Jessica Boll, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Spanish

My sabbatical leave in the fall of 2022 was dedicated to researching for and writing an edited volume for which I served as both co-editor and contributor. The volume is titled Sea Change: Representations of Transformation in the Mediterranean and Caribbean and examines cultural texts of a variety of genres that represent significant transformations in the Mediterranean and Caribbean regions in the 20th and 21st centuries. This framework allows us to better see the variables that shape the cultures behind these texts and offers new possibilities for understanding the profound changes that have resulted from such factors as migration, immigration policies, xenophobia, (post)colonial relations, economic exigencies, tourism, and natural disasters. The chapters cover a wide range of cultural studies approaches to the analysis of human experiences and draw from areas of inquiry including film studies, media studies, anthropology, literary studies, and environmental studies, among others.

Thomas E. St. George, Ph.D, M.S.
Associate Professor of Mathematics

My Spring 2023 sabbatical offered me the ability to focus on collaboration, finish research projects, and start new ones. Brian Tomczyk, a former math major at Carroll and Summer of 2022 Pioscholar, and I worked during the Summer of 2022 on generalizing the Lindley distribution in probability theory to any time scale support, i.e., a domain that is a closed subset of the reals. During my sabbatical, we worked on writing up our results and submitting them in the form of a paper to Involve, an undergraduate mathematics journal. It was accepted in the summer of 2024. Brian presented a poster of this joint work at the 2023 Joint Mathematics Meetings in Boston, MA. 

   Similarly, I worked with former student and Summer of 2019 Pioscholar Alec Wendland to write up our results on the Orthonormalization of Bernstein polynomials and their applications. While these results were substantial, the paper we submitted was not accepted. However, it was recommended for edits and resubmission. We are currently finishing these edits up now. The outcomes of both of these experiences created new ideas for student research in the future.

   Lastly, I was able to reignite my research involving nonlinear boundary value problems with multi-point boundary conditions. Sabbatical gave me the opportunity to revisit potential problems and begin writing up results. I was able to present some of the results obtained at the 2023 Joint Mathematics Meetings in Boston, MA. This work is still ongoing.
 

James Zager, MFA
Professor of Musical Theatre and Dance
Pierce-Hedges Chair in Theatre Arts

I worked with Actress, Musician, Author, and Artist Cory Goodrich to adapt her book “Folksong: A Ballad of Death, Discovery, and DNA” and her CD “Long Way Around” into a one-person show. 
 
Both the book and the CD were created in the wake of the startling discovery, following her mother’s death, that the man she grew up calling dad was not her biological father.
 
It is a journey of love and longing, a ballad of grief and forgiveness, an ode to self-discovery, and a heart-stirring look at the lengths to which a family will go to protect themselves and each other.
 
Our next step is to present Cory’s one-woman show in collaboration with Milwaukee Metro Voices sometime in the late summer or early fall of 2024.