Spring 2021

Humanities @ Home: Humanities and Healing

Anonymous — Tue, 11 May 2021 23:00:12 +0000

Humanities @ Home: Humanities and Healing Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 05/11/2021 - 17:00

Humanities @ Home and the Center for Humanities & the Arts (CHA) held a panel discussion about ways in which the humanities can be used as tools and connectors to navigate traumatic events on May 11, 2021 at 5pm MT via Zoom Webinar.

Panelists included Ben Barron, PhD Student of Geography; Dyonne Bergeron, Assistant Vice Chancellor for Inclusion and Student Achievement, Office of Diversity, Equity & Community Engagement (ODECED); and Erika Randall, Associate Professor and Chair of Theatre & Dance.

A link to the recording of the event can be found here.

[video:https://youtu.be/tIA4kA4bvKA]

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Seeing Differently: The Art of Communicating Climate Change

Anonymous — Thu, 22 Apr 2021 17:33:01 +0000

Seeing Differently: The Art of Communicating Climate Change Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 04/22/2021 - 11:33

Climate change affects each and every one of us, from right here in Colorado to communities around the world. The need for collective action on this global challenge has never been more urgent. And yet, scientific facts and news reports alone are not always enough to persuade others. Humans engage with issues through other emotional and sensory means as well, and mediums such as theatre, comedy, film, and painting can be especially impactful. Climate change communicators can and should seek to engage these other ways of knowing, harnessing the power and interconnectedness of the arts to illuminate the importance of safeguarding our planet's health for future generations.

Join us virtually on Earth Day at 7 p.m. MT for a special evening of climate conversation hosted by Denver7 Chief Meteorologist Mike Nelson, featuring a diverse lineup of filmmakers, artists, performers, and more. This free public event is presented by the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, Denver7, and the �� Boulder Center for Humanities and the Arts in collaboration with the Institute for Science & Policy and Inside the Greenhouse at the University of Colorado Boulder. The event will also be livestreamed on Facebook and YouTube.

"The World's Littlest Book on Climate" by Mike Nelson, Pieter Tans, and Michael Banks is available for purchase at the DMNS online store.

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Cox Family Process Speaker Series: Dr. Priscilla Wald

Anonymous — Tue, 30 Mar 2021 00:13:10 +0000

Cox Family Process Speaker Series: Dr. Priscilla Wald Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 03/29/2021 - 18:13

The Center for Humanities & the Arts (CHA) at �� Boulder held the inaugural installment of the Cox Family Process Speaker Series featuring Dr. Priscilla Wald (English, Duke University) on March 29, 2021 at 3pm MT via Zoom Webinar.

The Cox Family Process Speaker Seriesannual programming will bring renowned artists and scholars to �� Boulder, each spring, to speak about work that made them famous in their fields.

For the inaugural event, Dr. Wald spoke about her book, Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative (Duke University Press 2008) – she shared her inspiration for this critical work, the afterlives of CONTAGIOUS, and thoughts she had about this work given our COVID-19 lives.

A link to the recording of the event can be found here.

Priscilla Wald teaches and works on U.S. literature and culture, particularly literature of the late-18th to mid-20th centuries, contemporary narratives of science and medicine, science fiction literature and film, law and literature, and environmental studies. Her current work focuses on the intersections among the law, literature, science and medicine. Her last book-length study, Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative, considers the intersection of medicine and myth in the idea of contagion and the evolution of the contemporary stories we tell about the global health problem of "emerging infections.” Wald is also the author of Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form and co-editor, with Michael Elliott, of volume 6 of the Oxford History of the Novel in English, The American Novel, 1870-1940. She is currently at work on a book-length study entitled Human Being After Genocide. This work chronicles the challenge to conceptions of human being that emerged from scientific and technological innovation in the wake of the Second World War and from the social and political thought of that period, which addressed the geopolitical transformations that followed the war and decolonization movements. Wald is interested in tracking how those debates found expression in what, following several historians, she calls a new mythistory (the term marks the mythic features of a collective history, or creation story). She tracks it through the rise of science fiction as a newly emergent mass genre and then turns to how it inflected the debates around the science and ethics of biotechnology as it became a multi-billion dollar industry. She is interested, in this project, in showing how beliefs and values circulate through mythistories as well as in how, why, and when mythistories become more visible and accessible to change. This project explores the particular importance of science, law, and religion to these stories and works to identify ideas of the sacred that we don’t typically identify as such. Wald is especially interested in analyzing how information emerging from research in the genome sciences circulates through mainstream media and popular culture, thereby shaping a particular understanding of the science that is steeped in (often misleading) cultural biases and assumptions. In her research, her teaching and her professional activities, she is committed to promoting conversations among scholars from science, medicine, law and cultural studies in order to facilitate a richer understanding of how information circulates through language, images, and stories to shape lived experience. Wald's professional service includes: co-editor of American Literature, co-editor, with David Kazanjian and Elizabeth McHenry of the America in the Long Nineteenth Century book series at NYU Press, Chair of the Faculty Board of Duke University Press, member of the Editorial Boards of Penn Studies in Literature and Science and the journal Literature and Medicine, Senior Editor for American Literature, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, on the Advisory Board of the Centre for Humanities and Medicine at the University of Hong Kong, and co-director, with Sean Goudie, of the First Book Institute. She has served as President of the American Studies Association and on the National Council of that organization as well as on the Executive Council of the Modern Language Association and as the MLA representative to the American Council of Learned Societies. Wald is currently Margaret Taylor Smith Director of the Program in Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies and is on the Faculty Governance Committee of Science and Society and the steering committee of IS&S (Information Sciences + Information Studies) at Duke.

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Difficult Dialogues: Power

Anonymous — Wed, 10 Feb 2021 15:40:30 +0000

Difficult Dialogues: Power Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 02/10/2021 - 08:40

The Center for Humanities & the Arts (CHA) and the �� Boulder Libraries offered the next installment in the Difficult Dialogues panel series on Wednesday, February 10th, 2021 at 12pm virtually via Zoom.

This event was meant to examine the different ways that power impacts the lives of people at �� Boulder and the different types of power dynamics that affect us–that make it hard to advocate for various issues and that are often difficult to talk about.

This panelists for this event included Gwendalynn Roebke, undergraduate student; Sarah Fahmy, graduate student; Chantal Baca, staff, and Erika Randall, chair and professor. The moderator was Janet Ruppert, who was also a graduate student.

This event was free and open to the public.

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Cultural PostMortem 2020

Anonymous — Wed, 27 Jan 2021 16:01:49 +0000

Cultural PostMortem 2020 Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 01/27/2021 - 09:01

How can artists and scholars help the nation contend with the peril in which we find ourselves? The 2020 US presidential race was one of the most politically and ideologically divisive and contentious races that we’ve ever seen. And as the events of January 6, 2021 have illustrated, the nation remains divided to the point where political leaders at the highest level are challenging election results without any evidence or basis in reality and a largely white group of insurrectionists tried to overthrow the US government. Our humanities centers, located in three different states that also have a history of divided state government, have brought together three artist-scholars to reflect on the cultural, social, and political fall-out from the 2020 election—a fall-out that we will undoubtedly continue to feel the ramifications of long after the January 6, 2021 inauguration—and to imagine paths forward.

On Wednesday, January 27th at 3:30 MT (4:30 CT/5:30 ET), the Center for Humanities & the Arts participated in a joint collaboration among Carolina Public Humanities (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) and the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies (University of Iowa) to feature humanities scholars discussing the state of culture, politics, and society in the aftermath of a tumultuous 2020.

The featured speakers were Ruth Ellen Kocher from �� Boulder, Malinda Maynor Lowery from UNC Chapel Hill, and Christopher Merrill from the University of Iowa.

This event will took place over Zoom. Here is a recording of the event.

Ruth Ellen Kocher is Senior Associate Dean of Program Initiatives at �� Boulder and the author of domina Un/blued (Tupelo Press 2013), One Girl Babylon (New Issues Press 2003), When the Moon Knows You’re Wandering, winner of the Green Rose Prize in Poetry (New Issues Press 2002), and Desdemona’s Fire, winner of the Naomi Long Madget Award for African American Poets (Lotus Press 1999). Her poems have been translated into Persian in the Iranian literary magazine, She’r, and have appeared or are forthcoming in various anthologies including, Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poets, Black Nature, From the Fishouse: An Anthology of Poems that Sing, Rhyme, Resound, Syncopate, Alliterate, and Just Plain Sound Great, An Anthology for Creative Writers: The Garden of ForkingPaths, IOU: New Writing On Money, New Bones: Contemporary Black Writing in America. She has taught poetry writing for the University of Missouri, Southern Illinois University, the New England College Low Residency MFA program, the Indiana Summer Writer’s workshop, and Washington University’s Summer Writing program.

Malinda Maynor Lowery is a Professor of History at UNC-Chapel Hill and Director of the Center for the Study of the American South. She is a member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina. Her second book, The Lumbee Indians: An American Struggle, was published by UNC Press in September 2018. The book is a survey of Lumbee history from the eighteenth century to the present, written for a general audience. Her first book, Lumbee Indians in the Jim Crow South: Race, Identity, and the Making of a Nation (UNC Press, 2010), won several awards, including Best First Book of 2010 in Native American and Indigenous Studies and the Labriola American Indian Center National Book Prize from Arizona State University. She has written over fifteen book chapters or articles, on topics including American Indian migration and identity, school desegregation, federal recognition, religious music, and foodways, and has published essays in the New York Times, Oxford American, The North Star, and Scalawag Magazine. She has won fellowships and grants from the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Sundance Institute, the Ford Foundation, and others. She has produced documentary films, including the Peabody Award-winning A Chef’s Life (5 seasons on PBS), the Emmy-nominated Private Violence (broadcast on HBO in 2014), In the Light of Reverence (broadcast on PBS in 2001), and two short films, Real Indian (1996), and Sounds of Faith (1997), both of which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival.

Christopher Merrill has published six collections of poetry, including Watch Fire, for which he received the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets; many edited volumes and books of translations; and five works of nonfiction, among them, Only the Nails Remain: Scenes from the Balkan Wars and Things of the Hidden God: Journey to the Holy Mountain. His latest prose book, The Tree of the Doves: Ceremony, Expedition, War, chronicles travels in Malaysia, China and Mongolia, and the Middle East. His writings have been translated into twenty-five languages; his journalism appears widely; his honors include a Chevalier from the French government in the Order of Arts and Letters. As director of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, Merrill has conducted cultural diplomacy missions to over forty countries. He serves on the U.S. National Commission for UNESCO, and in April 2012 President Obama appointed him to the National Council on the Humanities.

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Citizenship: Past and Present

Anonymous — Wed, 20 Jan 2021 17:09:25 +0000

Citizenship: Past and Present Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 01/20/2021 - 10:09

Citizenship, its definitions, and its obligations has been very much in the news lately.

After watching the Inauguration, please join us for a panel discussion on citizenship on Wednesday, January 20th at 12pm noon MT. The panel features experts on the history, law, and ongoing meaning of citizenship in the United States.

We'll meet on Zoom at https://cuboulder.zoom.us/j/96137481116.

Many thanks to our sponsors: CHA, the History Department, and the Law School's Immigration and Citizenship Law Program.

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