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University of Wisconsin Oshkosh professors on sabbatical this year will embark on intensive study in their disciplines, ranging from art to astronomy and from economics to the environment.

Granted on the merit of their academic contributions, those awarded sabbaticals have the opportunity to become more effective teachers and scholars.

UWO artist Andrew Redington and economist Nancy Burnett are spending the fall semester working on their big projects —a large-scale sculpture depicting iconic forms related to industry and a cutting-edge model in gender/discrimination economics, respectively.

Professors on sabbatical for the full 2016-2017 academic year include Nadia Louar, foreign languages and literatures; Mary Elsbeth McPhee, biology and environmental studies; Robert Pillsbury, biology; David Siemers, political science; and Nenad Stojilovic, physics and astronomy.

Louar and Siemers are both working on writing three book chapters. Louar’s book, entitled “Black Men White Gals: An Analysis of Sexual Stereotypes in Contemporary Women’s Writing in France,” explores the contentious question of sexual and racial stereotypes as depicted in the literary works of two French-speaking authors and a French Canadian author.

Siemers’ book will focus on demonstrating that the United States ideal of having “three coequal branches” of government actually is contrary to the Founding Fathers’ thinking.

McPhee will spend the year studying both in the field and the office. She will collect basic population data on whooping cranes and closely related sandhill cranes and test the hypothesis that cranes do not have appropriate predator response behaviors. In addition, she will conduct an extensive literature review of 13 other crane species to characterize similarities and differences in their ecology and behavior.

Collaborating with the Natural Resources Research Institute in Duluth, Minnesota, Robert Pillsbury is working to reconstruct the environmental history of Lake Ontario since European settlement and to predict how future changes will impact the lake.

Stojilovic will experiment with scattering laser light from crystals that have strongly correlated electrons in order to better understand the physics of the materials.

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