CHA Annual Report: 2022 - 2023

The CHA Annual Report is an overview of what the Center for Humanities & the Arts (CHA)has accomplished and offered throughoutJuly 2022- July 2023.

At the 鶹Ƶ, the CHA supports faculty and students in new research, creates collaborations across departments, incubates new forms of graduate teaching and training, and connects to the broader community.


Jennifer Ho

Jennifer Ho

The Center for Humanities & the Arts (CHA) celebrated our 25th anniversary during 2022-2023, culminating in an event that even a snow storm couldn’t deter. With two new full-time staff members and two new student employees, we worked to fulfill our mission of supporting and promoting arts and humanities at CU Boulder and beyond. We formed new collaborations with partners atGrace Commons Church, increased funding opportunities for graduate students, and returned to in-person events that highlighted the richness of humanities scholarship and artistic productions.

Arts and humanities give meaning. This is the vision that the Center for Humanties & the Arts believes in—that we announce on our home page. We believe that arts and humanities give meaning to our work, our relationships, our very lives. We are so proud of the faculty, staff, students, and community members who come to our events, take part in our programs, and who receive funding from us because we believe that each person who makes contact with us affirms our belief that arts and humanties give meaning.

Sincerely,

Jennifer Ho, CHA Director


Student Support

The CHA provides campus-wide fellowships and highly competitive travel grants for graduate students working in the humanities and the arts. These fellowships and grants are used to recruit incoming students, provide support in completing doctoral dissertations, and aid in scholarly research by providing summer stipends and travel to conferences where they will present a paper or, for those in the arts, perform or display their work.

170 K

Fellowship Funding

10

Fellowships Awarded

32 K

Grant Funding

47

Grantees Awarded

MFA/MM Excellence in Creative Research Microgrants

  • Abby Kellems, Music Composition
  • Andi Newberry, Art and Art History
  • Andrea Caretto, Art and Art History
  • Andy DiLallo, Art and Art History
  • Anna Graef, Art and Art History
  • Anna Pillot, Dance
  • Caroline Butcher, Theatre & Dance
  • Charles Bistodeau, Theatre & Dance
  • Dawna Rae Warren, Voice and Opera
  • Eileen Roscina Shoup, Cinema Studies & Moving Image Arts
  • Elisa Wilcott, Art and Art History
  • Hannah Purvis, Art and Art History
  • Jessica Bertram, Dance
  • Katerina Lott, Dance
  • Madeline Plumley, Cinema Studies & Moving Image Arts
  • Marcella Marsella, Art and Art History
  • MarieFaith Lane, Violin Performance & Pedagogy
  • Noa Fodrie, Art and Art History
  • Samira Hemmat, Art and Art History

Eaton Graduate Student Research Awards

  • Anna Pillot, Theatre & Dance
  • Daniel Carr, Philosophy
  • Darija Medic, Intermedia Art, Writing, and Performance
  • Florent Rethore, French and Italian
  • Gentry Ragsdale, Music
  • Idowu Odeyemi, Philosophy
  • Ivan-Daniel Espinosa, Theatre & Performance
  • James Hoang Nguyen, Theatre & Dance
  • Jessica Bertram, Theatre & Dance
  • Jessie Lause, Music Composition
  • Jesus Munoz, Theatre & Dance
  • Julia Shizuyo Popham, Ethnic Studies
  • Julie Estlick, Media Studies
  • Kun You, Asian Languages and Civilizations
  • Kyle York, Philosophy
  • Laura Klein, Musicology
  • Micaela Cruce, History
  • Mohammad Rezwanul Haque Masud, Political Science
  • Robert Pritchard, Spanish and Portuguese
  • Sam Collier, Theatre & Dance
  • Sarah Fahmy, Theatre & Dance
  • Sylvia Feghali, Geography
  • Toma Peiu, Critical Media Practices
  • Troy Coleman, Theatre & Dance
  • Viola Burlew, History
  • Xiaoling Chen, Geography
  • Xiaoyue Luo, Asian Languages and Civilizations
  • Zoe Moss, Political Science

CHA Student Fellowships

  • Blanca Berjano, Spanish and Portuguese
  • Elisa Wolcott, Art and Art History
  • Georgia Butcher, Anthropology
  • José Luis Toledano, Spanish and Portuguese
  • Kristin Enright, Art and Art History
  • Patrick McKenzie, Anthropology
  • Candace Nunag Tardío, English
  • Dawa T. Lokytsang, Anthropology
  • Page McClean, Anthropology

Faculty Support

45 K

FundingGiven

29

Grants Awarded

10

Fellowships Awarded

CHA Small Grants

The CHA Faculty Steering Committee recommended awarding a total of $44,537in CHA Small Grants to fund 29 projects across 20 different departments at CU Boulder supporting research, creative work, special events, and virtual presentations by visiting scholars and artists.

Departments Supported: Art andArt History, Asian Languages & Civilization,ATLAS Institute, Center for Asian Studies, Cinema Studies & Moving Image Arts, Classics, Composition, Computer Science, English, French & Italian, Germanic & Slavic Languages & Literatures, History, Journalism, Music Theory, Religious Studies,Shakespeare Festival, Spanish and Portuguese, Theatre & Dance, Trumpet, Women & Gender Studies

CHA Faculty Fellows

CHA’sFaculty Fellowship programoffers CU Boulder faculty working in the arts and humanities opportunities to focus on their research through course releases/s. Faculty immerse themselves in projects, often seeing them to completion by the end of their fellowship and attend monthly meetings to connect and share strategies for writing and making work.

CHA Faculty Fellows AY 22-23

Maisan Alomar, Women & Gender Studies

Race for the Cureexamines the transhumanist movement–which positions itself as a cutting-edge and future-oriented endeavor to eliminate mortality–as part of a long historical arc of medically rehabilitative research and practice that has exploited and exacerbated gendered, race, and class inequality. It analyzes key moments in the post-WWII “rehabilitative turn”– including a new look at the origins of the Tuskegee Study – to situate the contemporary transhumanist movement as part of this history of research ethics, gendered and racial subjectivity, and unequal access to healthcare. Amidst the present global health crisis, which understandably has led to the proliferation of hurried efforts to develop rehabilitative technologies, examining this precedent shows: At every stage from conceptualization to testing to distribution, the development of rehabilitative medical technologies risks exploiting and reproducing historical inequities evident in earlier attempts to define and rehabilitate disability.

Angie Chuang, Journalism

American Othernessexamines journalism’s cultural role in producing American identity and navigating racial equity through case studies. The book project focuses on eight distinct news-media narratives that span thefirst two decades of this century,bracketed by the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the COVID-19 pandemic. These narratives include the news coverage of the undocumented mostly-Latinx youth pursuing residency through the DREAM Act/DACA, the Barack Obama “birther” debate, and the Atlanta spa shootings.My research argues that journalism’s struggle to embody an ideal of racial equity mirrors a broader cultural struggle over Americanness—and that the mainstream news media are very much enmeshed in this process, at once hindering and enabling progress and self-reflection.

David Ciarlo, History

Ciarlo'snew book project,Selling War: Advertising, Propaganda, and the Origins of the Fascist Aesthetic in German Visual Culture, 1910-1925offers a visual history of the First World War, using images that were widely seen at the time, but are now largely ignored or forgotten—namely, those of advertising. My research shows how belligerent, warlike imagery circulated widely in German commercial culture long before the German state begin its (better-known) efforts to disseminate official propaganda. Moreover, my exploration of advertising shows how graphic designers were the first to craft thethemesthat would be picked up by later official propaganda: advertisers created and circulated visions of hyper-masculine militarism, of smugly-confident technophilia, and of a type of German-ness that was increasingly racialized (as "whiteness") and these widely-circulated visions became an important means by which ordinary Germans at home or at the front actually "saw" the war.Selling War, then, will argue that even the horrors of trench warfare could be re-imagined through the ceaseless repetition of martial themes in mass-produced commercial imagery. Moreover, the imagery of the hyper-masculine, militarized, and racially-pure "German" that emerged in the advertising of the war years formed the core of a "fascist aesthetic" which the National Socialists (Nazis) would first borrow from and then coopt.

Brianne Cohen, Art & Art History

Cohen’s TheEmpathic Lens: Contemporary Art, Ecology, and Kinship in Southeast Asiais the first study to explore a 21st-century efflorescence of artistic projects in Southeast Asia that urge widescale publics to prevent socio-environmental violence by envisioning ecological empathy through more sustainable, Indigenous cosmologies. This artwork employs the camera lens not only to document destruction of local landscapes, but also to galvanize feeling for inanimate matter, plants, animals, and humans through the imagining of more embodied, interconnected forms of kinship, an understanding of familial, environmental relations central to Indigenous knowledge. Majormuseums and cultural venues throughout the world widely exhibit the work of these artists from Cambodia, Vietnam, and Singapore, yet publics in the United States and Europemay not recognize their names yet because they remain marginalized and understudied in Euro-American scholarship– names such as Khvay Samnang, Tuan Mami, or Nguyễn Trinh Thi.The Empathic Lensanalyzes andintroduces English-speaking, arts-and-humanities audiences to this body of environmentally engaged, camera-based artwork, which presents an alternative, more ethical picture for planetary living through the lens of sustainable, Indigenous worldviews.

Celine Dauverd, History

All the Kingsof the Mediterraneanexaminesthe conquest ofNorth Africa (1450-1620) through the prism of seven Renaissance popes. By investigating on the one hand soft power through rhetoric and authority, and, on the other, raw power through secular jurisdiction and alliance politics, it argues that popes sought leadership over all confessions. By examining 15-17thc. documents in six different languages, I reveal that popes’ ecumenical identity was the signifier of their redefined imperium. Acting as potent ideological fuel whose imperial interests choreographed wars in Africa, popes adroitly consolidated their sovereignty over the Mediterranean world at the expense of Iberian rulers and Muslim warlords. Bridging classical studies, religious history, and international relations, this projectbrings an alternate history to the Maghreb conquest.

Mithi Mukherjee

The Asian Dissentexamines the dissenting judgment of the Indian jurist Radhabinod Pal in the Tokyo Trials of 1946, held by the victorious powers of the Second World War to try Japanese wartime leaders. In this lone dissent Pal mounted the most significant legal challenge from the colonized world in Asia to the existing discourse of international law and its connections to empire and race in the twentieth century. By exploring the complex and conflicting geopolitical and cultural discourses that undergirded this historic act of defiance,The Asian Dissentseeks to insert anticolonial resistance into the heart of the story of international law, empire, and international relations. As the search for a new post-imperial international law that could meet the challenges of a globalized world becomes ever more urgent, Pal’s anticolonial perspective has become particularly salient.

Yumi Roth, Art & Art History

Filipiniana Americanais a play on words and the associations we have with terms like “Americana” and, to a lesser extent in the US, “Filipiniana.” As categories, “Americana” and “Filipiniana” seem to describe quintessential aspects of each culture, yet, when combined, what can the new, hybrid term suggest? Though Filipinos were present and represented in the American West from the late 19th c. (e.g. the 1899 Greater America Exposition in Omaha, NE and Buffalo Bill's Wild West show), the myth of the American West does not include Filipinos. As an artist, I am interested in the forms that these stories and knowledge can take, from objects to video to site-based installation.Filipiniana Americanadescribes the larger project of locating the intersection between “Filipinoness” and “Americanness” couched in the American West.

Honor Sachs, History

Sach’s project, “Freedom by a Judgment,” which traces the story of a mixed-race family of slaves named the Colemans as they sued for freedom claiming Indigenous ancestry over multiple generations. The Colemans claimed descent from a maternal Indian ancestor named Judith, an Apalachee woman born in Spanish Florida who was captured by the English and sold into slavery. As Judith’s children and grandchildren were sold, they initiated freedom suits by claiming Indigenous heritage. This project documents their complex personal histories as they worked within the evolving legal system of the early United States to define their own understandings of race, rights, and family.

Laura Winkiel, English

Modernism and the Middle Passageis a literary history of modernism written from the vantage point of the sea and the legacy of the slave trade. The sea has long been viewed in the West as wasted, empty space and a lawless zone that hides its history and swallows its traumas, especially the mass atrocities on board slave ships.Modernism and the Middle Passage’s attention to the ocean and its role in slavery remaps modernist literary history across centuries, nations, races, and even the nature/culture divide that defines the human.It compares Anglophone writing from Africa, Britain, the Caribbean, and the US within the common frame of Atlantic history and situates newly published works by Zora Neale Hurston and Claude McKay within modernist writers’ focus on the aftereffects of the slave trade. The book presents the sea as a material entity that invites new kinds of planetary connectivity, new histories of slavery and colonization, and new modes of thinking the human to emerge.


Hazel Barnes Flat in London

The Hazel Barnes Flat in the heart of London is a gift to scholars in the humanities and arts made by Hazel Barnes (1915-2008), the much-admired Professor of Philosophy at CU Boulder and founder of the Interdisciplinary Program in the Humanities. Since 2010, the flat has provided opportunities to conduct scholarly research in and around London to CU Boulder faculty and graduate students. Management of the flat has been entrustedto the CHA since its inception.

26

Total Visitors

69 %

Faculty & Staff

31 %

Students


CHA Events (Summer 2022- Summer 2023)

    CHA Projects 2022 - 2023

    April 2023
    In recognition of, the largest literary celebration in the world, the Center for Humanities & the Arts (CHA) has put together a "Poem of the Day" project highlighting a new poet every day.Our hope isto createconnections with the Boulder community and beyond through poetry.

    2021-2024
    The CHAandpartnered on athree-year fellowship program to support faculty working in digital humanities and arts.

    2022
    TheCHAcelebrates and uplifts CU Boulder faculty faculty with a yearly publication of the Faculty Celebration of Major Works Magazine, featuringmajor works (books, art exhibitions, films, musical compositions, and other major accomplishments) created by CU Boulder faculty working in arts and humanities.

    2021-2023
    The CHAjoinsCU Advancement,andto address anti-Asian racism through public-facing projects.The goal is torecognize and combat the rise in anti-Asian racism, harassment, and discrimination.