Sabbatical Summaries | Provost's Office

Dr. Brian Bodenbender spent the Fall Semester of 2024 immersed in the liberal arts, living and teaching at the Oregon Extension. During his semester he hosted groups of six or seven students in his living room for book discussions, supervised independent student research on topics such as the role of Columbian street murals in political protest, the psychological effects of screen use on adolescents, critiques of global food systems, contrasting views of animals in Christianity and Jainism, and building community resilience to climate change. He co-taught a course on forest ecology with a stream ecologist, learned to tell a fir from a Douglas fir, and found that larches in the fall are magical. He led students in exploring René Girard’s theory of mimetic desire, Brian Doyle’s novelization of small-town life on the Oregon coast, Annie Dillard’s observations of nature, Paul Collier’s economic analysis of immigration policy, Colin Beavan’s experiment in sustainable living, Suzanne Simard’s research on the importance of mycorrhizal fungal networks to forest health, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s characterizations of what it is to be human in The Brothers Karamazov. He backpacked with students for five days in the Sky Lakes Wilderness and hiked Mt. McLaughlin, Mt. Luther, Table Rock, Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park, Lava Beds National Monument, and Crater Lake. He assisted in the slaughter and processing of four turkeys before Thanksgiving and witnessed the birth of several new vegetarians. He joined the entire community of faculty, staff, and students in weekly chores. He split, delivered, stacked, and burned a lot of firewood.

Dr. Darin Stephenson spent his time in Holland working on three main projects. He worked on finalizing some results, revising code, and formalizing new questions for an artificial intelligence project in game theory. He will continue work onthis project with three students in Summer 2025. Darin also worked on improving results related to sand dune land classification. He worked remotely with faculty from around the country to develop curriculum materials in linear algebra using design-based research. This work is funded under an NSF-PROTEUS grant centered at the University of Michigan.

In addition to enjoying some welcome rest and rejuvenation (and playing pickleball for the first time), Dr. Bram ten Berge spent his Fall 2024 sabbatical finalizing three projects. The most important of these is a co-edited book (Tacitus and the Incomplete), which reconstructs and analyzes lost portions and other forms of ‘incompleteness’ in the works of the Roman historian Tacitus (ca. AD 55–120). Dr. ten Berge contributed one chapter to the volume and co-authored the introduction and the epilogue. He and his co-editor submitted a full manuscript of the book to the University of Michigan Press in October and are currently awaiting peer-review reports.

In addition to finishing this volume, Dr. ten Berge published a peer-reviewed article (“Tacitus’ Use of Columella’s De re rustica”) in the ancient historiography journal Histos (Newcastle University). This was a fun project, in which Dr. ten Berge, unpacking various linguistic correspondences between the two authors, set out to prove that Tacitus used as a source text the agricultural treatise of the Roman agriculturalist Columella (ca. AD 4–70). Since the scholarly consensus has always been that ancient historians did not consult these kinds of technical treatises, this article may open up a new avenue of analysis in the study of both Roman historiography and the use of agricultural language and concepts in Roman (political) thought more broadly.

The third piece on which Dr. ten Berge worked during his sabbatical is an entry on the Roman historian Cremutius Cordus for the new Trends in Classics – Greek and Roman Humanities Encyclopedia (GROH, De Gruyter). This was an intriguing and challenging project—intriguing because Cremutius was (as far as we know) the first ancient historian to have been condemned (unjustly) for treason on the basis of a written history, challenging because his work survives only in fragments. Writing this entry allowed Dr. ten Berge to dive more deeply into an important event in Roman history, to gain a greater appreciation of the difficulties in reconstructing fragmentary texts, and to understand much better an author whose life and work were of great significance in the development of ancient censorship and the discipline of Roman historiography. The entry has been accepted by De Gruyter and should appear some time in 2025.

Dr. ten Berge’s sabbatical, in sum, has been both rejuvenating and rewarding. He is grateful for having been given the opportunity to develop the above projects and is excited to return to campus in January.