Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literature

Are modern politicians really making a deal with the devil?

Anonymous — Mon, 23 Sep 2024 06:00:00 +0000

Are modern politicians really making a deal with the devil? Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 09/23/2024 - 00:00

Chris Quirk

In an election season when accusations of ‘Faustian bargains’ are flying, CU Boulder scholar Helmut Müller-Sievers reflects on what that really means

Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard noted that “every notable historical era will have its own Faust.”

The current election season seems to have an abundance of them, judging by the frequent cries of “Faustian bargain” made by media pundits, candidates in races across the country and members of the opinion class. With the term so commonly used as Election Day approaches—generally as an accusation of having made a deal with the devil or of selling one’s soul—it seems fair to ask: Is this what Goethe meant?

Is claiming that a candidate made a Faustian bargain if they aligned themselves with a certain politician, voted a particular way or made certain stump-speech promises true to what the German author envisioned two centuries ago?

Helmut Müller-Sievers, a CU Boulder professor of German, notes that “the Faustian bargain always has to do with the value of our conscience.”

“The Faustian bargain always has to do with the value of our conscience,” says Helmut Müller-Sievers, a professor of German in the �鶹��Ƶ Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literature. “You're basically saying, so long as I have created advantages for my family, created advantages for my political ideology, created advantages for my short-term goals in life, it will not bother me. I will be able to sleep.”

Müller-Sievers—whose academic focus includes the intersections of literature, science and engineering in the 18th and 19th centuries and the history of technology—teaches a course on Johann Goethe’s tragic play Faust, in which he also examines the motif of the Faustian bargain as it appears in literature.

A deal with the devil

According to Müller-Sievers, the mythical idea of the Faustian deal with the devil as we understand it today originated in Germany sometime around the beginning of the 16th century. Likely the first literary treatment is by Christopher Marlowe late in the 1500s.

“But already Marlowe situates the play in Germany,” Müller-Sievers explains. “There seems to be a sense that the Reformation might have emboldened people to make their own relationship with God and the devil, so there’s a little bit of polemics going on there.”

In Goethe’s rendition, Faust is a bitter academic who has been seeking truth and failing in his pursuit. “Nothing gives him satisfaction, and he falls into what we would today call a depression. He is a cynic,” Müller-Sievers says.

Faust meets the devil, who is in the form of a dog that soon transforms into the demon Mephistopheles, and they begin a debate over the price for Faust’s soul. “It's the banter of super clever people who have no values and are too highly educated. That was already a common criticism at the time—intellectuals who want to show their brilliance but have no inner core.”

The two soon agree to a contest: Mephistopheles will win Faust's soul if he is able to entice Faust into wanting to hold on to some experience or aspect of the world that he finds desirable or fulfilling. Faust is convinced at first that he can resist, but soon succumbs.

The story of Faust has inspired artists for centuries, including the etching Faust by Rembrandt van Rijn (left, ca. 1652) and a lithograph of Mephistopholes flying above the skyline (right) by Eugène Delacroix for an 1828 translation of Goethe's Faust.

“We use the term Faustian bargain, and we think there must have been some kind of decision, but it might well be a gradual sliding—small bargains you make along the way, and then can’t go back,” Müller-Sievers says.

“It is basically a question of whether we are able to push aside our moral qualms when we act. At a certain point, will they come and bite us, and make us change? Will our conscience ever rise up and force us to denounce compromises that we've made?”

Müller-Sievers cites the example of German actor Gustaf Gründgens, whose career is portrayed in the Oscar-winning 1981 film Mephisto by Hungarian director István Szabó. “It’s bizarre. He was one of the great actors of his time, and maybe the greatest actor ever to play Mephisto on the stage,” he says.

“But he made a deal with the Nazi regime so he could continue to work in theater.” Gründgens continued playing Mephisto in performance in Germany in the run up to and even during World War II.

Sometimes, as in Gründgens’ case, one makes a deal with a reigning power rather than an individual, Müller-Sievers notes, and sometimes a large percentage of a population makes a deal.

“In the former East Germany, the GDR, you had an oppressive regime, and many people thought, ‘Well, I have to cut a deal with this system to get a job or get ahead,’ and they started snooping on other people,” Müller-Sievers explains.

“There were conscientious objectors, but it was embarrassing that so many people consented to this, and it was embarrassing later when all the documents came out, and you could read all the terms of the bargains people had made.”

Top image: Faust und Mephisto beim Schachspiel (Faust and Mephisto Play Chess), artist unknown

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In an election season when accusations of ‘Faustian bargains’ are flying, CU Boulder scholar Helmut Müller-Sievers reflects on what that really means.

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Professor Mary Rippon led a secret, separate life

Anonymous — Tue, 17 Sep 2024 21:31:39 +0000

Professor Mary Rippon led a secret, separate life Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 09/17/2024 - 15:31

Silvia Pettem

In book, CU Boulder alumnus Silvia Pettem details a little-known chapter of the trailblazing faculty member's story

As a student at the University of Colorado, I often passed through the Mary Rippon Outdoor Theater on the way to my classes. I had assumed Rippon was a woman associated with the theater department, but that was not so. I later learned that she had arrived in Boulder in 1878 and became the university's first female professor. After her death in 1935, then-President George Norlin named the theater (then under construction) in her memory.

Publicly, "Miss Rippon" was highly respected by students and faculty. However, unknown to Norlin and the others, she had a secret private life that would have been considered scandalous, had she not hidden her husband and daughter behind a Victorian veil of secrecy.

The long-concealed truth was revealed in 1986 when an elderly man donated Rippon's diaries, account books, and journals to the university's archives. He was Rippon's grandson and revealed that she had had a romantic relationship with one of her students, became pregnant in 1888, secretly married, and took a year's sabbatical in Germany to give birth.

CU Boulder alumnus and historian Silvia Pettem (left) wrote Separate Lives about a little-known chapter in the life of influential CU Boulder Professor Mary Rippon, namesake of the campus theater.

At the time, there was no rule concerning teacher-student relationships, as it never occurred to anyone to implement one. Rippon was 37, and her husband, Will Housel, was 25. When the baby, Miriam, was born, Housel was still at CU in his senior year.

After graduation, Housel joined his wife and daughter in Europe before Rippon returned to Boulder and continued to teach as if nothing in her life had changed. Housel and Miriam remained in Europe, where he attended graduate school. Initially, Miriam was placed in a series of orphanages. At the age of 4, she was taken to Rippon's extended family in Illinois.

At the time, Victorian-era society expected women with children to be supported by their husbands. If a professional woman married, she would have been accused of taking a job away from a man with a family to support. Rippon had to completely separate her public and private lives in order to keep her job. She continued to teach for 20 more years.

As a revered pioneer woman educator, Rippon appears to have valued career over family, but she may have, instead, realized that she needed to work to financially provide for her daughter's care.

Eventually, Rippon and Housel divorced. Housel remarried when Miriam was 8 years old and provided his daughter a home, but he lacked an adequate income. On a salary less than her male colleagues, Rippon continued to support her daughter, as well as her divorced husband, his second wife, and, eventually, their four children!

Meanwhile, Rippon was a role model for her female students, a full professor, and even chair of the Department of German language and literature. Except for confiding in two close friends, she took her secret to her grave in Boulder's Columbia Cemetery.

For decades, the only tangible evidence on the CU campus of Rippon's secret life was ivy that Housel had planted outside of Old Main, where Rippon held her classes. His sentiment was obvious in a poem he penned his senior year that read in part, "But the ivy is for friendship and it seemeth best of all; 'tis the rose of love and petals that will never fade or fall."

Silvia Pettem’s In Retrospect column appears once a month in the Daily Camera, where this first appeared. She can be reached at silviapettem@gmail.com. She will be signing copies of Separate Lives: Uncovering the Hidden Family of Victorian Professor Mary Rippon (Lyons Press, 2024) at the Boulder Bookstore on Oct. 22.

In book, CU Boulder alumnus Silvia Pettem details a little-known chapter of the trailblazing faculty member's story.

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Understanding the Brothers Grimm beyond princesses and magic

Anonymous — Sun, 07 Apr 2024 17:57:52 +0000

Understanding the Brothers Grimm beyond princesses and magic Anonymous (not verified) Sun, 04/07/2024 - 11:57

Blake Puscher

In her Arts and SciencesHonors Program Distinguished Lecture, CU Boulder Professor Ann Schmiesing offers a detailed look at the famous fairy tales and their collectors

Best known for their fairy tale collection that history has either sanitized and Disney-fied or reframed as a violent bloodbath, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm—known collectively as the Brothers Grimm—are misunderstood, at least in the popular imagination, a CU Boulder expert notes.

More than just collectors of German folk tales, the Brothers Grimm were also passionate scholars, linguists, librarians, supporters of the arts and intellectuals who strongly opposed censorship. They also made jabs in their collected fairy tales at those who had wronged them, fudged the truth about the sources of those tales and rewrote some of them to make them morally acceptable.

The depths and contradictions of the Brothers Grimm make them much more fascinating than mere collectors of tales, Professor of German and Vice Chancellor for Academic Resource Management Ann Schmiesing noted in her Arts and Sciences Honors Program Distinguished Lecture Thursday evening.

Ann Schmiesing, CU Boulder professor of German and vice chancellor for academic resource management, discussed the Brothers Grimm and their legacy in her Arts and Sciences Honors Program Distinguished Lecture.

In her lecture, titled “Misunderstood Ever After? The Brothers Grimm and Their Legacy,” Schmiesing explained the parts of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s lives that are unknown outside of certain scholarly circles, explored the brothers’ contributions to literature and linguistics, and detailed their legacy beyond the fairy tale collections for which they are famed.

Unfamiliar origins

The Brothers Grimm are best known for the German folk tales they collected and preserved in writing: classic stories about Cinderella, Hansel and Gretel and Rapunzel. They’re so well known for these fairy tales, in fact, that UNESCO cites them as the two most frequently translated German authors of all time. “Not only that,” Schmiesing said, “they are in tenth and 11th place respectively on UNESCO’s list of the top 50 most translated authors in the world,” underscoring the global popularity of their fairytales.

Even though the stories in the brothers’ collection of fairy tales are well known, the tales’ origins, original contents, and editorial history are unfamiliar to most readers, Schmiesing said, especially since audiences worldwide have become used to sanitized 20th and 21st century retellings like those created by Disney.

One prominent example is the story of Cinderella: In the Brothers Grimm version, the stepmother instructs her daughters to cut off their big toe and heel, respectively, so that the shoe will fit, and the prince notices the blood.

“Some readers are shocked by the violence and darkness in many Grimm tales,” Schmiesing explained, “but others, having heard of this violence, wrongly assume that each and every Grimm tale is saturated with blood-curdling gruesomeness.”

There are also misconceptions about the origins of the stories that the Brothers Grimm collected, she said. “Some readers erroneously believe that the Grimms authored their tales from whole cloth, but the more prevalent misconception is that the Grimms journeyed into the fields and spinning parlors to interview peasants firsthand and record their tales word for word. In fact, scholars have established decades ago that the vast majority of the Grimms’ tales came from educated young townswomen, and then the Grimms significantly edited many of those tales.

“To my mind, dispelling these and other misconceptions opens a path to better understanding the Grimms’ remarkable achievements and the social, cultural, and political context from which these achievements arose,” she said.

More than just stories

However, fairy tales weren’t the sole focus of the brothers’ careers. They also pursued groundbreaking work in linguistics, literary history, mythography, runology (the study of runes), folklore, medieval literature, lexicography and more, Schmiesing said.

Some readers are shocked by the violence and darkness in many Grimm tales, but others, having heard of this violence, wrongly assume that each and every Grimm tale is saturated with blood-curdling gruesomeness ... To my mind, dispelling these and other misconceptions opens a path to better understanding the Grimms’ remarkable achievements and the social, cultural, and political context from which these achievements arose"

Seven years after the first edition of Grimms’ Fairy Tales was published, Jacob began working on German Grammar. According to Schmiesing, the most notable part of this text was his groundbreaking “Grimm’s law,” also known as the First Germanic Sound Shift.

While the details of this theory are arcane, Schmiesing said that it allowed him to explain why words for the same thing in different languages descended from the Proto-Indo-European language, such as Greek, Gothic and Old High German.

“The significance of Grimm’s law to the humanities has been compared to the significance of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species to the life sciences,” Schmiesing said.

Shortly after the completion of German Grammar, the Brothers Grimm made history again by protesting the annulment of the constitution of Hannover with five other professors from the university where they worked, a group now known as the Göttingen Seven.

“The King of Hannover not only terminated all seven professors, but he further decreed that three of them, including Jacob, had three days to leave Hanoverian soil,” Schmiesing noted. “As news of the terminations and banishments spread, students poured into the streets in protest.”

According to some scholars, the Göttingen Seven contributed to the development of liberalism in Germany.

A disputed legacy

The Grimms’ legacy, though, is not as straightforward as history has made it out to be. For several decades after World War II, Schmiesing said, the Grimms were viewed in intellectual circles as “quaint, old-fashioned and even dangerous, largely because their constructions of Germanness were too easily appropriated by Nazi ideology.” Relatedly, some of their correspondences reveal anti-Semitic attitudes, she noted.

However, there are several distinctions between the brothers’ views and Nazism, some scholars have argued. Schmiesing explained that “whereas Jacob regarded a people or a folk principally as the embodiment of people who speak the same language, later 19th century and early 20th century figures took this a step further to mean ancestry, such that folk becomes a biological category with racial overtones.”

More importantly, Schmiesing said, the Grimms’ nationalism existed in the context of a culturally united but politically divided Germany that was dominated first by the Holy Roman Empire and later by the French under Napoleon. In fact, Schmiesing added, after the Revolutions of 1848, “Jacob was called to be a representative at the Frankfurt National Assembly, which was the first freely elected parliament for the German-speaking lands,” demonstrating that he was invested in creating a unified Germany.

Ultimately, the Grimms sought to study the past as a way of bettering the present, Schmiesing concluded. “What is often overlooked in the popular consciousness of the Brothers Grimm is that they passionately believed in the power of humanistic study to contribute to and foster civic discourse, and they vigorously challenged attempts to censor academic and political expression.”

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In her Arts and Sciences Honors Program Distinguished Lecture, CU Boulder Professor Ann Schmiesing offers a detailed look at the famous fairy tales and their collectors.

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Democracy is bound to get ‘rough,’ scholar says

Anonymous — Wed, 14 Feb 2024 19:40:23 +0000

Democracy is bound to get ‘rough,’ scholar says Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 02/14/2024 - 12:40

Bradley Worrell

German historian Paul Nolte discusses what populist movements in the United States and Europe mean for liberal democracies during CU Boulder colloquium

Is democracy in crisis?

It’s a question Paul Nolte, an eminent German historian, has been ruminating on for more than a decade.

“I’ve been concerned with the history of democracy since about 2010. And it was about that time when (I had) the first idea that something was going in the wrong direction,” Nolte noted Tuesday afternoon in a research colloquium titled “Crisis or Transformation? From Good-old Democracy to Rough Democracy, ca. 1970-2020.”

Nolte was the invited scholar for the event that was jointly organized by the �鶹��Ƶ Program in Jewish Studies, the Louis P. Singer Endowed Chair in Jewish History and the Pacific Office of the German Historical Institute Washington in cooperation with the Gerda Henkel Foundation. His visit was co-sponsored by the CU Boulder Center for Humanities and the Arts; the International Affairs Program; and the Departments of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures, History and Sociology.

At a Tuesday colloquium, attendees listen to German historian Paul Nolte discuss the outlook for liberal democracy in the 21st century. (Photo: Bradley Worrell)

During the colloquium, Nolte noted that while it’s not possible to predict the future, it seems unlikely that democracies will return to what some might call the “good-old democracy” days of the 1970s through 2020—what could be called the Liberal Age for democracies in Europe and the United States.

“The good old times for many European countries, in which there were just three or four political parties, center left and center right … the classical Westminster model, they’re probably gone for good. It’s not a very likely expectation that this will return,” he said. “There is a broad understanding (among historians) that we’ve entered a new period of history where things are not as they were in the 1970s.”

Specifically noting democracy in the United States, Nolte cited the work of author Daniel Rogers, who wrote the 2011 book Age of Fracture, detailing the disintegration of shared American values.

“The (book) title speaks volumes,” Nolte noted. “If we’re in an age of fracture economically, and also in social rifts, and the old working class does not exist, why would we expect anything else for the state of democracy?”

Nolte also said people need to understand previous developments in “rough politics” in Europe and the United States during the late 18th and 19th centuries and the “new roughness” in recent years as politicians on both the political right and left have embraced populism.

“Will we spend two more decades lamenting a persistent crisis, or even conjuring up the imminent downfall of democracy, somehow yearning for the good old days that never return?” Nolte asked in a paper shared ahead of the colloquium. “Or will we take up the challenge, academically and politically, of democracy not being steady-state, but changing in larger historical contexts? Welcome, then, to the old-new rough democracy.”

Top image: Paul Nolte (left) and Thomas Kaplan, the Louis P. Singer Endowed Chair in Jewish History and interim director of the CU Boulder Program in Jewish Studies (Photo: Bradley Worrell)

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German historian Paul Nolte discusses what populist movements in the United States and Europe mean for liberal democracies during CU Boulder colloquium.

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Research colloquium addresses ongoing crisis of liberal democracy

Anonymous — Mon, 12 Feb 2024 20:04:30 +0000

Research colloquium addresses ongoing crisis of liberal democracy Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 02/12/2024 - 13:04

Eminent German historian Paul Nolte will discuss whether the golden age of democracy is over or whether it can escape collapse and recover

One of Germany’s leading contemporary historians will present a research colloquium addressing the stage of crisis that liberal democracy has entered in the early 21st century—asking whether the golden age of democracy over and is on course for eventual collapse, or whether it can recover.

Historian Paul Nolte will present the colloquium, titled “Crisis or Transformation? From Good-old Democracy to Rough Democracy, ca. 1970-2020,” which is jointly organized by the �鶹��Ƶ Program in Jewish Studies, the Louis P. Singer Endowed Chair in Jewish History and the Pacific Office of the German Historical Institute Washington in cooperation with the Gerda Henkel Foundation.

Historian Paul Nolte will discuss the crisis in liberal democracy at a research colloquium Tuesday.

It will be from 2-3:30 p.m. Tuesday in Center for Academic Success and Engagement (CASE) E422. To receive the pre-circulated text on which the discussions will be based, please RSVP by email to cujewishstudies@colorado.edu.

At CU Boulder, the visit is co-sponsored by the Center for Humanities and the Arts; the International Affairs Program; and the Departments of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures, History and Sociology.

As one of Germany’s leading contemporary historians, Nolte holds a chair in modern history with a special emphasis on contemporary history and international relations at the Friedrich Meinecke Institute of the Freie Universität Berlin. His research areas include social, intellectual and political history of the 18th to 20th centuries, especially post-1945 Germany and the United States; transatlantic history of democracy; public intellectuals and social, economic and political concepts and mentalities; urban history and metropolitan cultures; religion and civil society in Western societies; and public history and cultures of memory.

Research colloquium

What: Crisis or Transformation? From Good-old Democracy to Rough Democracy, ca. 1970-2020

When: 2-3:30 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 13

Where: CASE E422

More information

Nolte has written more than a dozen books and has served as a fellow or guest professor at Oxford University, Harvard University and the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. Among his many transatlantic undertakings is chairing the academic advisory committee of the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies, which brings American PhD candidates to Germany.

His colloquium will focus on the current state of crisis in which liberal democracy exists, when they are under attack from neo-authoritarian ideas, movements and regimes, externally as well as from within. He will address what a potential recovery could look like, asking, “What if we were not witnesses to a crisis of democracy, but rather to its transformation, with the current predicaments being the new normal?”

Nolte will discuss how, from a historical point of view, “pre-crisis” democracy corresponded to social structures, cultural milieus and technological environments that will never return. Further, this longing often projects a relatively short period in the trajectory of democracy, participation and liberal society as an ideal state, while it was in itself full of shortcomings, rigid structures and privileges for the few.

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Eminent German historian Paul Nolte will discuss whether the golden age of democracy is over or whether it can escape collapse and recover.

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Treading softly with the soul of a Viking

Anonymous — Mon, 04 Dec 2023 22:04:40 +0000

Treading softly with the soul of a Viking Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 12/04/2023 - 15:04

CU Boulder researcher Mathias Nordvig joins The Ampersand podcast to discuss animism, Norse mythology and what it means to live on Earth

Listen to The Ampersand

It’s not hard to imagine Mathias Nordvig waking up under a thatched roof that doesn’t quite block the light of early morning stars. It’s easy to envision him waking in a Viking camp and taking his place in a snekkja longship, pulling hard on the oars as waves and the old gods roar all around him.

However, Nordvig, a teaching assistant professor in the Nordic Program of the �鶹��Ƶ Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literature, is not just the Viking guy who knows a lot about swords. He carries the past and present inside him as he treads softly on the Earth, feeling a soul-deep connection to the rocks and the plants and the animals with which we share this planet. He revels in the wild around and within him.

He's also the man who can teach you about witchcraft and magic in Scandinavia, though not, to the disappointment of some students, how to cast actual spells.

He recently joined host Erika Randall, associate dean for student success in the College of Arts and Sciences, on "The Ampersand,” the college podcast. Randall—who also is a dancer, professor, mother, filmmaker and writer—joins guests in exploring stories about “ANDing” as a “full sensory verb” that describes experience and possibility.

In a broad-ranging discussion involving dragons, Pearl Street, Viking camps and eyes of newt, to name a few, Nordvig and Randall discussed growing up in Greenland, alt-right appropriation of Viking lore and what it means to one part of the living, universal whole. Click the link above to hear the entire conversation.

Nordvig: I did an article on this alt-right manosphere personality called Jack Donovan, and I told him that I was doing research on his material, and then I wrote an article about him, and that article has been positively received by everyone including him.

CU Boulder scholar Mathias Nordvig's research encompasses not just Vikings, but thousands of years of Norse mythology and history.

From what he's said to me, he feels that it's the most fair, scholarly assessment of what he's doing and who he is, so.

Randall: Wow, that's actually incredibly beautiful,

Norvig: I think so.

Randall: Yeah. 'Cause when do we ever all agree?

Nordvig: Exactly.

Randall: Especially about hard things.

Nordvig: Yeah, and then I had very liberal, academic colleagues and friends who were like, "Oh, wow, you're really calling him out on this and this and this," and I'm like, "Well, yeah."

Randall: (laughs) That's my job. And he still felt like he was present in the conversation and not being attacked.

Nordvig: Yeah, he felt that it was a reasonable presentation of how he's thinking. There are things that he was like, "Oh, I didn't actually realize that that's something that I was doing or incorporating," but otherwise, yeah.

Randall: What is the primary language that you would use that gets usurped by alt-right when talking about your area of research?

Nordvig: Well, what we have is this set of texts, literature telling us about Nordic mythology, primarily written in Iceland, but otherwise, some of it is also written in Denmark in the medieval period. And this is a retrospective type of literature, looking back on what existed in the Viking age and before that.

Randall: Yeah, because it's badass? Is this why people are looking back all the time, not just people who are hailing from this land, but... (laughing) I love the stance that you’re doing.

Nordvig: (laughs) There's definitely a lot of people who are like, "Oh, this is badass” nowadays. Back then, in the medieval period, it was still cultural currency, even though people had converted to Christianity. It was still really important cultural material that told these people in Scandinavia something about who they were.

Randall: But then, the appropriation into the alt-right world.

Nordvig: Yeah, so what happens next is that we have a lot of historical interest at different times after the medieval period from the 1200s and onwards. In the 1600s, we have a lot of scholars in Sweden and Denmark who are very interested in this, and this has everything to do with propaganda and the emergence of nationalism in Scandinavia, where Denmark is one empire.

It's a conglomerate empire with Norway, Iceland, and then you have Sweden, that's another empire, a conglomerate empire with Finland, sometimes Estonia, parts of Poland, and even parts of Germany, and they're rivaling.

Mathias Nordvig co-hosts The Nordic Mythology Podcast with Daniel Farrand.

And so, the scholars are trying to come up with explanations for why they're the coolest... Then, what you have from that moment on is this link between national identity and the Viking age, Nordic mythology and all that stuff, and that then becomes useful in different groups that have very distinct political aims. And this is where you also see it coming into the alt-right, just like you do with the Greek history and Roman history as well.

I think with the alt-right, they're very focused on what it means to be a man, and that's the connecting point. So, they look to these old…

Randall: Kind of hyper-masculine.

Nordvig: Well, they are hyper-masculine-ing it…

Randall: Yeah, they're verbing it into hyper-masculinity.

Nordvig: Yeah, but then back then, it was a mode of existing.

Randall: It's just how you had to show up.

Nordvig: Yeah, especially like, I would say warrior ideals and not necessarily something that any man would consider being a man, really.

So, that's also important to consider that a lot of the material that we have from that past has something to do with elite culture, with warrior culture, not with everyday culture. So, we have 10% and the rest, like the 90% of the population, we don't know much about what they did and how they thought.

Randall: But you do.

Nordvig: I try to figure it out, at least.

Randall: Yeah, yeah, so you don't just stay in that realm of the warrior.

I love when we're sitting in a room face-to-face with one another, and I'm hearing these stories of these myths. And then you're kind of a larger-than-life human. Like, when you stand up, you would hit the ceiling maybe a little bit. Your tattoos make you look bigger. You are fitting in this room, like this incredible giant who cares about the 90%, not just the big Viking story, and about the land as we walk on it.

So, you're doing this beautiful translation of, you show up like someone who I might think is gonna just tell me about swords. But you know things that are a lot more delicate about the heritage of heathenism, of living on the land with care, of showing up with old-way traditions in this contemporary world. Can you talk about that? I mean, it's like a living, walking paradox from my vantage, and maybe it's not so paradoxical. Maybe it's exactly who you are and exactly just right.

Nordvig: Well first of all, thank you for this description of me. It's very flattering. I think, like so many other people, I've been through different kinds of transformations in life, figuring out who I am and what I am and how I am. And I'd say that one thing that's always been with me is love and care for nature and the natural world. If nothing else, just in appreciation of it being there and being a space I can enter.

And that comes all the way from my childhood when I lived in Greenland where there was a lot of nature around you, a space that is, even if you're living in an urban space in Greenland, you're living in what we would classify as a wild place, because there's so much happening that we're not exposed to when we live in urban spaces.

Among the books Mathias Nordvig has written is Norse Mythology for Kids.

Randall: And as a child… you had free rein; you could just go into the world.

Nordvig: Yeah, yeah, we grew up with hunting and fishing and camping out there in what we classify as the wilderness. And the reason I use these roundabout ways of talking about it is because I don't consider it wilderness in that sense. I don't wanna make that distinction between civilization and nature or civilization and wilderness. I don't like that distinction, because it alienates that world from us, and I think that's really generally problematic.

Randall: So, the term “wilderness” for you is...

Nordvig: It's either something that gives us an idea that it's dangerous or allows us to romanticize it to an extent that I would say is not appropriate. And that comes from my perspective, that, well, everything in existence belongs to a kinship with us. So, we are related to all existing entities out there. I think the best way to describe it is that if I walk out there in my world, I can encounter a rock and realize that it's a person.

That’s how it works for me, and so that means that going on a hike in the Rockies is similar to taking a walk down the street. I don't feel like a guest. I feel like, generally, I would say that I feel like I belong.

In what I classify as the animist perspective on the world, relationality that you're established with these different entities out there doesn't necessarily preclude that you can be mean to them or you kill them, right? And what it really comes down to is to maintaining balance between yourself and that community of other-than-human-beings out there. That's something that I also feel that we have generally lost in our world. And this is at the root of the climate crisis that we are experiencing, that we're seeing.

I think if we had approached the world with that perspective of relationality, which does not necessarily exclude using resources, but it does require that using resources comes with a high level of responsibility. If we had approached the world like that, then I think that we would probably be in a better place.

Randall: Yes, and you have found the vehicle for your caring is going back into the roots of yourself, your life, your family, even though it sounds like you could be an environmental scientist, you could be an urban architect, you could be, and you do, write children's books, that there are so many ways to get at this kind of care, but did you find yours in the classroom or through this particular study because of the going into the self or into your history? Or are you looking at it from a psychological perspective or from this historical, where anger has been held in the stories of...

Nordvig: Social, cultural, historical, psychological, mythological… the whole. And what I'm familiar with when it comes to going to the roots, what I'm familiar with as an alternative way of thinking about the world, and an alternative way of understanding your place as a human in the world, is this thing we call Nordic mythology. I like to call it the Nordic Story Worlds.

Randall: Great, that's what I wanted from you. That's the umbrella, the Nordic Story Worlds.

Nordvig: Yes, and the reason I like to call it that is because mythology nowadays has been merged with fantasy. And these story worlds were not fantasy to the peoples who used them in their everyday lives. I don't want to say believed in them, because that's really inessential. What is essential is that back in the day, people walked around on a piece of land and told stories like these, because they were meaningful to their existence in that plot of land.

A central aspect of Norse mythology is Yggdrasil, a sacred ash tree that encompasses all nine worlds. (Illustration: The Viking Herald)

Randall: They served the moment.

Nordvig: They served the moment, but this also served a relationship to the land. The relationship to the rock, to the tree, to the bird, to the fish, to whatever animal would come there, and of course, also to the family.

So, in that sense, these stories are expressions of our human kinship with the world.

Randall: That pulls me into that question about how you use these traditions in your life now.

Nordvig: So, the thing is that, a story can be loaded up with, I don't know, swords and horses and carts and thatched roofs, and I dunno, whatever else existed in a space way back when. But that doesn't mean that that story doesn't have what are essentially, eternal truths in a way.

Randall: Thatched roofs are not eternal truths.

Nordvig: No, they're a result of the technological level that they were at, and that's why I wouldn't wanna go back to anything, because I could probably do quite well in a hut like that, but-

Randall: Not so much.

Nordvig: No, see, that's the thing. There's some people out here that wouldn't be able to do that well in a hut like that. And also, although I've spent a lot of time in my teenage years doing Viking age reenactment and actually stayed in huts like that-

Randall: You did?

Nordvig: Yes, and tents.

Randall: And were there dragons?

Nordvig: There were no dragons, at least none that materialized…

Randall: That others could see.

Nordvig: (laughs) Yes.

Randall: But you fought them, nonetheless.

Nordvig: Yes, (laughs) and I've sailed on Viking ships and that kind of stuff, it was a lot of fun. But I don't know what that life actually was like. I have an idea, but I don't know what it was like, and that's why I wouldn't wanna go back. So, what I would like to do instead is I would like to take the wisdom that these people had back then, and then bring it into our present, because our present, when you look at it very broadly, it seems like is lacking a lot of wisdom.

Randall: Yes, so living in a modern world with traditions is not a, there's no odds there. You're not at odds with that. You just find different ways and the different things that you need. And so, I see that, like you were saying earlier, as separate and that to pull them together and to realize that you don't have to just be hardcore in a hut to be connected to things that will then change your care for the world that you live in.

Click the button below to hear the entire episode.

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Top image: Viking boat by Daniel Oxford

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CU Boulder researcher Mathias Nordvig joins The Ampersand podcast to discuss animism, Norse mythology and what it means to live on Earth.

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Russia retools Soviet propaganda against Ukraine, expert says

Anonymous — Tue, 08 Aug 2023 15:00:59 +0000

Russia retools Soviet propaganda against Ukraine, expert says Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 08/08/2023 - 09:00

Bradley Worrell

In her master’s thesis, CU grad student highlights how the current Russian regime is making use of Soviet narratives and symbols to justify its war with Ukraine

For Daria Molchanova, the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine feels very personal.

“First of all, because I’m Russian, I’m literally a part of it,” she says. “My family was in Russia when it (the invasion) all started, I have a lot of friends in Ukraine, and I have been to Ukraine many, many times.”

So, perhaps it’s no surprise that when Molchanova was completing her master’s degree in the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures at the �鶹��Ƶ, she decided to write her thesis on how the current regime in Moscow has co-opted propaganda and symbols from the Soviet era to justify its armed conflict with Ukraine.

Molchanova is pictured here in her native Russia; a Russian Orthodox church is pictured in the background. Molchanova has studied Russian war propaganda efforts, first when she earned a PhD in history from Moscow State University in 2016, and more recently when obtaining a master’s degree in the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures at the �鶹��Ƶ, where she wrote her thesis on how the current regime in Moscow has co-opted Soviet World War II propaganda and symbols and made use of them in its current armed conflict with Ukraine.

“I have taken it (the invasion) very harshly, so I guess writing about it was one way to maybe have some personal input, and maybe (expressing) just a little bit of the feeling of guilt for what my country was doing,” she says.

Also, while earning a PhD in Russian history from Moscow State University in 2016, she wrote her dissertation on Russian propaganda in the country’s war with Japan and “instantly noticed a lot of similarities in terms of how some symbols were used and how some of the linguistic aspects are basically the same.”

Observing Russia’s initial propaganda efforts related to its invasion of Ukraine in 2020, Molchanova says she first noticed how chaotic and ineffective those efforts were.

“The propaganda was not effective from the beginning, because the main function of propaganda is to explain things,” she says, adding that the government failed to make a convincing case justifying an invasion of Ukraine. Russian President Vladimir Putin and others in his government were confident the conflict would be over in almost no time, she says, so comprehensive propaganda efforts were not formulated in the beginning.

“I guess that by now it’s obvious that nobody was prepared that this so-called ‘special military operation’ would last for years,” she says. Instead, the government likely hoped it could achieve its goals quickly, like it did in its 2008 military campaign against the former Soviet republic of Georgia. That conflict lasted a matter of days and resulted in a defeat for Georgia and the loss of some of its territories.

As the war with Ukraine has dragged on, however, Russian propagandists have had more time to shape their narratives—some have fallen flat, but others have taken hold with at least part of the Russian populace.

Recently, Molchanova talked about the Russian government’s propaganda efforts and how some borrow symbols and terminology from the former Soviet Union, especially those relating to War II narratives. Her responses were lightly edited for style and clarity.

Question: When Russian propagandists talk about Ukrainian leaders being Nazis and fascists, is there more charged meaning to those words than the average American might understand?

Molchanova: Specifically using this Nazi card, it all comes from the biggest trauma of—not just Russian people, but from Slavic people, in general—because the losses Russia had during World War II were just unheard of, more than 20 million people. And if you talk to any Russian family, they had someone who either died in World War II or was severely injured.

So, I think it’s just very hard for some (in the West) to understand on the personal level. Imagine speaking to every American family and they would say, ‘We lost that person in that war’ or ‘We lost five people in that war.’ In Russia, every family had this sacrifice.

So, of course, the word Nazi for Russians, it’s something we grew up hearing about non-stop … because for Russians it’s much more personal than I think it is for most people. That’s why it’s so effective. And that’s why, unfortunately, modern propaganda is trying falsely to use this.

Question: It seems part of the recent propaganda efforts are focused on making the Russian soldiers seem very heroic?

Molchanova: They have this whole section in the news every day, showing how some brave Russian soldiers saved a family, or children, or a dog and her puppies. So, it’s always some emotional story of some soldier savior. That’s what they’re showing—and they’re completely denying every single accusation that comes from Ukraine.

If you go to any Russian news source … it’s like the opposite (of what Ukraine says happened), no matter what happened. For example, this church was destroyed in Odessa. The western side, of course, said Russian missiles hit the church. The Russian version said a Ukrainian rocket hit the church (because) Ukrainians can’t use their air defense system. They destroyed the church. So, it’s never, never admitted that Russians did anything wrong—complete opposite representation.

Question: One example of propaganda from a few years back that you highlighted in your thesis was a story of Ukrainian soldiers supposedly crucifying a young boy in a Ukrainian eastern province. Do average Russians really believe a story like that?

Molchanova: I think it’s one of the most successful propaganda stories, about the crucified boy back in 2014 in Slovansk (in eastern Ukraine). This young woman, a mother, was sharing this super emotional story (on Russian TV) about how Ukrainian Nazis crucified the boy and how he bled to death.

But when (independent journalists) tried to find any witnesses—it’s a very small town, and obviously someone would have seen, and she said the crowd was on the square, so everybody was there to witness it—they couldn’t find a single witness there at all. Never, ever was there any proof of this happening, and I think the dates that she was talking about, the Ukrainian army was not even there in those days. So, it’s a completely made-up story.

But the problem with propaganda is that once something so strong is thrown into the public, unfortunately, nobody is coming back (to check) if that story in 2014 was actually true. …

A lot of Russians sitting somewhere far away in the countryside in the evening were watching the news. They’re not interested in doing some further research or anything. No, it’s just the fact for them. So yeah, even today, a lot of people still think that it happened. Nobody wants to double-check, unfortunately.

Question: In your thesis, you note that there was a deliberate decision in Russia to play up Great Patriotic War mythology in recent years—even before the invasion of Ukraine. How have things changed, specifically?

Molchanova: Yeah, it (the May 9 holiday celebrating victory over Nazi Germany) was not as strong in the Soviet Union—especially in the first two decades after the victory. Even in the 1990s, it was a very quiet holiday. I remember it in my childhood, there were no festivities, there were no fireworks, no military parades, nothing like that. We would just buy some flowers and we went to the local memorial, where we laid the flowers. That was it.

But later, when I was starting at the university, I noticed every single year how it was just changing. I don’t even know what to compare it with—almost like cosplay. People were dressing their babies in the Red Army uniforms.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, Russians lost the unifying force that communism provided. In recent years, the Russian government has promoted the myth of the Great Patriotic War (Russia’s defeat of Nazi Germany in World War II) as a rallying point for the population. More recently, Russian leaders also have made use of propaganda efforts to justify the war with neighboring Ukraine.

And it looks fun at first, but when you start thinking about it, the main phrase that every single Russian veteran from World War II says was, ‘Never again. The only important thing is there is no war.’

Now, there is no sense of how terrible the war is. They replaced the idea of ‘never again’ with, ‘How amazing we are; how heroic we are; how we do this and that from one of the latest movies.’ On Amazon, there’s a movie called T-34 about tanks, and Russian media were presenting it as, basically, Fast and Furious with tanks. So, that’s how they’re portraying the most horrifying war in history. Now, there is no trace of how horrible war is; it’s only beautiful stuff and heroism.

Question: Are there other things you think it’s important to mention about Russian propaganda or the state of Russia today?

Molchanova: I think it’s important, especially for Western people, to understand that it (war propaganda) is not something unique to Russia. War propaganda has happened every single time in every single war, including in the United States. If you look for it, American propaganda has all the same patterns, the same rules, the same symbolics. So, there’s nothing new here. …

There is a massive brainwashing campaign in Russia now. There is this term ‘zombification’ right now, and it does work successfully on some groups of people. But a lot of Russians don’t support this war. And the proof is that millions of Russians had to leave the country.

There were Russian protests against the war. … Unfortunately, there is very little news from Russia of Russians being against the war. I think that should be shown more, because I don’t know a single person who supports it. Not one.

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In her master’s thesis, CU grad student highlights how the current Russian regime is making use of Soviet narratives and symbols to justify its war with Ukraine.

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After 100 years, university recognized a pioneer

Anonymous — Tue, 08 Mar 2022 21:44:03 +0000

After 100 years, university recognized a pioneer Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 03/08/2022 - 14:44

Clint Talbott

Women’s history snapshot: Lucile Berkeley Buchanan graduated in 1918 but wasn’t allowed to walk across the stage with other graduates because she was Black

History overlooked Lucile Berkeley Buchanan, the first African American woman to graduate from the University of Colorado. A dogged CU journalist brought her back to the fore.

Tipped off by a newspaper story, Polly McLean, a CU Boulder associate professor of media studies, spent years exhuming Buchanan’s story and, finally, correcting history. For decades, the university’s official history erroneously stated that the first Black woman to graduate from CU earned her degree in 1924.

In fact, the first Black woman to graduate from CU did so in 1918.

In 2018, a century after Buchanan’s alma mater barred her from walking across the Macky Auditorium stage to accept her degree, Buchanan was more fully recognized. During the May 2018 commencement, Philip P. DiStefano, the campus chancellor, recognized Buchanan. McLean symbolically accepted Buchanan’s degree. Onstage.

At the top of the page: Lucile Berkeley Buchanan, photographed at the time of her high school graduation, was the first African American woman to graduate from CU Boulder. Above: In this 2007 photo, Polly McLean, associate professor of media studies at CU Boulder, is seen in front of the childhood home of Lucile Berkeley Buchanan while holding a portrait of Buchanan that was probably taken at the time of her graduation (Photo by Glenn Asakawa, the Denver Post/Getty Images).

Thus it was that the first African American woman to graduate was honored because of the efforts of McLean, the first Black woman to earn tenure at CU Boulder and the first Black woman to head an academic unit.

McLean preserved a record of Buchanan’s trailblazing life in a book, Remembering Lucile: A Virginia Family's Rise from Slavery and a Legacy Forged a Mile High.

The daughter of emancipated slaves, Buchanan was born in 1884 in Denver. Her family lived on land purchased from P.T. Barnum, the noted circus mogul and cynic.

She became the first in her family to graduate from not one but two of the state’s top institutions of higher education: In 1905, she was the first African American to graduate with a two-year degree from what is now the University of Northern Colorado. In 1918, she was the first Black woman to graduate from CU, earning a degree in German.

After a long career as a school teacher, she lived in Denver until her death in 1989, at the age of 105.

McLean found the story by chance: In 2001, she was doing background research for an assignment she’d given her women’s studies class.

During a visit to the CU Heritage Center in Old Main, McLean was handed a copy of a newspaper article from eight years prior. The story, in the now-defunct Rocky Mountain News, bore this headline: “She was CU’s first Black female grad: A pioneer buried without a headstone.”

The News quoted Doris and Larry Harris, who had purchased Buchanan’s Denver home after the state of Colorado had forced her into a nursing home. The Harrises noted that they’d bought the home for $70,000 and wondered why her estate didn’t yield enough money for a headstone.

The News also quoted a CU spokeswoman as saying that the university would correct the incorrect record “wherever it appears.” Eight years later, the official record was still wrong.

As McLean writes: “A desire to understand the university’s reasoning for dismissing her achievement motivated me to dig deeper, and thus began my search for Lucile.”

The search spanned 10 states and more than 10 years.

By the time McLean was on the story, Doris and Larry Harris had divorced and moved, taking Buchanan’s memorabilia with them. With tenacity and cajolery, McLean unearthed a portrait of the pioneer.

Buchanan applied for her first teaching job in 1905 in a company coal town in Huerfano County, Colorado. She didn’t get the job, but her cause was taken up by a newspaper editor who condemned the racial discrimination that thwarted her hiring.

Buchanan left Colorado and taught in Little Rock and Hot Springs, Ark., then in 1915 enrolled in the University of Chicago, where she studied German, Greek and the British poets Robert Browning and Alfred Tennyson.

At CU, she continued her study of German, and McLean underscores a reason: “The Black intelligentsia at the end of the 19th and into the early decades of the 20th century viewed Germany as a ‘spiritual fatherland,’” McLean writes.

Additionally, Buchanan had studied the work of W.E.B. Du Bois, the sociologist, historian and activist who studied in Berlin.

At CU in 1918, Buchanan’s mother, two sisters and a niece came to campus to watch commencement, which was supposed to be a happy occasion. After being barred from the stage, Buchanan left CU and vowed never to return. “She kept her promise,” McLean writes.

We remember Lucile Berkeley Buchanan not only to honor her life, but also to reflect on what we once did and what we could now learn.”

Buchanan went back to school in 1937, enrolling in graduate studies in English literature at the University of Chicago. She was 53. And in 1949, she retired from teaching and returned to Denver to live in the home that her father, the former slave who became a teamster and street commissioner, had built.

There she lived until she was 103, when Colorado Adult Protective Services deemed her a danger to herself, physically restraining her and placing her in a Denver nursing home. The agency asked a court to appoint a conservator to sell Buchanan’s home and pay her bills.

Buchanan was blind and had no family willing or able to help.

Even in old age and confined to a nursing home, Buchanan remained a faithful voter. The News interviewed her and other centenarian voters in 1988, when she was 104 and voting, with assistance, from the nursing home.

Noting that Buchanan did not live to see the university admit its error, James W.C. White, acting dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, observed:

“These gestures are symbolic, but symbols matter. However meager and tardy, the university’s recognition is a kind of reparation. We remember Lucile Berkeley Buchanan not only to honor her life, but also to reflect on what we once did and what we could now learn.”

Women’s history snapshot: Lucile Berkeley Buchanan graduated in 1918 but wasn’t allowed to walk across the stage with other graduates because she was Black.

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On lonely Boulder ‘prairie,’ Mary Rippon saw glory

Anonymous — Thu, 03 Mar 2022 18:44:38 +0000

On lonely Boulder ‘prairie,’ Mary Rippon saw glory Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 03/03/2022 - 11:44

Women’s history snapshot: CU’s first woman faculty member, now a university icon, hesitated to come West

Mary Rippon was a bona fide pioneer who became a University of Colorado icon, but CU almost did not become her home.

CU’s first president, Joseph A. Sewall, invited Rippon to teach at the University of Colorado, which had just opened its doors in September 1877. Rippon initially declined, noting that she’d just accepted a high school teaching job in Detroit.

Rippon—whom history books conspicuously call “Miss Rippon,” thus underscoring the fact that she was not married—had already led a vigorous academic life by the time Sewall recruited her. After graduating from high school, she studied abroad for five years, spending two years apiece in Germany and Switzerland, plus one year in France.

While in Detroit, a minister who’d just returned from Boulder urged her not to go. As the clergyman told it, the university comprised nothing but a single building “way out on a prairie.” Further, he warned, that one building would soon collapse, killing all inside.

Rippon ignored this advice, accepting an appointment to join the faculty in January 1878.

At the top of the page: Completed in 1876, Old Main was the first building on CU Boulder campus. Above: Mary Rippon was the first female professor at CU and is believed to be the first female faculty at a state university (Photo courtesy of CU Boulder Archives).

As the story goes, three things changed her mind. One was news that Charles Buckingham, a Boulder banker, had donated $2,000 to purchase books for the new CU library. Another was Helen Hunt Jackson’s inspiring writing, accompanied by watercolors paintings, of Colorado wildflowers. And the third was President Sewall, whose repeated invitations helped persuade her to come.

She took the train from Detroit to Cheyenne, Wyoming, then south to Boulder, where Sewall met her. As Rippon observed, “The daylight had faded, but a new moon cast enough light to show up the wonderful line of the snow-clad mountains.”

In the crisp January air, Sewall asked Rippon how things looked to her.

She recalled: “With eyes turned toward the silhouette at the west, and thoughts on the Alps, my one word was ‘glorious.’”

Sewall appeared relieved and said, “Well my spirits have risen 100%. My wife had told me that you would not stay two days in this lonely place.”

But stay she did. Her job was to teach French and German, plus to give “some instruction in the branches of math and English grammar.” On this then-remote outpost, with a handful of college students, she became the first woman to be a professor at CU and is thought to be the first female faculty member at any state university.

Nine men and one woman had entered the inaugural first-year class of students in 1878, but only six, all men, continued to graduation. For the young men, it was easy to leave school to find good-paying jobs as cowboys. It is not clear, but not hard to imagine, what prompted a woman to leave.

When Rippon joined the university, having studied abroad and lived as an independent person, she was entrusted with the education of the young, yet she did not have the freedom to vote. That right was not recognized until 1894, after a statewide referendum recognized female suffrage.

She also received unequal pay. President Sewall had an annual salary of $3,000 in 1878. The first faculty member, a man, was paid $2,000. Rippon, hired at about the same time, got $1,200 a year.

The six men who composed CU’s first graduating class in 1882 might not have thought such inequity amiss. As one of the graduates wrote, two of the six graduates “would vote for ‘women’s rights,’ meaning the suffrage, one would not, one is for woman’s rights—rights to manage the household—while two are lukewarm as to the whole question.”

Further, the graduate said, one of the six graduating seniors was opposed to “co-education,” in which women and men studied together.

These shades of information suggest the contours of life for Mary Rippon, who remained at the university until she retired in 1909. Today, the campus’ outdoor theater, home of the Colorado Shakespeare Festival, bears her name. It is an homage to her pioneering spirit, which, in other ways, endures.

Sources: Glory Colorado, a History of the University of Colorado, 1858-1963; The University of Colorado, 1876-1976.

Women’s history snapshot: CU’s first woman faculty member, now a university icon, hesitated to come West.

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College recognizes six faculty with top honors

Anonymous — Fri, 03 Dec 2021 17:09:32 +0000

College recognizes six faculty with top honors Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 12/03/2021 - 10:09

Four professors of distinction and two teaching professors of distinction are named for 2021

Four members of the �鶹��Ƶ faculty have been named 2021 professors of distinction by the College of Arts and Sciences in recognition of their exceptional service, teaching and research. Additionally, two faculty members have been designated as 2021 teaching professors of distinction.

The new professors of distinction are Chris DeSouza of integrative physiology, Nan Goodman of English, Michael Ritzwoller of physics and Paul Youngquist of English. The two teaching professors of distinction designated in 2021 are Vicki Grove of Germanic and Slavic Language and Literatures and Brett King of psychology and neuroscience.

The professor-of-distinction title is reserved for scholars and artists of national and international acclaim whom peers also recognize as exceptionally talented teachers and colleagues. Those honored with this award hold the title for the remainder of their careers in the College of Arts and Sciences at CU Boulder.

Those designated as teaching professors of distinction are recognized for their outstanding record in the areas of teaching, service and leadership.

Professors of Distinction

Chris DeSouza

DeSouza’s research is focused on the effects of cardiovascular and metabolic risk factors, HIV-1 infection and, most recently, spinal cord injury on vascular endothelial cell function (how well the inner lining of cells are functioning) and repair. His laboratory also studies the effects of lifestyle and pharmacological interventions on vascular endothelial cell biology.

DeSouza earned his PhD in exercise/applied physiology from the University of Maryland, College Park, in 1995. He joined the CU Boulder faculty as a postdoctoral researcher the same year and became an assistant professor here in 1999.

He has directed the Integrative Vascular Biology Laboratory at CU Boulder since 1999, and the �鶹��Ƶ Clinical and Translational Research Center since 2008.

He received a Clinical Research Award from the American Diabetes Association in 2002, became a fellow of the American Heart Association in 2007, and earned an Established Investigator Award from the American Heart Association in 2008. His research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health since 1995.

Nan Goodman

Goodman teaches and writes about 17th- through 19th-century American literature and culture, the intersections of American law and literature, and the early Jewish American experience. She is especially interested in cultural manifestations of social inclusion and exclusion and questions about identity.

She is the author of three books on early American law and literature: The Puritan Cosmopolis: The Law of Nations and the Early American Imagination; Banished: Common Law and the Rhetoric of Social Exclusion in Early New England; and Shifting the Blame: Literature, Law and the Theory of Accidents in Nineteenth-Century America. She is working on a book, tentatively titled Sabbatai Sevi Comes to America, which stems from her research on the legacy of the false Jewish messiah, Sabbatai Sevi. She has also co-edited two volumes of essays, one on religion in America and the other on law and humanities in 19th-century America.

Goodman earned a PhD in English from Harvard University in 1992 after having earned a JD from Stanford Law School in 1985. She joined the CU Boulder faculty in 1992 and has also been an adjunct professor in the CU School of Law as well as a Visiting Professor of Law at Georgetown Law School. She directed the university’s Jewish Studies Program from 2015-19 and is a member of its faculty.

She won the Boulder Faculty Assembly Award for Excellence in Research, Scholarly and Creative Work in 2019, was named a Kingdon Fellow by the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2019, and taught as a Fulbright Scholar at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul in 2014.

Michael Ritzwoller

Ritzwoller is a theoretical geophysicist who works broadly to develop and apply new methods to image earth structures from local through global scales. His recent work has focused on developing methods to exploit seismic ambient noise to resolve isotropic (uniform) and anisotropic (varied) earth structures in the crust and upper mantle, particularly across the US and China. He has also worked in normal mode seismology, helioseismology (the study of the sun), ocean acoustics and shallow subsurface imaging using Nuclear Magnetic Resonance and seismic waves.

He earned a PhD from Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, in 1987. After doing a post-doctoral fellowship at Harvard University, Ritzwoller joined the CU Boulder faculty in 1990. He has served as co-director of the university’s Joint Seismic Program Center, was a fellow of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES), was director of the Center for Imaging the Earth’s Interior, and is chair of the Department of Physics.

Ritzwoller was the American Geophysical Union’s Gutenberg Lecturer in 2013 and was named an American Geophysical Union fellow in 2005. He has won two CU Faculty Fellowships and was named a fellow at the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1990. He has published more than 125 peer-reviewed journal articles.

Paul Youngquist

Youngquist’s research focuses on relations between European and African cultures in the late 18th-century West Indies, specifically their mutual contribution to the cultural flowering called British Romanticism. He mixes archival and theoretical resources with fieldwork to examine the role dislocated Africans play in the economic and cultural production of the late 18th-century Anglophone world.

Youngquist is the author of A Pure Solar World: Sun Ra and the Birth of Afrofuturism, a book about the artist who is credited with creating “space music” as a means of building a better future for American Black people. He also edited Race, Romanticism, and the Atlantic and Gorgeous Beasts: Animal Bodies in Historical Perspective.

Youngquist earned a PhD from the University of Virginia in 1988 and also earned a BA, magna cum laude, from CU Boulder in 1980.

Among the awards he’s won are a Boulder Faculty Assembly Excellence Award in 2018, CU Boulder Kayden Awards in 2009 and 2012 and a George W. Atherton Award for Excellence in Teaching in 1991.

Teaching Professors of Distinction

Vicki Grove

Grove is a senior instructor in the Russian and Nordic Programs. She received both her MA and PhD in comparative literature, with an emphasis on 19th-century Russian literature at CU Boulder.

Her research interests include the fantastic and supernatural in Russian and other literatures, and those subjects related to her teaching: Russian folklore, culture, fairy tales and epic narrative. She has presented papers on the works of Fyodor Dostoevsky and Mikhail Lermontov and chaired panels on Slavic folklore. Her research focus also includes contemporary Nordic fiction and saga literature.

Grove is also co-director of the Russian, East European and Central Asian (REECA) Heritage Camp for Adoptive Families. With volunteers from Russian, Kazakh, Ukrainian and other members of the Denver community, as well as from CU Boulder's Russian Program and its majors, this camp offers a rare opportunity for children to not only learn about the culture of their native countries, but also to develop a sense of pride in their heritage, and to participate in a community of fellow adoptees.

Among other recognition, Grove has won the Boulder Faculty Assembly Award for Excellence in Leadership and Service, in 2020. She also received a Distinguished Service award from the CU Faculty Council in 2020.

Brett King

King’s research focuses on the development of American psychology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century with an emphasis on the critical role that German-American psychologists made in promoting Gestalt psychology in the United States.

King earned a PhD in psychology from Colorado State University in 1990 and joined the CU Boulder faculty as a postdoctoral researcher the same year. He has won a number of teaching awards, including twice his department’s annual teaching award, in 1994 and 2005. He is a three-time winner of the university’s Residence Life Academic Teaching Award.

This year, he won the Marinus G. Smith Award, conferred by New Student and Family Programs on faculty and staff who have had “a particularly positive impact on our students.” And, in 2007, he won the Herd Teacher Recognition Award from the CU Boulder Alumni Association.

He is co-author of a textbook, A history of psychology: Ideas and context, now in its fifth edition. With Michael Wertheimer, he is co-author of the book Max Wertheimer and Gestalt theory; Michael Wertheimer is Max Wertheimer’s son and a professor emeritus of psychology at CU Boulder.

Four professors of distinction and two teaching professors of distinction are named for 2021.

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