will focus on the etymologies of the names of anatomical structures.
“It’s a classical approach to learning things, both Greek and Latin, but it’s understanding the historical background of names,” York said. “It’s how they first came up with the names, and it makes things much more interesting.”
Similarly, Swinehart will be spending his sabbatical compiling and writing his upcoming book, “Nature’s Museums: Late-Pleistocene and Holocene Palaeoecology of the Southern Great Lakes Region.”
“What a book really is is a service to the community of the discipline,” he said. “You are synthesizing and analyzing data in a way that had never been done before. Whereas in an article you are just reporting your data, in a book, you are compiling others’ research in a way that hasn’t been done before.”
Professor of Classical Studies David Jones has spent his last several months on sabbatical preparing a new core class for the classics department, catching up on the last several years of research and publications in the field, and working on his most recent book.
“I’ve been working on a book that is designed to introduce high school students and early college students coming into Latin to the rhetorical devices that play in Roman poetry,” he said. “As a source of a sort of laboratory for the students, I have used sections of Virgil’s “Aeneid,” Horace’s “Odes,” and Ovid’s “Elegy” and that will give students insights into the uses of the rhetorical tropes in epic, lyric, and elegia, the three major poetic modes.”
Jones has also dedicated much of his sabbatical to developing a new class, tentatively titled “Greco-Roman Literature and Culture,” which is to take the place of Roman Civilization and Greek Civilization as the core-level literature class offered by the classics department.
“The idea of sabbatical is to enhance your teaching and knowledge of the topic by research or writing,” Swinehart said. “You are doing some sort of service to the discipline.”
