The College of Letters & Science is filled with faculty members who are experts on subjects wide and varied. But professors don’t spend all their time just researching and teaching. We thought you might enjoy reading about some of their interesting and unusual hobbies.
We can begin at the top, with the Dean of the College of Letters & Science. In addition to being a university leader and astronomer, Eric Wilcots is also a member of the Madison Curling Club (based in McFarland), where he wields a broom and a stone to win bonspiels. Word is, he’s pretty talented.
The children of Tom DuBois, the chair of the Department of German, Nordic and Slavic+ Studies, made it all the way to high school before eating store-bought bread. DuBois, who teaches about the folklore and culture of the Finnish and Sami people, is a fanatically devoted baker. He first learned the craft as a student in Finland and bakes Finnish specialties like voisilmäpullia, sweet buns with a sugary center, and korvapustit, the equivalent of a cinnamon roll. DuBois routinely rains baked goods on department meetings and makes a point of imparting his knowledge to interested graduate students in the department. We’re guessing they’re as happy to sample as they are to learn.
The Department of Philosophy’s Steven Nadler coordinates weekly bike rides with L&S and other UW-Madison colleagues, including Larry Shapiro (Philosophy), Aaron Brower (School of Social Work), Cary Forest (Physics), Markus Brauer (Psychology), Mark Craven (Biostatistics and Medical Informatics) and Ullrich Langer (French and Italian) The group usually rides around Paoli and, on longer ventures of up to 100 miles, areas south and west of Madison—wherever they can find lightly traveled roads and beautiful scenery. Some group members have even made multiple trips to France, to ride together in the Pyrenees.
“It can get a little competitive at times,” says Nadler, noting that the cyclists will often race to be first to cross town or county lines. “There’s some serious jockeying for position that happens about a mile out.”
Several years ago, Karyn Riddle, a professor of journalism and a natural introvert, began to reconsider the “participation” requirements she placed on the students in her classes.
“There’s some benefit to just listening,” she says. “So I changed the requirements to include things an introvert would want to do.”
Riddle had long wanted to write fiction, and her internal discussion also helped inspire her to write The Introvert’s Handbook, a young adult novel.
Riddle finished her manuscript in 2019, and submitted it to Pitch Wars, an organization that pairs aspiring authors with writing mentors.
After supervising author revisions, mentors help connect the author with an agent, which happened for Riddle in March, 2020.
The pandemic has slowed the process, but Riddle’s manuscript is in the pipeline.
For the last 8 years, mild-mannered Professor of English Martin Foys has been skating around the rinks in Madison, calling fouls and counting points as “Johnny Zebra,” one of the regular skating officials for Madison Roller Derby, the popular local women-only flat track roller derby league and home to Madison’s own Mad Rollin’ Dolls. Foys first picked the hobby up 16 years ago while living in Baltimore.
Foys is a jammer ref, which means he’s charged with making sure the skater who’s trying to score points isn’t committing fouls and validating points when the skater is successful.
“As a referee, you can’t really look at where you’re going,” says Foys. “You have to have some keen muscle memory to be able to do it. And when you’re skating, your brain is focused on your body and the other bodies on the rink, and there’s no room for anything else. It all just fades away.”
If you haven’t heard of ecstatic dance, you may not be alone. Julie Larson-Guenette, a faculty associate in German with UW-Madison’s Department of German, Nordic and Slavic+ Studies, describes it as “yoga-inspired, barefoot freeform dance/movement.”
“It's a chance to get out of your head and allow the music to move your body, as opposed to you moving to the music,” explains Larson-Guenette, who says she finds ecstatic dancing relaxing and transformative, even if her kids describe it as "a bunch of weird people dancing with their eyes closed."
The practice, she says, has taught her how to be more present in the moment, and sustained her through several difficult times. Ecstatic dance also introduced Larson-Guenette to the work of German dancer/choreographer Pina Bausch. Last fall, she worked Bausch into a unit in her German 337 course, tying ecstatic dance to German grammar.
Derek Johnson, a professor of communication arts, ran in high school, but only re-embraced racing when his departmental colleague, Jason Kido Lopez, invited him along to train for 10K and half-marathon events in 2014. The following year, Jeremy Morris, another Comm Arts professor, taught him to ride a road bike.
Supported by this camaraderie, Johnson trained up for the Madison Marathon and his first triathlons in 2015. Eleven more marathons followed, including the Boston Marathon in 2018, 2019, and virtually in 2020. In 2018 and 2019, he completed the full Wisconsin Iron Man triathlon.
Johnson enjoys competition—placing first in his age group and the master’s division at the 2021 Madison Marathon. But, he adds, the ongoing training “helps routinize my approach to research and teaching while it builds enduring friendships with my colleagues.”
Jake Vander Zanden spends his days studying Madison lakes as the Director of the UW’s Center for Limnology (CFL). He is also a musician—in fact, back in the ‘90s, he was the bass guitarist of a pop-punk band called The Snitches, who actually signed a record contract with Universal Records. Prior to the pandemic, Vander Zanden regularly recruited graduate students to join Phantom Midge, the unofficial CFL band, named for an insect whose larvae live at the bottom of lakes.
Vander Zanden, who plays guitar, bass and keyboards, also plays in a band called the River Rats that performs at the Marquette Waterfront Festival's annual Fool’s Flotilla.
“Music is a great way to get together with friends,” he says. “It’s an opportunity for me to connect with grad students on a personal level and do something outside the classroom.”
As a young boy growing up in rural Michigan, Joshua Coon loved to build things.
As a teenager, the professor of biomolecular chemistry built his own fishing boat. As an adult, he has used his woodworking skills to build furniture for his home, as well as other home improvement projects.
In 2015, the famous President’s Oak, a more than 300-year-old tree on the UW campus, succumbed to decay and had to be felled. Coon got permission to recover some of the wood, which he used to create a set of ornate frames for artwork commissioned to honor the tree. He’s currently working on a cabinet that will hold a piece of stained-glass art honoring one of his colleagues in the Department of Biomolecular Chemistry.
“There’s a lot of satisfaction when you create something on your own and it’s unique,” he says. “The sense of accomplishment is wonderful.”
Baha Balantekin, a professor of physics who was born in Turkey, has spent a lot of time overseas in the last three-plus decades, visiting, among other places, Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan. It was there that he discovered his passion for translating Japanese haiku into Turkish.
Balantekin was drawn to a Japanese haiku written about the temples than surround Sendai—in particular, a poem about the Yamadera Temple by the 17th Century Japanese poet Basho.
“I felt that the sublime beauty of that poem my Japanese speaking friends were excited about did not really translate into English,” he explains. “Over the years I realized that it is possible to better preserve that essence when you translate these poems into Turkish, as both Japanese and Turkish are syllabic languages.”
Over the years, Balantekin has slipped some of his translated haiku into presentations at physics conferences.
"When it's appropriate," he says.