2023 Faculty Sabbatical Awards

Faculty will be advancing knowledge of baseball in 2001, federal aid to faith-based organizations and crisis management during sabbaticals.

Courtney Grable | 05/06/2023

Lindsay Dillingham, Susan Haynes and Willie Steele

Lipscomb University’s research efforts are not limited to its labs and classrooms. Each year faculty receive funding to take their research on the road in sabbaticals to advance proposed projects.

Read on to see what faculty will be working on during 2023 and 2024 while on sabbatical.

Willie Steele

Professor, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Department of English and Modern Languages
Spring 2024

Steele will be focusing on research for a book tentatively titled, A New Normal: Baseball in the Aftermath of 9/11, examining how Major League Baseball addressed the terrorist attacks of September 2001 and how the game played a significant role in American culture during the rest of that season.

“The project is dedicated to telling the story of how baseball reacted to the attacks, the way teams and specific players responded in the days following the tragedies, and how the sport helped provide a sense of normalcy and healing in the weeks following,” says Steele.

The book will focus on the four teams closest to where the planes crashed: the New York Mets and New York Yankees (World Trade Center), the Baltimore Orioles (Pentagon) and the Pittsburgh Pirates (Shanksville, PA).”

After receiving a Lipscomb summer research grant in 2019, Steele was able to begin the process with a combination of interviews with players, managers, team personnel and executives and collecting archival materials. The spring 2024 sabbatical will be dedicated to finishing any remaining research and finalizing the first complete draft of the manuscript.

“My plan is to provide historical and cultural context to the events of September 11,” remarks Steele. “This sabbatical will allow me to stay on the timeline for the book to be released in 2026, in time for the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.”

Lindsay Dillingham

Associate Professor, College of Business
Department of Management, Entrepreneurship, and Marketing
Spring 2024

Dillingham will be taking a sabbatical to finish her research project: Spillover Crisis Effects: A Resistance Approach. “Spillover crises occur when a crisis event of any kind, such as natural disaster, corporate misdeed, employee relations issue or product failure, for example, creates harm to an organization,” explains Dillingham.

As her past research was cited in a call for articles for the Public Relations Review’s special issue on spillover crisis management, Dillingham plans to publish an article proposing an “Her piece “is an experimental design that examines the impact of a report of a tainted peanut factory product on perceptions of peanut butter safety.”

“Following the release of the full journal issue, I plan to apply an experimental design to other contexts covered by Public Relations Review regarding spillover crises. Given my other research stream, resistance to persuasion, I plan to integrate messages designed to insulate stakeholder attitudes from the negative effects of spillover crisis,” she said.

Dillingham’s research will “and will grow Lipscomb’s perception as a relevant and competent academic institution, by engaging with faculty at other institutions,” says Dillingham.

As “crisis communication anomalies are a growing area of scholarly interest,” says Dillingham, she hopes this project will boost the credibility of Lipscomb as a growing research institution and further establish her as an expert on the topic of spillover crisis communication area.

Susan Turner Haynes

Associate Professor, College of Liberal Arts & Sciences
Department of History, Politics, and Philosophy
Fall 2023

Haynes will be finishing her book Faith in Foreign Aid: Faith-Based Organizations’ Engagement with USAID while she is on sabbatical.

Faith in Foreign Aid “closely examines how the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has engaged with faith-based organizations (FBO) over the past 20 years,” Haynes says. “While faith in U.S. foreign aid remains high, faith-based actors’ involvement in U.S. foreign aid remains relatively minimal.”

The book will discuss several various topics including: trends in USAID funding, what accounts for the relatively few faith-based organizations receiving USAID grants and the experience of faith-based humanitarian and development organizations that have received grants. Her research will aid in “dismantling lingering distrust and false assumptions” surrounding and preventing government-FBO partnerships, says Haynes.

Throughout the fall, Haynes will finish writing and editing Faith in Foreign Aid, as well as meeting with publishers.