Division of Arts and Humanities

As a new space race takes shape, a ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� class asks: Do we understand China?

Rachel Sauer — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 17:16:14 +0000

As a new space race takes shape, a ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� class asks: Do we understand China? Rachel Sauer Wed, 04/29/2026 - 11:16

'China's Space Dream,' ASIA 4100, brings aerospace engineers, Chinese language students and international affairs majors into one room—and a visiting journalist from the South China Morning Post into the conversation

Days after Artemis II splashed down in the Pacific, returning four astronauts from the first crewed voyage beyond low Earth orbit in more than half a century, a science journalist who has spent years reporting on China's space program from inside its scientific institutions sat down with a ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� classroom full of students who had been tracking the same story from the outside.

The conversation that followed put the American triumph in a wider frame. When the International Space Station was being designed in the 1990s, China had little to offer a partnership even if one had been on the table. Three decades later, the country operates its own permanently crewed space station, has returned the first-ever samples from the far side of the Moon, and is on track to bring back the first Martian soil before the United States does. The students, aerospace engineering majors sitting next to Chinese language and civilizations majors, history students alongside international affairs specialists, already knew these facts. What they wanted from Ling Xin was something harder to find out, what does this moment look like from the other side of the space race?

ASIA 4100, “China’s Space Dream: Long March to the Moon and Beyond,” is a course developed through the support of ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� interdisciplinary Space Minor and taught by Lauren Collins, a teaching assistant professor and director of the Asian Studies program in the Center for Asian Studies. Now in its second iteration, the class will be offered again in spring 2027.

Collins designed the course around an observation that kept surfacing in her own work. US-China space competition is one of the defining dynamics of a shifting world order, but the people who understand the engineering often lack the cultural and historical context, and the people who study China often aren’t following the technical developments.

Four astronauts aboard NASA’s Orion spacecraft atop the SLS (Space Launch System) rocket launch on the agency’s Artemis II test flight, Wednesday, April 1, from Launch Complex 39B at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. (Photo: NASA)

“The mix in the classroom is the whole point,” Collins said. “Aerospace and astronomy students know something about orbital mechanics and mission design. Chinese language and civilizations students know something about political culture and history. International affairs students understand geopolitics. But the interconnectedness across all of those domains is what surprises everyone, including me.”

The course weaves together Chinese culture, history, geopolitical contexts, and the race to the Moon as it unfolds in real time. Students study the origins of China’s space program, the role of the “space dream” in Chinese national identity, the Wolf Amendment that bars NASA from bilateral cooperation with China, the military dimensions of space technology, and the case for collaboration.

“Warfare and military applications are clearly an issue,” Collins said. “But the need to collaborate is so key, too. We’re talking about planetary challenges that affect all of us like climate monitoring, asteroid deflection, space debris, deep-space science. These issues don’t respect national borders.”

Learning from a visiting journalist

Ling Xin’s visit to the class came through the Conference on World Affairs classroom visit program, which pairs CWA speakers with ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� courses during conference week. The 78th annual CWA, running April 13–16, featured more than 60 speakers across 50 panels at the Limelight Hotel Boulder and across campus.

For Collins, the match was ideal. Ling Xin is one of a small number of journalists working in English who can draw on firsthand access to Chinese scientific institutions, fluency in Mandarin, and formal journalism training in the United States. A former writer for the Chinese Academy of Sciences, she holds a master’s degree in journalism from Ohio University and has published in Science, Scientific American, Nature, and MIT Technology Review. She has reported extensively on China’s Chang’e lunar missions, the Tiangong space station, and the movement of Chinese scientists between US and Chinese institutions, a phenomenon known as the “reverse brain drain”.

“Having a journalist like Ling Xin in the classroom is a different experience from reading an article,” Collins said. “She can tell students what Chinese space scientists actually say when a reporter asks them about the competition with NASA”.

The timing of the visit was perfect. Artemis II had splashed down on April 10 after a successful nine-day circumlunar flight, making astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Canadian Space Agency mission specialist Jeremy Hansen the first humans to fly past the Moon since Apollo 17 in 1972. Koch became the first woman to travel beyond low Earth orbit. The mission was a triumph (and a relief) after many delays.

But even as the Artemis II crew was being celebrated, the competitive landscape was shifting beneath the surface. NASA announced in February that the first crewed lunar landing has been pushed from Artemis III to Artemis IV, now targeted for 2028. The Lunar Gateway station was cancelled. And Congress effectively killed NASA’s Mars Sample Return program in the FY2026 spending bill, leaving nearly 30 carefully collected sample tubes sitting in Mars’s Jezero Crater with no funded plan to bring them home.

"Let's Go to the Moon!" by Yuko Shimizu

Accelerating push to space

China, meanwhile, is accelerating. Its Tianwen-3 Mars sample return mission is targeted for launch in 2028, with samples expected back on Earth around 2031. If NASA doesn’t revive its own program, China will likely become the first nation to return Martian soil, a milestone with enormous scientific and symbolic weight. These debates are a key substance of class discussion.

“When you put an aerospace engineering student and a Chinese civilizations student in the same conversation about whether or not space should be treated as a global commons, you get an analysis that neither of them could produce alone,” Collins said. “Knowledge is co-created.”

The Wolf Amendment, a congressional provision renewed annually since 2011 that bars NASA from bilateral activities with Chinese space agencies, is a recurring thread in the course. The policy, which effectively excluded China from the International Space Station partnership, is widely credited with accelerating China’s independent development of the Tiangong station, the Long March 5 rocket family, and the full suite of crewed spaceflight technology that now positions the country as NASA’s primary competitor.

In 2026 alone, China plans to launch two crewed missions to Tiangong, including its first year-long stay, and host a Pakistani astronaut, the station’s first international crew member. The Chang’e-7 lunar probe, targeting the Moon’s south pole to search for water ice, is scheduled to launch later this year. A crewed lunar landing is targeted before 2030.

Collins also brings science fiction into the classroom to explore the cultural dimensions of space ambition. The global success of Liu Cixin’s “Three-Body Problem” trilogy has made Chinese science fiction a shared cultural reference point that crosses national and disciplinary boundaries. “Science fiction adds a layer that unites all of us,” Collins said. “These are universal concerns about what technology is doing to human civilization, especially now in the age of AI.”

The course is one of several electives offered through ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� Space Minor, a campus-wide program open to students regardless of major that provides an interdisciplinary foundation in all aspects of space. The minor, part of ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� Grand Challenge initiative, requires five courses: the foundational “Pathway to Space” and four electives drawn from departments across the university, ranging from aerospace engineering to music to environmental design.

��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� has a singular claim on the subject. The university is the only academic institution in the world to have sent instruments to every planet in the solar system and Pluto, and the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics has been a leader in space research since 1948.

“This university has extraordinary depth in the technical side of space,” Collins said. “What the Space Minor makes possible is courses like mine that bring the human dimensions like culture, history, geopolitics, and collaboration into the same conversation. That’s what students will need to navigate a world where the US and China are building competing lunar bases and competing for leadership in the space economy.”

ASIA 4100, “China’s Space Dream: Long March to the Moon and Beyond,” will next be offered in spring 2027. The course is open to all ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� students and counts toward the Space Minor.

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Top illustration: A Chinese flag added to famed photo of astronaut James Irwin on the moon. (Original photo: NASA)

Preserving the spaces that shaped O’Keeffe’s iconic art

Rachel Sauer — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 14:00:50 +0000

Preserving the spaces that shaped O’Keeffe’s iconic art Rachel Sauer Tue, 04/21/2026 - 08:00

Cody DeBos

��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� MFA alumna Giustina Renzoni considers how to share space and preserve history as director of historic properties at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum

In Abiquiú, New Mexico, vast mesas sprawl beneath an expansive blue sky. Among them sit the adobe walls of a home once inhabited by one of America’s most iconic artists. The interior is painted with light and characterized by quiet restraint reminiscent of the natural features outside.

It is here, in the home of Georgia O’Keeffe, that Giustina Renzoni helps visitors see both the artist’s work and the world that shaped it.

“When I first encountered Georgia O’Keeffe’s home in Abiquiú, what struck me immediately was that it wasn’t just her residence. It was also a remarkable example of vernacular adobe architecture with nearly 200 years of history before she purchased it,” Renzoni says.

Giustina Renzoni, ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� MFA alumna, is the director of historic properties at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in New Mexico.

Now, as the director of historic properties at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Renzoni’s day-to-day work involves a careful balance of sharing the space with visitors while also preserving the structure and its layers of history.

A path shaped at ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ��

Renzoni’s path to her current role began with a long-standing interest in the relationship between art and environment.

“I’ve always been drawn to the intersection of art, history and place,” she says. “Over time, I became especially interested in how artists’ environments shape their creative work.”

After studying art history and visual culture and gaining early experience working in museums, she pursued a Master of Fine Arts at the University of Colorado Boulder.

“I chose ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� because it offered a program that encouraged interdisciplinary thinking. I was interested in exploring art history alongside visual culture, often through sociohistorical frameworks,” Renzoni says.

She also calls out the collaboration required when working in a museum and recalls how her time at CU helped hone these skills.

“My time at CU helped me develop the ability to think across those disciplines and see how they all contribute to interpreting art and history for the public. That interdisciplinary mindset has been incredibly valuable in my role at the O’Keeffe Museum.”

How place helps us understand art

At the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Renzoni oversees the preservation and interpretation of the Museum’s historic properties—O’Keeffe’s home in the village of Abiquiú and another at Ghost Ranch. The Abiquiú home welcomes thousands of visitors a year, while the Ghost Ranch home is currently closed to the public, awaiting renovations and preservation work Renzoni will head. Her work bridges scholarship and public experience, ensuring the physical spaces connected to O’Keeffe’s life remain protected while also giving visitors a chance to experience them.

Much of her work is rooted in a simple, but powerful, idea: To understand an artist, one must understand where and how they lived.

“Seeing the places where artists lived, the landscapes they looked at every day, and the objects they surrounded themselves with can reveal dimensions of their work that aren’t always visible in a gallery setting. For me, those spaces create a kind of context that brings the artwork to life,” Renzoni says.

The Abiquiú patio, bedroom and zaguán of the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum. (Photos: Krysta Jabczenski/© Georgia O'Keeffe Museum)

Though the art may be stunning, viewers can’t see the full picture when it is hanging on a featureless white wall.

“Historic spaces show the relationship between creative work and daily life. You see what an artist chose to keep around them, how they organized their studio and how the landscape shaped their perspective,” she says.

For Renzoni, one of the most compelling ways to explore that connection is through her recent exhibition, Artful Living: O’Keeffe & Modern Design, which is currently on view at the museum’s welcome center in Abiquiú.

“The exhibition explores how O’Keeffe transformed her traditional adobe home in Abiquiú into a distinctly modern living environment through furniture, textiles, and design objects,” Renzoni says. “What I find fascinating is that the house itself becomes a kind of three-dimensional expression of her artistic vision.”

Balancing preservation with public access

Preserving this one-of-a-kind environment, however, comes with challenges.

“The biggest is balancing preservation with access,” Renzoni says.

Historic homes like O’Keeffe’s weren’t designed for a steady stream of visitors. Even small interactions can cause lasting damage.

“Things like light exposure, temperature changes and foot traffic can all affect fragile materials,” Renzoni notes.

In Abiquiú, where O’Keeffe’s home is built from earthen adobe, those concerns are even more pronounced. Still, ensuring public access is essential.

“The goal is to create thoughtful ways for people to experience [these spaces] without compromising their long-term preservation,” Renzoni says.

Doing so requires careful coordination across disciplines, from conservation and collections management to education and visitor engagement.

“In a gallery, the artwork is often isolated from that context. In a historic home or studio, you begin to see how art, environment and personal life were all intertwined.”

Reinterpreting O’Keeffe’s legacy 40 years later

Renzoni’s work feels especially timely in 2026, which marks the 40th anniversary of O’Keeffe’s death. Decades later, the artist’s work continues to resonate with audiences around the world.

“I think O’Keeffe resonates because her work feels both deeply personal and universal,” Renzoni says. “Her paintings of New Mexico, in particular, capture a sense of space, light and stillness that many people continue to find compelling today.”

Visiting the places where O’Keeffe lived can also reshape how people understand her work.

“Seeing those environments helps visitors understand that her work was deeply rooted in direct observation and in her relationship with the land,” Renzoni says.

Standing in Abiquiú, visitors witness how the scale of the sky, the geometry of adobe walls and the contours of the surrounding cliffs influenced an icon of American art, grounding her paintings in lived experience.

In the end, the spaces Renzoni preserves offer more than a glimpse into O’Keeffe’s life. They let visitors connect to O’Keeffe’s work on a deeper level, granting an understanding of how her work took shape that can be found nowhere else.

“In a gallery, the artwork is often isolated from that context,” Renzoni says. “In a historic home or studio, you begin to see how art, environment and personal life were all intertwined.”

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��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� MFA alumna Giustina Renzoni considers how to share space and preserve history as director of historic properties at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum.

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Top image: Abiquiú sitting room, Georgia O'Keeffe Museum (Photo: Krysta Jabczenski/© Georgia O'Keeffe Museum)

Should we want to die?

Rachel Sauer — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 22:54:23 +0000

Should we want to die? Rachel Sauer Fri, 04/17/2026 - 16:54

Iskra Fileva

The human condition ends in death, but is there anything to do besides simply accepting it?

We are mortal. We are all going to die. What is one to do about it? Nothing, according to the dominant position: One must accept the human lot, and if possible, accept it with equanimity.

Premature death is viewed as a tragedy, of course, and we sympathize with fear of the inevitable even on behalf of centenarians, yet attempts to extend human life significantly are viewed with suspicion. What kind of person, the thought appears to be, would attempt to overcome biological limitations on lifespan? Someone exceedingly greedy, surely. Or worse, someone forgetting himself, like the character Braddock from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s story “A Diamond as Big as Ritz,” who tries to bribe the Almighty with a very large diamond. Ultra-wealthy anti-aging champions such as Bryan Johnson seem to fit this schema and may provide support for it in the popular imagination, if unwittingly.

Iskra Fileva is a ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� associate professor of philosophy who specializes in moral psychology and issues at the intersection of philosophy, psychology and psychiatry.

Virtuous people, we think, may hope for immortality through their deeds or yearn for eternal bliss as an immaterial soul in heaven, but a desire for a much longer life in the literal sense is deemed unseemly. Research on life extension has, for many, the flavor of a Faustian bargain: We suspect that only those without scruples would try to cheat their way out of the human condition and avoid death.

On the other hand, we don’t want anyone to get too cozy with death either. While we may, if grudgingly, accept behaviors that increase the risk of death—think car racing or climbing the Himalayas—we don’t think it quite proper to assume control over the end of our lives, especially when that end isn’t otherwise imminent. I suspect, in fact, that widespread qualms about physician-assisted suicide have less to do with alleged worries about murderous doctors or relatives and more with the background assumption that death must come for us when it will and not when we choose.

To be sure, support for the two directives is not univocal—both life-extension research and the “right to die” movement have advocates—but it is very widespread. We thus seem to embrace two injunctions that pull in opposite directions: “Accept mortality” and “Don’t choose death.” Should we or shouldn’t we want to die?

Natural human lifespan

Perhaps the two directives can be reconciled by appealing to the idea of a natural human lifespan. We can say that a mature and virtuous person aims to live out roughly the span characteristic of our species and then die a natural death. On this view, one should accept temporal finitude without ever seeking to bring death about; open the door when the Grim Reaper comes knocking but stop short of trying to lure him in; face the inevitable without claiming authority over the schedule.

A crude version of this position can be easily shown implausible: After all, medicine can seem, in some ways, unnatural. But the proponent of the natural-lifespan view need not bite this particular bullet—she can argue, instead, that the proper role of medicine is restorative, not transformative. Medicine ought to ensure we get the number of years we are “owed” by correcting genetic errors or counteracting the effects of harmful environments without feeding fantasies of living for thousands of years.

But just what is so good, never mind normatively choice-worthy, about a natural lifespan and a natural death? I will take the first question first.

It has been suggested that a much longer life would get tedious or meaningless or both. Philosopher Bernard Williams, in “The Makropulos Case,” adduces considerations to that effect. The title of Williams’s essay is a reference to Elina Makropulos, a fictional character courtesy of writer Karel Čapek. Čapek’s Makropulos acquires the gift of life extension and initially takes advantage of it, but after living for several centuries, becomes apathetic, as if frozen in boredom. She continues to fear death, but at 300 plus, she is so jaded that she laughs when another character burns the document containing the secret of life extension.

Williams’ argument appeals to self-interest, not virtue, so even if it succeeded, it would not show anything untoward or Faustian about the desire for radical life extension, but let’s set this point aside. I suspect that Williams’ view, and Čapek’s, likely expresses what is sometimes called “an adaptive preference”: that is, a tendency to see the attainable as better than the unattainable, whatever the alternatives’ underlying characteristics. We don’t have life-extension methods, so we might as well tell ourselves that human lifespan is best as is. Moreover, barring the possibility of a dystopia in which anti-aging treatments are obligatory, no one in a world with life-extension techniques would be forced to live longer than they wished, so there is no need whatsoever to browbeat each other into adopting a preference for current lifespans.

I must note here that I don’t know how many believe the prudential argument anyhow. For it is also sometimes suggested that were anti-aging treatments to become available, their price would be prohibitive for most people. Yet, if a significantly longer life was not an attractive prospect, the potentially high price tag of life extension treatment would bother no one. As for the price argument considered independently, the obvious response is that we should work to make the treatments affordable rather than try to persuade ourselves that we’d have no use for them anyway.

The unborn

Another argument put forward has to do with morality rather than with self-interest: What about the unborn? When do they get to live? If we slow down aging by a lot, we’d need to drastically reduce the number of births as well.

This argument is well intentioned, but I don’t think it is good enough. No merely possible person is owed a chance to be born. A merely possible person is not a person at all, so there isn’t anyone that such a chance may be owed to. (Think of all your merely possible siblings or children. Who are they? How many of them are there?) The people who die every day due to old age, by contrast, are quite real.

But the most important point I wish to make in response to the pro natural lifespans position is this: Our intuitions of what lifespans are “fair” for us to expect are anchored in current lifespans, which are an accident. We could have evolved to live for thousands of years, like bristlecone pine trees, in which case we’d think it perfectly fine and not greedy at all to live that long. Or we could have evolved to live for several months, like many mice, and then wishing to live for 80 years may have seemed to us terribly selfish, nay Faustian.

That may be, my opponent may say, but we haven’t evolved that way. Granted, our intuitions are thoroughly shaped by the contingencies of our evolutionary history. Still, we mustn’t discard them for all that: We mustn’t because we don’t know what life would be like if we did live much longer. Forget fairness to the unborn and consider self-interest again. Had we evolved to live for many more years, one might say, we’d probably have psychological features that allow for good longer lives, but we haven’t. Given that, extending life is a risky business, a leap into the unknown. What if anti-aging techniques turn out to be a Pandora’s box, and we end up saddling ourselves with greatly extended but very miserable lives?

Gauging what is good for us

A cynic may quip that it’s not as though we are all currently thriving, but let’s bracket that retort. The argument from deeply ingrained features of human psychology should not be dismissed lightly. There is a certain wisdom in taking naturalness as a heuristic that helps us gauge what is good for us.

While there is no normative reason to prefer natural human lifespans, virtue does require that we desire mortality.

That's an argument for proceeding with caution, not against proceeding at all.

To be clear, I do not intend to propose a different optimal lifespan. It may well be that even were we to live for thousands of years, many would desire more. (This is the main theme in what may be the first sci-fi novel, Voltaire’s Micromegas. Elsewhere, I call this the blessing and curse of imagination.) My point here is simply that having a choice to live longer is better than not having that choice.

I conclude from here that there is no normative reason to prefer natural human lifespans. Virtue does not require that we desire mortality.

But does it prohibit desiring death on a given day?

It is difficult to see why. Note that a heroic self-sacrifice is seen as not only compatible with but also exemplifying virtue, so the question would have to be whether one may choose death for self-interested reasons.

The idea tends to make us squeamish. Since death is irreversible, the squeamishness is all well and good, but ought we moralize it?

No one argues that a virtuous person cannot prefer mortality in general, and some, as we saw, claim that she must prefer it. So why can’t one choose death on a particular day? What is so virtuous about dying only when you don’t want to?

There is a much longer discussion to be had about this than I can offer in this essay, but for present purposes, I wish to say the following: In opting to die, a person may hurt loved ones, of course. This is not a trivial matter. However, loved ones, in turn, must consider the person’s own preferences. (Entrepreneur Salim Ismail reports that his father chose euthanasia and spent the last days of his life in a blissful state. Ismail asked the attending physician about this, and she said that 20,000 people had had the procedure and that most of them spent their final days in a similarly happy state, adding, “We think it is because they have agency.”[1])

Or is the thought that it would be somehow terrible for society as a whole if someone were to choose death for private reasons?

A character named “Mr. Tredegar” in Edith Wharton’s novel The Fruit of the Tree adopts some such view in the course of an argument with a nurse named Justine Brent. Wharton writes:

“Human life is sacred,” he said sententiously.

“Ah, that must have been decreed by someone who had never suffered!” Justine exclaimed.

Mr. Tredegar smiled compassionately: he evidently knew how to make allowances for the fact that she was overwrought by the sight of her friend's suffering: "Society decreed it—not one person," he corrected.

“Society—science—religion!” she murmured, as if to herself.

“Precisely. It’s the universal consensus—the result of the world’s accumulated experience. Cruel in individual instances—necessary for the general welfare.”

Yet the appeal to general welfare is unpersuasive. We cannot impose on each other a day full of experiences that the recipient does not wish to have. The prolongation of life of a person unwilling to live is but many such days.

What, then, explains the Tredegars of the world?

My strong suspicion is that the answer, once again, lies in the naturalness heuristic. It seems to us against nature’s injunctions for a person to end her life. But an otherwise healthy and helpful heuristic, when too rigidly held, may become a superstition. I suspect, in fact, that it is precisely an awareness that we are in the grips of something like that superstition which partly explains why we tend to oppose life-extension: We fear the motivational grip of “naturalness” intuitions and worry that in a world with life extension, we might end up accidentally saddling ourselves with very long undesirable lives.

It is quite possible that if radical life extension became possible, there would be some who don’t wish to live any longer but who, having opted for another several hundred years, would be unable to end it all, a bit like a person unable to walk away from a cult or a very bad job. The problem may be exacerbated by the fact that in the alternative world, people in this position may appear and biologically be thirty-five even if they have already lived for three and a half centuries.

Still, we successfully combat instincts (including the survival instinct, if doing so could help save a loved one’s life) and rethink heuristics. At any rate, the question is whether this is what we should try to do or whether, instead, we must continue to maintain that a mature and virtuous person would always choose mortality but somehow never, on any given day, choose death.

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The human condition ends in death, but is there anything to do besides simply accepting it?

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A new era of gunboat diplomacy?

Rachel Sauer — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 21:33:22 +0000

A new era of gunboat diplomacy? Rachel Sauer Fri, 04/17/2026 - 15:33

Tony Wood

Trump’s coercive tactics in Latin America evoke an earlier era of U.S. policy—and the rise of anti‑imperialism it helped spur

In Latin America, as in other parts of the world, the second Trump administration has adopted an increasingly aggressive policy.

From drone strikes on purported drug traffickers to increased tariffs on imports, and from the blockade on fuel shipments and threats of invasion in Cuba to the Jan. 3 military incursion into Venezuela, the U.S.’s more coercive approach to its hemispheric neighbors evokes an earlier period of U.S. foreign policy.

Many commentators have found echoes of the 1989 capture of Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega in the kidnapping of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro. Others highlighted the longer history of U.S. interventions in Latin America stretching back through the Cold War. That includes the Nixon administration’s support for the 1973 coup against Salvador Allende in Chile or the CIA-sponsored removal of Guatemala’s elected president, Jacobo Arbenz, in 1954.

Tony Wood, a ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� assistant professor of history, specializes in the political and social history of modern Latin America.

Yet as a historian of early 20th-century Latin America, I believe the Trump administration’s approach to Latin America more closely resembles an older pattern of U.S. policy. Between 1900 and the mid-1930s, U.S. forces intervened in one Latin American country after another. This practice was often justified by the Roosevelt Corollary, President Theodore Roosevelt’s addition to the Monroe Doctrine. In cases of “chronic wrongdoing,” Roosevelt said in 1904, the U.S would find itself compelled to exercise an “international police power” in defense of U.S. interests.

But crucially, how Latin Americans responded to the U.S. exerting its dominance in the early 20th century may hold some lessons for the present day. One of the major side effects of the U.S.’s so-called gunboat diplomacy was an upsurge of resistance and anti-imperialist thinking in the region’s political life.

The roots of anti-imperialism

In the 30 years after Roosevelt asserted the U.S.’s right to intervene across the hemisphere, U.S. forces occupied Cuba three times—in 1906-09, 1912 and 1917-21. They also occupied Haiti from 1915 to 1934 and the Dominican Republic from 1916 to 1924. In Nicaragua, the U.S. deployed the Marines from 1912 to 1925 and then again from 1926 to 1933, waging a counterinsurgency in which it used aerial bombardment for the first time.

Across much of the region, then, this was a time when the U.S. was quick to resort to force, unburdened by any concerns for Latin American countries’ sovereignty.

Yet this era of external intervention also coincided with a period of remarkable political ferment, which I describe in my recently published book, Radical Sovereignty.

In one place after another, from Buenos Aires to Mexico City and from Havana to Lima, movements sprang up that put forward sharp critiques of U.S power. Many of them grew out of student organizations in the late 1910s, while others drew on the rising strength of labor unions and newly formed leftist political parties.

In 1923, rural workers in the Mexican state of Veracruz formed a Peasant League. From the outset, they saw local issues as closely interwoven with international ones, and they argued that there was a compelling reason for this. As the league put it, “Our internationalism is not the child of a crazed enthusiasm for empty phrases … but of the need to take preventive measures, to bolster ourselves against the enemy,” which they identified as “the imperialism of North America.”

Many of Latin America’s radical movements at this time were inspired by the recent example of the Mexican Revolution. The new Mexican Constitution of 1917 had nationalized the country’s land and natural resources, putting it on a collision course with U.S. companies and landowners.

Emiliano Zapata (seated, center), was a Mexican revolutionary who employed guerrilla tactics during and after the Mexican Revolution (Photo: Library of Congress)

Others still were energized by the global repercussions of the Russian Revolution. This, of course, included several brand-new communist parties across the region. But at the time, many others in Latin America saw the Bolsheviks as part of a global anti-colonial wave.

Mexico City as activist hub

My book explores the key role Mexico City played as a gathering point for these different political tendencies.

They included groups ranging from Mexican peasant leagues to the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance, an anti-imperialist movement formed by Peruvian exiles. Many of these organizations converged under the umbrella of the Anti-Imperialist League of the Americas. Founded in Mexico City in 1925, it soon had chapters in a dozen more countries across the region.

Between them, these movements brought into focus the novel features of U.S. power. As the Cuban student leader and communist Julio Antonio Mella saw it in 1925 – at a time when his native country was highly dependent on the U.S. but formally sovereign—the U.S. was distinct. Unlike European empires, it largely refrained from direct control of territories, though it had pressed the Cubans to include in their 1901 constitution a provision allowing it to intervene in the island at will.

In Mella’s view, the U.S. was clearly an empire, one that mainly exercised its dominance through commercial or financial pressures. For him, the dollar and Wall Street were as central to U.S. power as the halls of government in Washington, D.C.

For Ricardo Paredes, an Ecuadorean doctor who founded the country’s Socialist Party in 1926, a new term was required to capture Latin American countries’ contradictory position. Formally sovereign, they were not colonies as such. Yet they were economically and politically subordinated to Washington and Wall Street—“dependent countries,” as he phrased it in 1928.

For the Peruvian poet Magda Portal, a leading member of the anti-imperialist American Popular Revolutionary Alliance, U.S. dominance played out differently in different parts of Latin America.

Fidel Castro (standing, center left) was influenced by the anti-imperialist upsurge of the 1920s and ’30s. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

In a series of lectures she gave in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic in 1929, Portal divided the region into zones. While countries such as Argentina or Brazil were mainly sites for U.S. investment, Mexico and the Caribbean were regularly subjected to U.S. military force. Or, as Portal put it, “Here imperialism wears no disguise.”

Portal concluded her lectures with a phrase that combined her analysis of U.S. dominance with a resonant appeal for unity: “We have a single and great enemy; let us form a single and great union.”

United states of resistance?

Yet while there was much Latin American anti-imperialist thinkers could agree on, there were also profound divergences between them. This included questions of strategy as well as issues of principle. What role should different classes play in their movement? How radical a transformation of society were they pushing for? And what kind of state should emerge from it?

Over time, these differences turned into deep rifts that pitted revolutionaries against democratic reformists, internationalists against nationalists, and pro-Soviets against anti-communists. These disagreements played an important role in Latin American politics over the rest of the century.

While many of these rifts became especially prominent during the Cold War, they developed out of earlier divisions over how best to counter U.S. dominance.

The anti-imperialist upsurge of the 1920s and ’30s was formative for a generation of Latin American radicals. Several of those who entered political life during these years went on to play key roles in major events of the 20th century. Raúl Roa, for example, who served as foreign secretary for Cuba’s revolutionary government from 1959 to 1976, was first politicized in the island’s anti-imperialist movement of the 1920s.

The men and women whose political visions were formed in the interwar period carried those ideals forward into the Cold War era. In important ways, the 1920s and 1930s laid vital groundwork for later and better-known radical movements.

Past is, of course, not always prologue. It is impossible to predict what the long-term consequences of current U.S. policy in Latin America will be, especially given the rightward tilt that is currently unfolding across the region.

But looking at the region’s anti-imperialist traditions does point to one possible outcome: The U.S.’s newly aggressive stance will, sooner rather than later, fuel a resurgence of anti-imperialist sentiment as the organizing principle for a new generation of activists.

Tony Wood is an assistant professor in the ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� Department of History specializing in the political and social history of modern Latin America.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Trump’s coercive tactics in Latin America evoke era of gunboat diplomacy—and the rise of anti‑imperialism it helped spur.

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Artist encourages talking with your mouth full

Rachel Sauer — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 21:06:15 +0000

Artist encourages talking with your mouth full Rachel Sauer Fri, 04/17/2026 - 15:06

Kayleigh Wood

As the featured artist at a recent Black Cube event, ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ��'s Alvin Gregorio emphasized how getting primal and getting to know each other—and yes, sharing meals—makes better people

Alvin Pagdanganan Gregorio understands the value of a shared meal. The University of Colorado Boulder professor of drawing and painting and associate chair for art practices was the recent featured artist and host of Talk With Your Mouth Full, a series of free, artist-led community potluck brunches organized by Black Cube, a nomadic art museum based in Englewood.

Artists invited to host Talk With Your Mouth Full select one ingredient for a main dish prepared by a local chef. Participants are encouraged to bring a dish as well, although it is not required, nor must it include the selected ingredient. After food and conversation, the artist leads a simple activity with the aim of fostering discussion.

For Gregorio, the choice of ingredient was simple: “Immediately I thought of ube, which is the purple yam of the Philippines,” he says. “It’s one of the most striking colors in Filipino food.”

Alvin Pagdanganan Gregorio, a ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� associate professor of art and art history, was the featured artist at a recent Black Cube Talk With Your Mouth Full potluck event, which featured ube cheese pandesals. (Photo: Alvin Gregorio)

To take on the challenge, Black Cube enlisted the help of Cakeheads Bakery, a family-owned Filipino American bakery in Centennial that created ube cheese pandesals: deep purple bread rolls filled with melted cheese and topped with golden breadcrumbs.

The artistry of the pandesals parallels Gregorio’s art, which features vibrant, eye-catching palettes and diverse textures. Through an unrestricted practice transcending any one technique, material or form, Gregorio creates drawings, paintings, installations, sculptures, performance and audio pieces that explore immigration, family, war, spirituality and defense mechanisms.

Sharing meals, lowering your defenses

Talk With Your Mouth Full addresses an assumption to which Gregorio is particularly adverse: the role of food in the studio and museum space (or lack thereof). Generally, exposing art to food and drink can threaten the quality of the work or destroy it entirely.

Yet Gregorio welcomes food in both the studio and his classroom. “I’m into [the potluck], much in the same way I am in class,” he says. “I want people to eat. As long as you clean up after yourself, I want you to eat in class too, because then you know you’re at home and safe. You’re in a place where you [can] put your guard down.”

In addition to allowing his students to eat in class, Gregorio aims to incorporate shared meals into his teaching practice. “College students aren’t great at feeding themselves,” he says. “Even the best of us get busy, so that’s one of things I want to include in the classroom. If there’s a 12-12:30pm break between all of our classes, then, all right, [every] Wednesday, let’s see everyone. Let’s do a community meal. When you start feeding people, people are like, all right, these people do care about me.”

In the classroom, Gregorio says he’s “trying to do it the right way, you know, where people aren’t being vulnerable [with] people they don’t trust.” Many art classes at the University of Colorado Boulder, including Gregorio’s, hinge on portfolio-building and periodic critiques, which are structured opportunities for a student’s peers to evaluate and analyze their work and share feedback, often requiring a degree of vulnerability from the student.

He sees shared meals as a tool to ease the pressure of critiques and to build trust, because “eating with other people is grounding, talking about things you love is grounding… It’s kind of hard [to] keep your guard up when [you have] powdered sugar all over your face.”

Caring for the person–not just the portfolio

As art practitioners rely heavily on critiques to improve, Gregorio insists that the most important aspect of his teaching practice is earning trust from his students by prioritizing their safety and comfort. “That has to be first,” says Gregorio. “If we’re talking about Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, at the bottom there’s safety . . . If people don’t feel safe there (in the classroom), then they can’t get to the top, and the top is generosity and creativity.”

To encourage trust, Gregorio gives social homework, or what he calls “fake homework.” These “fake homework” assignments range from suggestions to hang out with a peer over the weekend to long-term collaborative assignments that occur during class, like starting a “band” with a group of peers, carefully curating a vibe and designing an album cover over the course of a semester. Gregorio also often assigns “docu-buddies,” which are groups of peers responsible for photographing each other’s work in progress throughout the term.

"Plush Safe, We Think," by Alvin Pagdanganan Gregorio, mixed media on paper

While these simple, unserious social assignments may seem menial, Tyson Tieu, a senior in the Department of Art and Art History and a former student of Gregorio’s who attended Talk With Your Mouth Full, says he misses the social activities. In most studio art classes, Tieu says, “you’re in your own little bubble, like you’re doing your own thing and you’re at your table, whereas with Alvin, it could be annoying, but, yeah, he does force to you to, like, get up and move and work outside your comfort zone… if you’re [having] art block or something, it just helps you get your hand moving.”

Gregorio says, looking back, “It’s always been that first—people. I’m [only] able to get [my students] to trust me when we’re doing really hard things if I earn it along the way. . . . So then, if I say something that I need to say to make the work better, it’s a little bit easier for people to accept, because I earn the trust through caring for the whole person rather than just the portfolio.”

‘Art shifts the vibe’

The same ethos of security and companionship helped Gregorio shape his activity for Talk With Your Mouth Full, for which he was intent on addressing the current moment: “I didn’t want to do anything so escapist. I wanted [to] acknowledge that [we’re] living through a weird time.”

For his exercise at Talk With Your Mouth Full, Gregorio started by admitting to his audience: “I hate violence, I hate war . . . I hate Donald Trump and all that he stands for . . . One of the things I hate about right now is [that] I’m living in a time where I feel like there’s a lot of hate in the world, and it’s f***ing exhausting.”

To combat this exhaustion, Gregorio reorients his mindset by wishing the person or thing that angers him well. He asked his audience at Talk With Your Mouth Full to do the same thing, first by offering his own example. “Hi, Donny,” he said to President Trump, “I wish that something great would happen for you today, so that you can have what I have. So that you can feel love in your life that I have. I hope that someone does something for you today.”

Alvin Gregorio (seated, black cap) leads an art project during a recent Talk With Your Mouth Full event at which he was the featured artist. (Photo: Alvin Gregorio)

For Talk With Your Mouth Full, he prepared print outs of his own work for participants to collage onto manilla envelopes he’d spray painted and signed, in the hopes that they could make something beautiful and flip difficult things into positive ones, in collaboration with others, during a time of tension and political unrest. “It’s just to try to remind people that art can help change perspective,” says Gregorio.

Before beginning the art activity, Gregorio explained the significance of the manilla envelopes: to pay for his undergraduate degree, Gregorio worked early mornings as a janitor on his college campus. During his shifts, he plucked used manilla envelopes and other discarded material found in the trash cans of professors and faculty members, a foundation which he transformed into some of the first works he ever sold.

A thread through Gregorio’s work is using art to address difficult things head on and “shift the vibe.”

As the grandson of a Filipino World War II guerrilla sniper, Gregorio spent most of his life hating the soldiers that came to the Philippines and killed his family. Eventually, he says he realized how exhausting that was. “Instead of expelling their ghosts,” Gregorio says, “I want to enlist them. And I think to myself, like, hey, they’re just f***ing teenagers too, [and] their government forced [them] to go to another country and do these things. They're just working-class people, too. So, I started to think, hey, instead of hating the Japanese that came to my village– those soldiers were just like my grandfather. They were sent to do something they couldn’t handle.

“Then I found in my practice that I could truly change my perspective, change my life. I don’t have to hate anymore. I like using art to think of a different way, like, hey, I genuinely want the offspring of those people to [be] happy and safe and peaceful.

‘The best part of my week’

In 2015, Gregorio was diagnosed with Chronic Inflammatory Demyelinating Polyneuropathy (CIDP), a rare autoimmune neurological disorder affecting the myelin, or protective covering, of peripheral nerves, preventing them from conducting electricity in the way they should.

“Every Friday, Mary [Gregorio’s partner] gets my shots,” Gregorio told his Black Cube audience. “Three [shots], and it lasts three hours. And it’s the worst part of my week, and I’ve been doing it for 10 years.

“I want you all to consider the power we have in reframing the things that we do, and [how] art does that,” Gregorio tells the Black Cube audience. Asking them to hold him accountable, he says, “from here on out, I want you to remind me that [these shots are] the best part of my week. That is the part of my week that helps me be [around] for our continuum… So in front of you all, I’m going to try to change that.”

“I could do the opposite and just talk s*** on everything,” he says, admitting that it would probably be easier. Sharing his mother’s advice, he says, “If you’re not going to do it out of love, don’t do it. And growing up, I was like, are you trying to tell me that I have to be in a good mood about all the things that I have to do? And what I realized is that what I [think] she’s saying now that I look back, is like, if you could figure out how to find the good in it, it’s going to be better for everybody. You’ll enjoy it, the product will be better… that’s art, right? Trying to shift the perspective. Like, hey, you have the ability to shift your perspective… we have the power to reimagine the way we see things.”

At Talk With Your Mouth Full, in his classroom and his day-to-day life, Gregorio says, “I hope to remind people that creativity is an awesome tool. Art is an awesome tool.”

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Top image: Alvin Gregorio (front row, black cap) with attendees at the recent Talk With Your Mouth Full event organized by Black Cube

Exhibit explores identity through ancient coins

Rachel Sauer — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 17:59:18 +0000

Exhibit explores identity through ancient coins Rachel Sauer Fri, 04/17/2026 - 11:59

'Expressions of Identity in Ancient Greek Coins' opens Wednesday as a collaboration between the Department of Classics and the CU Art Museum

A new exhibit opening Wednesday at the CU Art Museum will celebrate the stories and history of ancient Greek and Roman coins, highlighting student research as well as the campus partnerships bringing the exhibit to fruition.

“Expressions of Identity in Ancient Greek Coins” will open with a celebration from 4:30 to 6 p.m. Wednesday, April 22. The exhibit, which has been jointly curated by Beth Dusinberre, a professor of distinction in the Department of Classics, and Hope Saska, CU Art Museum director and chief curator, features ancient Greek and Roman coins that served not only as currency, but as media for communicating political messages and civic pride.

The exhibit features coins from the collection of John Nebel, including one minted by Brutus that celebrates the Ides of March, as well as Roman coins from ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� Wilton Jaffee collection. It builds on work done by students in Dusinberre’s Fall 2025 class on Greek coins.

The public is invited to attend the opening celebration Wednesday afternoon, and refreshments will be served.

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'Expressions of Identity in Ancient Greek Coins' opens Wednesday as a collaboration between the Department of Classics and the CU Art Museum.

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Sometimes you just feel like a mango

Rachel Sauer — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 14:48:12 +0000

Sometimes you just feel like a mango Rachel Sauer Wed, 04/15/2026 - 08:48

Rachel Sauer

In new mid-grade novel Confessions of a Mango, writing team Katheryn Lumsden and Nathan Pieplow explore the challenges of navigating middle school with a dyslexia diagnosis

Have you ever felt like the mango in a line of lovebirds? Sure, you look like you fit in—same general shape, same red, yellow and green coloring—but, well, you’re a mango and everyone else is a bird.

That’s how Ruby Emmerson feels at Benton Academy, where she’s starting sixth grade with her twin brother, Bryce. But while Bryce is an academic high achiever who likely will excel at the competitive charter school, Ruby’s diagnoses of dyslexia, dysgraphia and dyscalculia mean that reading, writing and math are tough for her.

And when she fails her first test at Benton, wow, does she feel like a mango. She even writes a brief blog post about it: “I dont belong at Benton Acadamy. I’m an imposter. I walk beside you in the halls every day. But I’m not smart enuff to stay much longer. Theres so much work. Im failing.”

Nathan Pieplow (left) and Katheryn Lumsden (right) are the authors of Confessions of a Mango, a new mid-grade novel that explores questions of belonging.

Except . . . so many of her classmates relate. Just as readers likely will.

Ruby’s are the confessions in Confessions of a Mango, a mid-grade novel published this week and written by Katheryn Lumsden, a University of Colorado Boulder molecular, cellular and developmental biology alumna, and Nathan Pieplow, an associate teaching professor in the Program for Writing and Rhetoric.

But for the purposes of this book, they are Kate and Nate, a writing team with way too many ideas and way too little time, and a shared passion for telling honest stories with humor and empathy.

“This is the first creative partnership I’ve been in that works,” Pipelow says. “We bicker like siblings, but the beautiful thing about writing with Katheryn is she’s an idea factory. She can write 2,000 words in an afternoon, then she sends them to me, and I don’t have to start with a blank page.”

“I’m the sloppy copy,” she says.

“I contribute ideas,” he says.

“He’s the atmosphere and the voice. Ironically, Mango didn’t have my voice until he added it.”

It just works, they conclude.

A writing partnership is born

Pieplow and Lumsden met, unsurprisingly, in a Boulder writing group six years ago. Lumsden, a pharmacist by profession, was a longtime group member who wanted a community of support to help her wrangle her boundless ideas. Pieplow, who had authored two field guides to bird sounds, wanted to delve into fiction writing.

“Everyone was like, ‘Why is he here? He doesn’t have plots,’” Lumsden recalls. “But I didn’t have pretty writing and he does, so I decided, ‘I’m gonna ask Nathan if he wants to meet'—for me it was so that he could teach me how to write better, and for him it was so I could teach him how to plot.”

Author event

Katheryn Lumsden and Nathan Pieplow will talk about Confessions of a Mango Thursday evening at Boulder Bookstore.

What: Book discussion of Confessions of a Mango

Who: Authors Katheryn Lumsden and Nathan Pieplow

Where: Boulder Bookstore, 1107 Pearl St.

When: 6:30 p.m. Thursday, April 16

Reserve a spot

And so, a writing partnership was born. Their first book was a young adult historical fantasy that was good enough to get them their agent, Sarah Fisk, but it wasn’t bought by a publisher. The next novel wasn’t, either.

“If you want to be a fiction writer, you write several (books) and if one doesn’t get published, you move on to the next,” Lumsden says.

“(Confessions of a Mango) is definitely our debut,” Pieplow adds. “The first two were not quite at this level; with our first ones we were playing with form and voice.”

In fact, Fisk told them that the most important thing to get right when writing mid-grade or young adult fiction is the voice, Lumsden says, “and fortunately, voice has always been one of the things I do well.”

The idea for Confessions of a Mango germinated from many seeds. Lumsden grew up in Boulder with a twin brother who, like Bryce, was considered the “smart” one. Lumsden struggled with reading, and their mom, not wanting to make Lumsden feel bad, took both of them for dyslexia testing, explaining it away with “people are interested in twins.”

She did learn to navigate dyslexia, however, so when she was 12, her mom brought home a cake as a sort of “Congratulations for outgrowing dyslexia!” celebration. “Except it wasn’t until much later that I found out you don’t actually outgrow dyslexia,” Lumsden says.

She also read Overcoming Dyslexia by Sally Shaywitz and ideas began percolating. So, when Pieplow went on a birding trip for a month, Lumsden grew impatient waiting for his return and started writing a book.

Making it realistic and relatable

“Part of it was that I was so angry,” she explains. “So often, these kids (diagnosed with dyslexia) don’t know how smart they truly are, and that’s so unfair. Plus, they never see themselves in books because dyslexia just isn’t something that gets written about in mid-grade fiction.

Confessions of a Mango tells the story of Ruby Emmerson, a sixth grader at Benton Academy whose diagnoses of dyslexia, dysgraphia and dyscalculia make her feel like she doesn't fit in at the competitive charter school.

“So, when Nathan got back, I sent him what I’d started and he was like, ‘This is actually very good.’”

Lumsden had an advantage because when the two began writing Confessions of a Mango three years ago, her son was 10 and her daughter was 12—she had a front-row seat to the joys and concerns of children entering and navigating middle school.

Pieplow says it was important to them to write a book that was realistic and relatable: The parents may be occasionally clueless, but they want what’s best for their kids. The teachers and administrators at the school are supportive, and the other kids may be squirrelly sometimes, but they’re otherwise normal, decent kids.

“I grew up in Boulder and my husband and I are raising our kids in Boulder, and the parents here are fantastic, but sometimes there can be this feeling of life or death if you don’t do well (in school),” Lumsden says. “There isn’t a lot of room to fail, and people sometimes won’t even say the word ‘fail’ to kids. But it’s important that kids know sometimes they’ll fail and it’s not the end of the world.”

When Fisk began pitching their draft to publishers—after suggesting they excise this chapter and add that chapter, and put in more about Ruby’s quirky best friend, Thea—Little, Brown was the first to make an offer and was the publisher they ultimately chose.

Part of that decision, they say, was the kindness that Little, Brown staff showed them throughout the publishing process—how included they felt in every step and how Little, Brown representatives embraced the dyslexia angle of their story. In fact, Confessions of a Mango is printed in the Lexend font, which improves reading performance and reduces visual stress for people with dyslexia.

They even had a significant say in the vibrant book cover, which shows a girl seated in the shadow of a huge mango with a lovebird perched on its leaf. When they and artist Andy Smith settled on two cover finalists, they asked Lumsden’s son and his friends to vote for their favorite one.

Now, in publication week, a three-year process is finally tangible with the book in readers’ hands. It’s a book close to their hearts, Lumsden says, and they’re proud of the story it tells and the children to whom it gives a literary voice.

But, well, on to the next. They already have several books in progress, and “one of the things I love about working with Katheryn is that eventually we’re going to write something in every genre, because of the exploration of (writing) and how it’s like travel,” Pieplow says. “I love seeing new places, and that’s what I’m doing through the books we’re writing.”

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In new mid-grade novel Confessions of a Mango, writing team Katheryn Lumsden and Nathan Pieplow explore the challenges of navigating middle school with a dyslexia diagnosis.

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Remembering victims of the Holocaust by speaking their names

Rachel Sauer — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 21:01:42 +0000

Remembering victims of the Holocaust by speaking their names Rachel Sauer Wed, 04/08/2026 - 15:01

Holocaust Remembrance Day, or Yom HaShoah, will be observed on ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� campus Tuesday with a public reading of the names of Jews killed in the Holocaust

The University of Colorado Boulder community will observe Yom HaShoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day, on campus Tuesday with a public reading of the names of European Jews murdered by the Germans and their allies during the Holocaust.

Chancellor Justin Schwartz will begin the reading at 10 a.m. at the Dalton Trumbo Fountain Court in front of the University Memorial Center, and the reading will continue until 3 p.m.

Event organizers encourage members of the campus and broader communities to participate in the readings. Prospective participants may sign up here.

In 1980, the U.S. Congress established the Days of Remembrance, an eight-day period which includes Yom HaShoah, as the nation’s annual commemoration of the Holocaust. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., which opened in 1993, leads the nation in observing Days of Remembrance and encourages observances throughout the United States.

Holocaust Remembrance Day

What: Public readings on Yom HaShoah

When: Tuesday, April 14, from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.

Where: Dalton Trumbo Fountain Court in front of the University Memorial Center.

The main event takes place at the U.S. Capitol, often attended by the president. In Israel, the Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Day (Yom HaShoah in Hebrew) is a national day of commemoration on which the 6 million Jews murdered in the Holocaust are memorialized.

It begins at sunset on the 27th of the month of Nisan, the first month of the Jewish calendar, and ends the following evening, according to the traditional Jewish custom of marking a day. Established in 1953 by a law from the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, it falls close to the anniversary of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

The central ceremonies, in the evening and the following morning, are held at Yad Vashem, Israel’s official memorial to victims of the Holocaust.

During Yom HaShoah ceremonies in the United States, Israel and elsewhere, people read the names of Jews murdered by the Germans and their allies during World War II.

“The events of the Holocaust are given meaning only by remembering the individuals who died during that time,” writes Sharon L. Sobel, a Reform rabbi currently serving Temple Beth Or in Raleigh, NC. “We gather as a community, we remember the names of those who died, and we affirm their lives by how we choose to lead our lives. So, names, indeed, are very powerful. ... we honor those who came before us and those who perished during the Holocaust by giving our names—and their names meaning through our actions and aspirations and the way we fulfill them.”

The ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� event is presented by the Program in Jewish Studies. It is co-sponsored by the ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� Department of History and Center for Humanities and the Arts.

Though the reading of names occurs each year, those names “have not lost any of their meaning and significance,” says Thomas Pegelow Kaplan, the Singer Endowed Chair in Jewish History. “On the contrary.”

For more information on the Days of Remembrance and Yom HaShoah commemoration, please contact Pegelow Kaplan at thomas.pegelow-kaplan@colorado.edu.

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Holocaust Remembrance Day, or Yom HaShoah, will be observed on ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� campus Tuesday with a public reading of the names of Jews killed in the Holocaust.

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��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� scholar examines Islam’s most controversial new movement

Rachel Sauer — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 14:41:17 +0000

��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� scholar examines Islam’s most controversial new movement Rachel Sauer Wed, 04/01/2026 - 08:41

Cody DeBos

Religious studies graduate student Shafiu Alidu went in search of West Africa’s boldest believers in the Yan Hakika Sufi sect

Shafiu Alidu grew up in a unique mixing pot of Islam, Christianity and Sufism in Accra, Ghana. Now a master’s student in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, he is shedding light on a bold, contested movement that has rattled northern Nigeria’s Muslim communities.

His research invites one to imagine standing in a crowded public celebration in Nigeria as someone nearby leans in and declares openly, and without apology, “Everything and everyone is God.”

For many onlookers, both traditionally devout Muslims and Sufi practitioners, the words might be considered heresy.

Shafiu Alidu, a ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� graduate student in religious studies, researches Yan Hakika, a Sufi movement that has only emerged in the last decade and a half in Nigeria.

This is the world of the Yan Hakika, a Sufi movement that has only emerged in the last decade and a half. Compared to Islam, a religion with more than a millennium of traditions and rules to follow, the Yan Hakika could hardly be more different. The evocative tension between spiritual daring and doctrinal boundaries is part of what drew Alidu to study the group.

“The Yan Hakika caught my attention because they are very bold, and quite controversial—even within Sufism,” he says. “It felt like studying something alive and unfolding right now, instead of just ancient history.”

A long road to Boulder

Alidu’s path to ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� is itself a remarkable story. After completing his undergraduate degree in religious studies, he was awarded a full scholarship to pursue not one but two master’s degrees in Turkey.

It was there that his scholarly voice began to take shape.

“Turkey gave me excellent resources and real intellectual freedom, and it was there that I began publishing academic articles,” Alidu says.

He adds, “That experience deepened my fascination with how spiritual paths blend with local African cultures and inspired me to continue my studies abroad.”

His journey would then bring him to Boulder in 2024 for his third master’s degree, where he now works under the supervision of Aun Hasan Ali, associate professor and associate chair of undergraduate studies.

Alidu recently published a paper on the Yan Hakika in the Journal for the Institute of Sufi Studies.

Boulder, he says, has been the right place to do it.

“Boulder has given me a wonderful new environment to explore these topics even further while staying closely connected to my West African roots,” he says.

Turning up the volume

To understand what makes the Yan Hakika so controversial, one must understand what Sufism is.

Alidu describes it as “the mystical, heart-centered side of Islam,” adding, “Sufis focus on getting close to God through love, meditation, chanting and spiritual training rather than just following rules.”

At the core of Sufi thought is a concept known in Arabic as “Wahdat al-Wujud,” or the “oneness of being,” which holds that there is ultimately only one true reality, and that reality is God.

“The (Yan Hakika) movement attracts many people who feel that traditional religious practice has become too dry or rule-focused. They are drawn to the Yan Hakika’s promise of a more direct, ecstatic and personal experience of God,” says ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� scholar Shafiu Alidu. (Photo: Fatima Yusuf/Pexels)

Alidu offers an elegant analogy.

“Everything else—the universe, the stars, the trees and even you and me—is like a wave on the ocean. The wave looks separate for a moment, but it is made of the same water as the whole ocean and will eventually return to it,” he explains.

Most Sufis hold this idea close, expressing it in private meditation and guarded spiritual language. The Yan Hakika say it out loud.

“It’s like they turned the volume way up on one of the deepest and most subtle ideas in Sufism,” Alidu says.

Heresy or awakening?

Being so forthcoming with their beliefs comes with consequences for the Yan Hakika.

“Both mainstream Sufi groups—especially within the Tijaniyya Sufi Order—and Salafi (strict literalist) Muslims have strongly criticized them, sometimes labeling their beliefs as heretical and even questioning whether they are true Muslims,” Alidu says.

Spilling into real-world actions, that backlash has led to heated public denunciations by prominent religious figures, social boycotts, ostracism and even arrests at social gatherings. And yet the movement keeps growing.

As Alidu explains, for many followers, the Yan Hakika movement offers something traditional practice does not.

“The movement attracts many people who feel that traditional religious practice has become too dry or rule-focused. They are drawn to the Yan Hakika’s promise of a more direct, ecstatic and personal experience of God,” he says.

“In this way, the movement both divides communities and offers some followers a powerful spiritual awakening,” Alidu adds.

This contradiction—threatening and beautiful in equal measure—makes the Yan Hakika impossible to look away from.

Catching smoke with your hands

Studying the Yan Hakika, however, is another matter. Alidu found early on that conventional academic methods go only so far in uncovering the depths of a religious movement steeped in the mystical.

“I was surprised by how much everyday conversation and oral stories—not just books—matter in understanding this group,” he says.

While preparing his latest paper, a turning point came when Alidu immersed himself in accounts of the Yan Hakika’s public gatherings.

“Everything else—the universe, the stars, the trees and even you and me—is like a wave on the ocean. The wave looks separate for a moment, but it is made of the same water as the whole ocean and will eventually return to it.”

“It helped me realize this isn’t just abstract philosophy, but a living, emotional, sometimes chaotic spiritual experience that deeply affects real communities,” he says.

The challenge, he admits, is holding two truths simultaneously. He’s learned to juggle both the scholar’s need for analysis and the community’s need to be understood on its own terms.

“Religious studies gives good tools, but studying something this fluid sometimes feels like trying to catch smoke with your hands,” Alidu says.

Still listening

As for what Alidu hopes to come from his research, the focus is all about people.

“I’m not trying to judge them. I’m trying to understand why their path makes sense to them. I hope they would feel I listened carefully and described their beliefs accurately and respectfully, even when I point out the controversies,” he says.

For readers outside the Yan Hakika, his hopes are broader.

“There is no single way to be Muslim; spiritual paths within the tradition vary widely across cultures and times. Second, even beliefs and practices that appear radical or shocking to outsiders can stem from a deep, sincere longing to experience God more directly and intimately,” he says.

Alidu believes the Yan Hakika movement is a reminder that even one of the world’s largest religions contains intricacies that rarely reach our collective consciousness.

“Understanding groups like them can help us become more open-minded about the rich variety of human spiritual experience in our complex world,” he adds.

Alidu plans to develop his research into a PhD dissertation and, eventually, to teach and write books that make African spiritual traditions and their intersection with Islam more accessible to a wider audience.

In the meantime, he believes that, in a world inclined to flatten Islam into a single story, understanding the intricacies of why people believe what they do is never wasted work.

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Religious studies graduate student Shafiu Alidu went in search of West Africa’s boldest believers in the Yan Hakika Sufi sect.

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When napping in nature becomes art

Rachel Sauer — Thu, 05 Mar 2026 23:55:15 +0000

When napping in nature becomes art Rachel Sauer Thu, 03/05/2026 - 16:55

Cody DeBos

CU alum Rick Silva finds meaning in the stillness of the natural world

Rick Silva (MFA’07) is lying still in the frame, perched on a rocky outcropping overlooking azure ocean waves. He’s sound asleep.

That’s one of 46 places you’ll find him taking a snooze in his new video art piece, Dirt Nap.

As he describes it, “Dirt Nap is composed of one-minute excerpts from 46 naps Rick Silva took in nature across the Western United States between September 2024 and January 2026, sequenced in the order they were recorded.”

“The project has some heavier personal meanings for me, but I also think it touches on broader themes of loss related to landscape in the 21st century, whether that’s the precarity of protected lands or ongoing threats from climate change,” says Rick Silva (MFA ’07) of his new video art piece, Dirt Nap.

The project’s structure is simple, almost stubbornly so. But the simplicity of one-minute naps, repeated 46 times, has a way of becoming something else—a question that challenges notions of patience and what it means to rest.

Taking a rest

The project began in 2024, a time marked by both grief and physical strain for Silva.

“My uncle-in-law died in a ski accident the previous year, and that late summer we hiked into the Grand Tetons to spread his ashes,” he recalls.

That same summer, Silva was dealing with severe migraines that forced him to retire to a dark room, sometimes for the entire day, just to ease the pain.

“The idea for Dirt Nap emerged during a lull in the pain of a migraine,” he says.

From the start, Silva knew the project needed to unfold over time. As the idea of deliberately resting in nature took hold, he started thinking of locations. Some had personal meaning. Others he hadn’t yet experienced but wanted to.

“There was a balance between planning and spontaneity throughout the process. I created a loose set of rules around framing and duration, then pushed against those rules through location, weather and light,” he says.

The title carries its own gravity. Often a dysphemism for death, the phrase “dirt nap” invokes images of a body being returned to the ground for its final rest.

Silva acknowledges the double meaning.

An ‘in-action’ sport

Prior to Dirt Nap, Silva spent years immersed in outdoor action sports culture, especially snowboarding. Video is a powerful medium for showcasing the pulse-pounding motion and spectacle of athletes carving through exotic terrain at high speeds.

��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� alumnus and artist Rick Silva created his video piece Dirt Nap from 46 naps he took in nature across the Western United States between September 2024 and January 2026.

Dirt Nap inverts the formula.

“There’s definitely a connection between Dirt Nap and that lineage of sport and nature filmmaking,” Silva says, “except here I’m doing ‘nothing’ in the landscape. It’s a kind of in-action sport focused on recharging and recovering.”

For Silva, shooting videos lying down instead of airborne while capturing exotic vistas across the Western United States is something of a return to his roots.

“My MFA thesis work at CU was a video art piece in which I filmed myself in nature, sort of DJ-ing various landscapes,” he says.

A CU foundation

Silva traces much of his foundational approach to filmmaking to his time in ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� MFA program.

“I was exposed to many different approaches to working with moving images, including experimental film, video art, performance and new media,” he says.

Just as influential was the support he received along the way.

“My professors encouraged me to follow my own path through those techniques and conceptual strategies, especially around time, presence and process.”

That trio anchors Dirt Nap.

“I think meaning emerges through the variation and duration of the project. It’s a very simple act, but multiplied to this extent it becomes something more epic, or perhaps absurd. I hope viewers oscillate between those readings,” says ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� alumnus Rick Silva.

Silva also found inspiration for the meditative quality of his footage from artists like Roman Signer and Ana Mendieta. While filming, he learned about the early works of Laurie Anderson, another artist who captured herself napping in public.

“I’m a longtime fan of her work and felt connected to her through our napping projects,” he says.

For current students, Silva offers some practical advice rooted in his own trajectory.

“If you can make it financially feasible, I highly recommend taking on an ambitious, self-driven creative project during a summer break.”

He points to an example close to home.

“The creators of South Park made Cannibal! The Musical during a summer break while they were students at CU.”

Ambitious early projects, he says, often echo through the careers of their creators for years.

Learning to look longer

As for Dirt Nap, the cumulative effect of 46 one-minute excerpts challenges viewers with one request: patience. It’s a hard ask in a world consumed by short-form videos and a never-ending tide of “the next big trend.”

Silva often finds himself returning to a quote from composer John Cage: “If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all.”

“That quote took on even more meaning for me during this project, which was both born from and made within that zone of observation and reflection,” Silva recalls.

While appreciating Dirt Nap, viewers start noticing the little things. The flicker of shadows across Silva’s face. The rhythm of his breathing. Grass, trees and water responding to the wind. From one minute to the next, a person lying down outdoors runs the gamut of looking peaceful to looking exposed.

What first appears to be “doing nothing” becomes a sustained practice of attention born from grief and structured by repetition. The act is quiet, even vulnerable, and for Silva, it’s a reminder that nothing is ever truly still.

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CU alum Rick Silva finds meaning in the stillness of the natural world.

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All photos courtesy Mario Gallucci

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