Books

When the microbiome is a family matter

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 15 Sep 2025 16:00:54 +0000

When the microbiome is a family matter Rachel Sauer Mon, 09/15/2025 - 10:00

Cody DeBos

��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� researcher Jessica Finlay wrote and recently published a book with her father about how microbes unlock whole-body health

When Jessica Finlay moved from Canada to Minneapolis for graduate school, she didn’t expect microbes to be part of her academic journey. Now an assistant professor of geography at ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� with a focus on health, neighborhoods and aging, she’s still an unlikely candidate to write a book about the body’s microbiome.

Yet, alongside her father, Brett Finlay, a professor of biochemistry and microbiology at The University of British Columbia, that’s exactly what she has become.

Together, the pair wrote The Microbiome Master Key: Harness Your Microbes to Unlock Whole-Body Health and Lifelong Vitality. Their new book blends cutting-edge science with practical advice for healthier everyday living.

Jessica Finlay (left), a ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� assistant professor of geography, and her father, Brett Finlay (right), a professor of biochemistry and microbiology at The University of British Columbia, together wrote the recently published The Microbiome Master Key: Harness Your Microbes to Unlock Whole-Body Health and Lifelong Vitality. (Photo: Jessica Finlay)

But hiding below the science is a family story that bridges disciplines and perspectives to give readers a better understanding of the hidden ecosystem within everyone.

From aging in place to microbial studies

Jessica’s primary research focuses on how environments affect health, aging and quality of mid- to later-life. She regularly delves into what it means to grow old in different neighborhoods and seeks to understand what people need to stay safe, active and connected.

“I’m a health geographer and environmental gerontologist,” she explains. “I’d never considered microbes as part of my research, but in conversations with my dad, I realized that they are everywhere and underpin many of the processes I study.”

Her interest in aging began during grad school, when she volunteered at community programs for older adults in north Minneapolis. That experience—and the changing urban landscape she witnessed—helped her to develop a dissertation focused on the lived experience of aging in place.

One recurring fear she identified while interviewing 125 older adults was the threat of Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias. Hearing their concerns eventually propelled Jessica to study how neighborhood environments affect dementia risk.

But it wasn’t until she started talking more about her work with her father, a long-time microbial science researcher, that she considered an even smaller-scale environmental factor.

“Microbes are our invisible neighbors and lifelong partners that fundamentally shape our health and well-being,” Jessica says. “When participants in my study are able to exercise, get outside, and socialize, they are swapping microbes and picking up new ones.”

Eat dirt

In 2016, Brett published Let Them Eat Dirt: How Microbes Can Make Your Child Healthier, a popular science book focused on how early microbial exposure supports childhood development.

The public response was positive, but readers kept circling back to one question: “What about the rest of us?”

Preparing for a follow-up, Brett knew his daughter would be the perfect collaborator. Together, they set out to explain gut health in accessible language and explore how microbial ecosystems influence nearly every part of the human body.

The Microbiome Master Key: Harness Your Microbes to Unlock Whole-Body Health and Lifelong Vitality blends cutting-edge science with practical advice for healthier everyday living.

“This book talks about microbiomes all over the body, not just the gut. It also looks at most of the body’s organs and the effect of microbiomes on them. It also provides a list of prescriptive things you can do based on science to improve your health,” Brett says.

That holistic approach was important to both him and Jessica. While Brett reviewed thousands of publications across microbiology and immunology, Jessica took the lead in translating technical insights into clear, practical prose. She also infused the book with narrative storytelling, expert interviews and examples from everyday life.

“We wanted to distill an overwhelming breadth of information into key evidence and studies so that readers have the facts to make health decisions based on what’s right for them,” Jessica explains.

Their core message? Taking care of your microbial health isn’t inherently complicated, but it often requires us to rethink how we move through the world.

As Brett puts it, “Look after your microbes and they will look after you. Eat healthy, exercise, stress less, sleep well, and have a good community of family and friends. All these factors really impact the microbiome.”

Collaborating for a cause

Collaborating on a book is never easy. Doing so across disciplines poses its own challenges, and during the years-long process, Jessica and Brett had to overcome many of them. But they both found the experience deeply rewarding.

Jessica says, “We wanted to continue the conversation from my dad’s first book. I was initially apprehensive to write together, since my depth of knowledge is health geography and environmental gerontology, not microbiology. But it was a true pleasure to collaborate and each [of us brought] distinct skills and knowledge to the book.”

Now, the Finlays hope their book will help people make informed choices about their health, whether it’s deciding if a probiotic is worth the hype or learning how to create healthier environments at home.

“Thankfully it’s relatively simple and hopefully affordable to support your microbes. Eat an array of plant-based foods. Get outside, move your body, and connect with people to swap both conversation and microbes,” Jessica says.

For her, science is about bridging the gap between research and real life—and it’s reflected in her work.

“Life throws us many unexpected situations,” she says, “and knowing the current state of science and what sources to trust can help us make the best decisions for us and those we care about.”

Brett agrees, summing up their shared hope for the book’s impact, saying, “I hope it makes readers aware of the microbiome and how it can affect our well-being.”

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��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� researcher Jessica Finlay wrote and recently published a book with her father about how microbes unlock whole-body health.

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Secrets, spies and a stirred Vesper

Rachel Sauer — Tue, 02 Sep 2025 19:53:24 +0000

Secrets, spies and a stirred Vesper Rachel Sauer Tue, 09/02/2025 - 13:53

Cody DeBos

CU alum mixes CIA career into newly published cocktail memoir

When Robert Dannenberg (IntlAf’78) began photographing cocktails against the backdrop of mountain views from his home in Nederland, Colorado, during the COVID-19 lockdown, it started as a casual hobby. He’d send the photos to a group of retired CIA colleagues, all of them still close after decades of fieldwork and covert operations.

“One of them suggested putting them together in a book,” Dannenberg recalls. “That was the wife of my co-author, Joseph Mullin.”

What started as a way to pass the time soon stirred up something more refined.

��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� alumnus Rob Dannenberg (left) at The Fountain Inn in Washington, D.C., enjoying an Old Fashioned (the cocktail mentioned on p. 52 of A Spy Walked Into A Bar). (Photo: Rob Dannenberg)

“We were reminiscing about various points in our careers where cocktails were important in helping us get the mission accomplished,” he says.

Soon after, A Spy Walked Into A Bar: A Practitioner’s Guide to Cocktail Tradecraft was born. The book blends real-life CIA stories from Dannenberg and Mullin’s careers with the drinks that helped mark the end of a successful operation or the forging of a crucial relationship.

“Cocktails and espionage are linked in real life as well as in fiction like the Ian Fleming novels,” Dannenberg says.

But his book isn’t a James Bond thriller. It’s a memoir in disguise, served shaken, not stirred.

A Cold War toast

For much of his life, Dannenberg worked in the shadows. Before eventually becoming the CIA’s former chief of operations for the Counterterrorism Center, chief of the Central Eurasia Division and head of the Information Operations (Cyber) Center, he was a field agent with boots on the ground.

“I was mostly a Russia guy and did two tours of duty in Moscow,” he says. “I was responsible for the agency’s global collection operations in Russia. Truly important and fascinating work if you consider what is going on in the world today.”

Dannenberg’s career was punctuated by moments where toasting a drink meant more than relaxation. Lifting a glass meant trust, camaraderie or closure. The stories in his book don’t spill classified secrets, but they do offer a glimpse into the rarely discussed human rituals of intelligence work.

The Vesper and the Manhattan

While his book includes everything from the Vesper Martini to bourbon sippers among a carefully curated selection of 58 cocktails, two stand out for Dannenberg.

“My favorite from the book is the Vesper Martini—probably the cocktail most truly associated with Fleming’s James Bond,” he says. “If you watch the movie Casino Royale with Daniel Craig, you will know what I mean.”

But when Dannenberg settles in for a drink of his own, he switches spirits. “If I’m in the mood for a whiskey cocktail, I’m a Manhattan guy,” he adds. “There are several variations of the Manhattan presented in the book.”

These two drinks have special connotations for Dannenberg, who associates each with specific operations he took part in during his career. Readers can find those stories within the pages, he promises.

Rob Dannenberg began photographing cocktails against the backdrop of mountain views from his home in Nederland, Colorado, during the COVID-19 lockdown, sending the photos to a group of retired CIA colleagues. (Photo: Rob Dannenberg)

Better than briefs

After decades of writing intelligence briefings, reports and operational memos, Dannenberg says that A Spy Walked Into A Bar offered a new kind of writing freedom.

Mostly.

“Writing the book was a lot more fun than writing intelligence reports!” he says with a grin. “But one of the agreements you make with the agency when you have a top-secret security clearance is that you have to submit to them for approval anything you write.”

Dannenberg sent in a draft of the manuscript, and, in true CIA fashion, it was returned with numerous redactions.

“I thought the redactions might look amusing to the reader, so we went ahead and left the blacked-out text in the book,” he adds.

Making a difference

Dannenberg’s path to the CIA began at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he studied international affairs.

“I grew up wanting to work overseas,” he says. “While at CU, I narrowed it down to three options: State Department, U.S. military or CIA.”

The CIA called first, and he answered. Dannenberg served through tense political shifts, cyber conflicts and counterterrorism operations during his career. Along the way, he learned the personal cost of the work.

“Being an operations officer (or case officer) in the CIA isn’t easy,” he says. “There is a lot of pressure, a lot of time away from home and family, plenty of risk and times that require patience and persistence.”

Still, Dannenberg believes it was worth it.

“I was privileged to experience things in my career, both good and bad, that I would not have experienced in any other profession. My time at CU set the stage for a career that was more than I could have ever imagined,” he says.

Now retired, Dannenberg remains in touch with many of the colleagues who shaped his career and the book. He also hopes that today’s CU students will consider international affairs and public service.

“We live in dangerous times, and you can make a difference,” he says.

If A Spy Walked Into A Bar proves anything, it’s that even in the secretive world of espionage, stories still find a way to be told— even if the best parts are blacked out.

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CU alum mixes CIA career into newly published cocktail memoir.

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Prof focuses on the brothers behind the fairy tales

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 25 Aug 2025 21:37:22 +0000

Prof focuses on the brothers behind the fairy tales Rachel Sauer Mon, 08/25/2025 - 15:37

Clint Talbott

��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� Ann Schmiesing, professor of German and Scandinavian Studies, publishes first English-language biography in more than five decades on Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm

Once upon a time, a professor volunteered to develop a college course on German fairy tales. She did as she promised, but that was not the end.

“Once I prepared the course and began teaching it, I was just smitten,” says Ann Schmiesing, professor of German and Scandinavian studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, now a world-renowned scholar of the Brothers Grimm.

��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� scholar Ann Schmiesing is author of The Brothers Grimm: A Biography, published last year to wide acclaim and reviewed in publications from The New Yorker to The Times of London.

Schmiesing has written two books on the Brothers Grimm. The most recent, The Brothers Grimm: A Biography, was published last year to wide acclaim and reviewed in publications from The New Yorker to The Times of London. It is the first English-language biography in more than five decades on Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, whose first names (and life stories) are less well-known than their usual moniker, the Brothers Grimm.

Jacob (1785-1863) and Wilhelm (1786-1859) are widely known as collectors of fairy tales, but they were also mythographers, linguists, librarians, civil servants and philologists who, among other things, strove to preserve key elements of German culture.

They produced a vast body of work on mythology and medieval literature, launched on a monumental German dictionary (which they had completed through the letter F by the time they both died), and made groundbreaking linguistic discoveries.

“By and large, people don’t know a whole lot about the Brothers Grimm, and that was one of the reasons why I wanted to write the book,” says Schmiesing, who is also the senior vice chancellor for strategic initiatives at ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ��.

While teaching the course on the Grimm fairy tales, she noted that students were often familiar with some version of the tales, principally through Disney versions or other contemporary retellings of stories like Snow White.

Teaching moral lessons

The Grimms released seven complete and 10 abridged versions of the tales, and the brothers revised the tales over time. Starting with the second edition, for instance, doves peck out the evil stepsisters’ eyes in Cinderella as a punishment for their wickedness. Violence in the tales is rarely gratuitous, Schmiesing says, but in Cinderella and other tales, the Grimms sometimes added violence to teach a moral lesson.

As they edited and revised the tales, she adds, they mediated among different versions and revised them to reflect 19th-century bourgeois norms. For instance, female characters in some tales contribute less dialogue in later editions, Schmiesing says: “Their thoughts are simply paraphrased.”

Similarly, the Grimms adjusted “Hansel and Gretel” to reflect then-contemporary notions of women. In an earlier version, the culprit was their biological mother but in a later version of this tale, a stepmother abandons the children.

“They change that because they feel like they can’t possibly suggest that a biological mother would abandon her children,” Schmiesing says, adding, “Again, that's playing into their 19th-century ideas of women and motherhood.”

The Brothers Grimm: A Biography by ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� Professor Ann Schmiesing is the first English-language biography in more than five decades on Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, whose first names (and life stories) are less well-known than their usual moniker, the Brothers Grimm.

Additionally, some female characters are initially more independent than they appear in later editions, “so the Grimms kind of lessened their independence and increased their dependence on male characters,” Schmiesing says.

Over time, the Grimms also made the tales folksier, adding rhymes and idioms. And the Grimms did not think the tales were just kid stuff. They saw the tales as being interesting to all ages and relevant to German culture, Schmiesing says.

Germany in the Grimms’ lifetime was not politically united, and it was wracked by the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. Their own part of Germany was occupied by the French for a time, and “so they see collecting and publishing fairy tales and other texts . . . as a way forward for Germany,” Schmiesing says.

In the Grimms’ view, if Germans could appreciate their cultural heritage, perhaps they’d be able to assert themselves as a politically united entity: “So it might seem to be naive, but they really thought that their scholarly works, their collections, would also be a path out of the wars,” Schmiesing says.

Asking deep questions

Their scholarship was even broader, however. The brothers were interested in deep questions, such as how languages developed over time, how customs developed over time, how literary texts developed over time, “and that to them is all interwoven.”

Jacob Grimm, in particular, devoted much of his scholarly life not only to literature, but also to legal customs, linguistic study and his German Grammar, which includes his discovery of what is now called Grimm’s Law.

“It’s been said that Grimm’s Law was as important to the humanities as Darwin’s On the Origin of Species is to the sciences,” Schmiesing says.

They did all of this on top of full careers as librarians, university professors, and, in Jacob’s case, a civil servant.

“It’s just extraordinary, the volume of scholarship that they produced,” Schmiesing says, noting their “sheer accomplishments” of “incredible breadth.”

Of the tales themselves, Schmiesing says Rumpelstiltskin is among her favorites. “It is one of the most enigmatic tales in the Grimms’ collection.” The tale can be viewed as being about the forced labor of female characters, disease and disability, or the meaning of spinning straw into gold.

In addition to these and other possible meanings, the tale changes significantly between versions, she notes. In an early version, the woman despairs not because she can’t spin straw into gold, but because she wants to spin yarn but can spin only gold.

“Also, who is Rumpelstiltskin, and what does he represent?”

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��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� Ann Schmiesing, professor of German and Scandinavian Studies, publishes first English-language biography in more than five decades on Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm.

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Top illustration: by Walter Crane from "Household Stories by the Brothers Grimm" (1886).

‘There’s no standard way to be Indian or Indigenous’

Rachel Sauer — Wed, 13 Aug 2025 18:57:35 +0000

‘There’s no standard way to be Indian or Indigenous’ Rachel Sauer Wed, 08/13/2025 - 12:57

Chris Quirk

In new memoir, ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� alumnus Tony Tekaroniake Evans eschews narrow notions of identity, especially Indigenous identity

Of all his childhood memories, one in particular sticks in the mind of Tony Tekaroniake Evans (DistSt'86, focusing on cultural anthropology, biology and geography): In his third-grade class in Georgia, while making decorations for Thanksgiving, his classmates began asking about American Indians.

“Where are they? Can we meet them?” they asked.

“I’m an Indian!” said the young Evans, who had recently begun to learn more about his Mohawk heritage. His teacher replied that, no, the Indians were gone. “The teacher said Indians were extinct,” Evans recalls. “That was a little traumatic, and I realized I was going to have to take what I was learning in school with a grain of salt. After all, my grandmother spoke Mohawk in our house.”

In his new memoir, ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� alumnus Tony Tekaroniake Evans explores history, identity and society through a personal lens, encouraging readers to eschew received and narrow notions of identity, especially Indigenous identity.

Evans recounts the episode in his new memoir, Believing in Indians: a Mixed-Blood Odyssey, published by Basalt Books. In the book, Evans explores history, identity and society through a personal lens. Along the way, he encourages readers to eschew received and narrow notions of identity, especially Indigenous identity.

The author of three books, Evans is also a journalist, historian, columnist and public speaker. He began his career writing for the Santa Fe New Mexican and the Taos News newspapers and since then has written for A&E Networks, History.com, High Country News and Smithsonian’s American Indian magazine. In addition, he has thousands of reporting bylines over the past three decades for the Idaho Mountain Express, his hometown newspaper in Ketchum, Idaho.

“People are so much more interesting than we can realize by glancing at their appearance, or making stereotypical assumptions about someone’s background, knowledge and interests,” he says. “It’s important to hear the details, because details bring us together as human beings, and that’s what I hope I’m doing with my book.”

Telling family stories

The jarring incident in the classroom spurred Evans to ask more questions about his family and background.

“My mother started telling me stories, and that my name, Tekaroniake, meant ‘two skies’ in Mohawk,” he says. “My Aunt Nadine had a medicine pouch made for me, and my mentor, who was also my mother’s childhood friend, Ed Two-Axe Earley, sent me some books from the reservation. That’s where my life journey began—but it didn’t end there.”

One of the questions about identity that Evans weaves through the book is who decides, and on what grounds? “If you tell people you’re Indian, they’re often going to have all these boxes to check—language, fluency, culture. Are you from the reservation? Do you know your history? It just goes on and on,” he says.

“When do you stop being Indian in somebody else’s eyes? When you get a vacuum cleaner? When you do yoga? There’s no standard way to be Indian or Indigenous. My Jewish grandfather was taken in by the Mohawks. He married my grandmother and worked with them building the Manhattan skyline. Did he stop being Jewish?”

In his book, Evans tells ironically of receiving his official registration “as an Indian and a member of the Mohawks of Kanawà:ke Band” from the registrar of Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development of Canada. “Becoming Indian is no simple process,” he writes. “Today, as a newly minted official Indian, I could go down to a nearby reservation and legally take peyote, stay up all night and visit with ancestors in the spirit world. Or I could just stay home and watch PBS Masterpiece programming and have a glass of wine.”

Time spent at CU was rewarding

His interest and investigation of his own identity led Evans to study cultural anthropology at the University of Colorado Boulder.

“I learned a lot of wonderful things at CU and absolutely loved my time there,” he says. “I found that I could learn from many cultures, not just my own. And I learned to interpret Iroquois traditions in my own way. Our Great Law of Peace, perhaps a thousand years old, stems from an experience of compassion and understanding for the pain of others, and how to heal from violence and move on from retribution to a better way of life.”

Evans’ book ranges across cultural topics and religious traditions, and provides numerous history lessons along the way, but stays firmly in the personal throughout. “I realized that the book needed to be about my story and emerging sense of Native values, and all of its quirks and weirdness, and heartache and humor,” he explains.

“Memoir is a really important art form. It is personal and subjective, and also specific. It gets deeper than the ethnographic generalities that people recount in much of the scholarly writing on native history and culture.” Evans also makes a case for what Indigenous people and traditions have to offer the world in a turbulent and uncertain moment: “Indigenous cultures can provide spiritual renewal and a sustainable path forward for humanity.”

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In new memoir, ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� alumnus Tony Tekaroniake Evans eschews narrow notions of identity, especially Indigenous identity.

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The ‘happy haunting’ found in letting words lead

Rachel Sauer — Thu, 24 Jul 2025 13:30:00 +0000

The ‘happy haunting’ found in letting words lead Rachel Sauer Thu, 07/24/2025 - 07:30

Cody DeBos

For poet Stephanie Couey, the inspiration for her new chapbook began with a walk

Some poems begin with grand ideas. Others start with a walk.

For Stephanie Couey, an assistant teaching professor in the University of Colorado Boulder’s Program for Writing and Rhetoric, inspiration often strikes when her feet are moving. The rhythm comes first, and meaning follows.

For Stephanie Couey, an assistant teaching professor in the ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� Program for Writing and Rhetoric, writing inspiration often strikes when her feet are moving.

“Some cluster of words that feels good or rhythmic or perhaps gross in a good way comes to mind,” she says. “I’ll record it in my phone, and everything else usually unfolds outward from there.”

That’s how many of the poems in her latest chapbook, “Quiet Pulse,” began. Fragments of sound or texture unearthed through movement and slowly shaped into verse according to their natural rhythms.

Feeling the language

Rather than starting with a theme in mind, Couey trusts her internal response to language—how syllables feel in the mouth and rhythms pulse on the page—to guide the outcome. Couey’s is a deeply embodied approach to writing that treats poetry not just as a literary act, but also as a physical one.

“I approach the writing process as rooted in the body, which it is,” she says. “I write focused mainly on sound, but I’ll almost inevitably see narrative threads emerge in the process.”

This sensory foundation creates space for emotion, memory and meaning to filter in organically.

“I never set out to write a poem about, for instance, gendered violence, late-stage capitalism or the endangerment and loss of arctic wildlife. But if it’s whirring around in my mind, it will likely come through.”

As Couey penned the poems that would eventually become “Quiet Pulse,” she started to notice they shared textures, recurring images and a certain emotional tenor.

“I don’t know that there’s an originating story or idea in particular,” she says. “But as the writing of these poems happened, I started to see something that a grouping of them was doing that felt related.”

“The title is intended to reflect some of those threads,” Couey notes, “a state of being near death, of being underwater, and/or having the body be silenced—all of which are states the speaker of the poems inhabits throughout the project.”

No shortcuts

Despite their spontaneous beginnings, Couey’s poems are far from effortless.

“They all took a long time to shape, but some came out in draft-form much faster than others,” she admits. “I think it’s like running or any kind of exercise. Some days you are just faster or more efficient, even if you prepared in all the same ways. I wish I knew what made the difference!”

Her willingness to move at the poem’s pace, rather than forcing her own deadline or structure upon it, mirrors her approach to teaching.

“Hopefully these poems create an experience of both beauty and abjection that lingers. A kind of happy haunting,” says Stephanie Couey.

In the classroom, Couey encourages students to pay attention to what their writing is already doing rather than make it conform to a formula.

“When student writers put any amount of effort into their work, they are almost always doing something worthwhile, and I want them to see that and focus on that, then figure out how to move outward from there,” she says.

The same ethos guides her as a poet.

“I try to treat my own poems in the same way, asking: What is the work on the page already trying to do, and how do I make it do that thing more effectively?”

Couey and her students also share a practice that’s become one of her favorite parts of the writing process: embodied journaling. The exercise encourages students to write freely and regularly, without self-editing or judgment, while tuning in to their bodies and surroundings.

“They often speak to the value of writing unself-consciously and engaging with their bodies, their breath and their surroundings,” Couey says, “and of slowing down and truly processing their thoughts and emotions.”

This sentiment, which frequently appears in students’ end-of-semester reflections, reminds Couey to keep her own notebook handy to scribble a thought at the bus stop or capture a mid-walk rhythm before it slips away.

Happy haunting

When “Quiet Pulse” found a home with Dancing Girl Press, Couey was thrilled. Now that her chapbook has been published, she hopes readers walk away from it with a lasting impression, if not a fully definable one.

“Hopefully these poems create an experience of both beauty and abjection that lingers. A kind of happy haunting,” she says.

While poetry remains a core part of her creative practice, Couey is also working on a long-gestating essay project about grief, suicide and the ways stories take shape around loss. She isn’t in a rush to finish. Like her poetry, the project will take the time it needs.

For now, whether she’s drafting verse or guiding students through journaling, Couey will continue to let the writing lead.

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For poet Stephanie Couey, the inspiration for her new chapbook began with a walk.

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Alum thinks about crime the write way

Rachel Sauer — Wed, 21 May 2025 00:01:33 +0000

Alum thinks about crime the write way Rachel Sauer Tue, 05/20/2025 - 18:01

Doug McPherson

What happens when a freshly minted film studies graduate heads out into the world with no particular plan? How A&S alum Patrick Hoffman went from taxi driver to private investigator to successful author

Back in 1998, Patrick Hoffman had just finished his degree in film studies at the University of Colorado Boulder when he decided to head back to his hometown of San Francisco with no real plan in mind for a career.

“I was very green when I came out of college,” says Hoffman. “I didn’t have much street smarts. I’d lived a pretty sheltered life.”

Author Patrick Hoffman, a 1998 ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� film studies graduate, located his newest novel, Friends Helping Friends, in Colorado.

He ended up landing a job as a taxi driver at night and working as a private investigator during the day. “Driving cabs at night in San Francisco and investigating murder cases are very quick ways to learn about the seamier side of life.”

Those lessons in the seamy side of life informed his recently released novel Friends Helping Friends, a thriller set in Grand Junction and Denver, Colorado, that sees its main character infiltrating a white-supremacist compound on the Western Slope.

Before writing his newest novel—or any of his previous and acclaimed ones—Hoffman realized that what he was seeing in his jobs as a private investigator and cab driver might make good grist for fiction.

Easier said than done, though. Hoffman would get started, but after a day or two, his motivation would melt away.

The best writing advice Hoffman ever got came from a friend who asked him what he wanted to do with his life. “I told him I wanted to write thrillers. He asked what was stopping me. I told him that whenever I started something I felt great at first … but then on the second or third day, the inspiration would go away, and I’d feel like a complete fraud.”

Hoffman’s friend then told him that the bad feelings were actually a good sign, and that the secret was to just embrace those feelings and keep going. “I literally started my first book the very next day and everything that has followed can be traced directly back to that conversation.”

It all started in film classes

Hoffman adds that his film classes were “where it all started.” Those days, he was thinking about very basic things like story and plot. “But those were important questions, and you really get to wrestle with them when you’re studying something like film. I had great teachers, too: Jerry Aronson, Marian Keane and, of course, the legend Stan Brakhage. I also had wonderful philosophy teachers. Gary Stahl, may he rest in peace, comes to mind. The English and Humanities Departments were wonderful, too.”

Following his friend’s advice, and armed with the basics from his ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� classes, Hoffman turned out his first novel, The White Van, set in San Francisco and about a troubled young woman wanted for bank robbery and hunted by a corrupt cop who wants the money more than justice.

��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� alumnus Patrick Hoffman drew on his experience as a private investigator to write his new novel, Friends Helping Friends.

Hoffman is adapting that book into a movie. “Hopefully that happens,” he says.

His second novel, Every Man A Menace, was also set in San Francisco. Clean Hands, his third novel, was set in New York City, where he lives now.

And his latest novel, Friends Helping Friends, takes place in Denver and Grand Junction, Colorado. “For this one, it was time to come back home to Colorado,” he says. “There is a certain comfort in it. Also, Denver makes a great setting for a neo-western noir.”

He admits that before his last novel, he was kind of blocked for about eight months, having a hard time coming up with ideas. “One day I literally just started typing. I thought, ‘OK, there’s a woman in Denver, she’s a lawyer and she’s using steroids, and that was the start of the book. I went blindly from there. That’s how I do it, though. The tricky part is getting started.

“For me, writing fiction is 100% about overcoming self-doubt, being able to see something through to the end. The hard part is always starting the book. But then the middle and ends, of course, are hard, too.”

Part of Friends Helping Friends takes place in a white-supremacist compound. To understand that arena, Hoffman says his 20 years working as a private investigator (he still does it) and handling many murder cases helped.

“So, all of that, of course, informs the fiction. But also, I’ll just Google around and look for federal cases.” And he searches public records for indictments. “I love talking to journalists, too. My wife is a journalist, so she gives me introductions to her friends and colleagues, and I force them to answer all my questions.”

Up next for Hoffman is another book—this one set in Boulder, a place he’s now reminded of regularly when riding the subway in New York.

“It’s been amazing to see Coach Prime make CU trendy. I see people wearing CU Buffalo jerseys and jackets. I’m just like wow! It’s amazing. Go Buffs!”

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‘Just being visible is an act of resistance’

Rachel Sauer — Tue, 13 May 2025 23:23:22 +0000

‘Just being visible is an act of resistance’ Rachel Sauer Tue, 05/13/2025 - 17:23

Collette Mace

In acclaimed new novel, ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� Professor Stephen Graham Jones explores ideas of ‘what an Indian is or isn’t’

When horror author Stephen Graham Jones was teaching his graduate seminar on monsters, he made sure to have his class spend some time on The Lesser Dead, a vampire novel written by Christopher Buehlman in 2014. He remembers thinking, “What’s the point of anyone else writing vampires ever again, when Buehlman has already done it so perfectly?”

Nevertheless, he decided to try doing just that. The idea he started out with was a single image of a small church with a dwindling congregation. At the end of the sermon, everyone leaves except for “one Indian guy sitting in the back, staring at the pastor through darkened glasses and (with) a jaded expression,” Jones says. With that and his self-defined challenge to write a vampire novel that had never been done before, his recently published novel The Buffalo Hunter Hunter—widely hailed as a horror masterpiece—was dreamed into existence.

Novels like this, which are centered around Indigenous stories and values, are important for many reasons, says Jones, a University of Colorado Boulder professor of distinction in the Department of English. Specifically, he sees writing by Indigenous authors as a reminder that “we, Indians who shouldn’t be around anymore, are still here. Just being visible is an act of resistance.”

In his new novel The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, Stephen Graham Jones, a ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� professor of distinction in the Department of English, centers around Indigenous stories and values.

Jones likes to play into the narrative that Indigenous people don’t always match up with the stereotypes forced onto them in post-colonial America. In fact, he employs stereotypes as a narrative tool often in his novels, including in The Buffalo Hunter Hunter. He uses his pastor character, Arthur, as an embodiment of what he perceives to be American ideas of “what an Indian is or isn’t,” and distorts these preconceived notions to further the novel’s horror.

He also plays with the ideas of stereotypes and performativity later in the novel, when a non-Indigenous character abuses his power and knowledge by pretending to be Indigenous himself. Jones says this event was inspired by the short story “Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience” by Rebecca Roanhorse, which also examines stereotypes of what it means to be Indigenous and how society tends to accept caricatures of Indigeneity—mostly because of the stereotypes we’ve been fed in the media all our lives, Jones says.

The irony in both Jones’ and Roanhorse’s work is that the actual Indigenous characters are cast aside and told that they are, in fact, the inauthentic ones.

Stories within stories

Another distinctive characteristic of The Buffalo Hunter Hunter is that it’s a nest narrative. Readers get three perspectives throughout the novel, beginning with the Native character’s stories, which are recorded in a journal by the pastor, Arthur, and then read by Arthur’s many-time-great niece, Etsy. “Etsy wasn’t originally part of the story,” Jones says, “but I found that I needed her perspective in 2013 in order to really probe where I wanted to in the story.”

That’s one of his favorite things about writing horror, Jones says: The stakes in horror novels are high, and readers often know immediately where the central conflict lies. This leaves room in the text to take a deeper look and probe who and what makes good horror, and why it makes us feel that sense of fear, disturbance or unease.

Jones likes to explore inner turmoil and complications within his characters. For example, he wants it to be clear from the beginning that Arthur’s definitely not the protagonist in the story, and yet he wants the reader to be endeared to the pastor from the first journal entry. This again plays with the idea of Arthur’s position and preconceived notions of being an American “everyman,” illustrating how Jones can flip stereotypes on their heads to create additional nuances.

Research was a big part of the conceptualization of the novel. Jones knew he wanted to have a location central to the buffalo hunts of the early 20th century, and through both travel knowledge and online research, he landed on the real-life Miles City, Montana. Miles City served as a multicultural hub at the time, where many trappers and hunters sold their trophies, most often beaver and buffalo hides taken from the nearby Blackfoot reservation.

Good Stab, the Indigenous man at the back of the church, hails from that reservation. Jones also discovered that there was a strong Baptist presence in Miles City in the early 20th century and positioned Arthur as a Baptist preacher for that reason.

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In acclaimed new novel, ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� Professor Stephen Graham Jones explores ideas of ‘what an Indian is or isn’t.’

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Dropping perfectionism and embracing purpose and joy

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 07 Apr 2025 15:22:31 +0000

Dropping perfectionism and embracing purpose and joy Rachel Sauer Mon, 04/07/2025 - 09:22

Pam Moore

��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� alumna Julie Chavez reflects on her new memoir, which chronicles her journey through a mental health crisis to finding a new motto: ‘Be adequate’

When Julie Chavez (Span’00) graduated from the University of Colorado Boulder with a major in Spanish language and literature, she didn’t see herself becoming an author. As a self-proclaimed “lifelong reader” who blogged for fun, she’d been told many times that she should write a book.

Although flattered, Chavez, who lives in Pleasanton, California, with her husband Mando Chavez, a 1999 ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� graduate, and their two sons, was comfortable in her role as a librarian at her sons’ school. And besides, she says, “I didn’t know what I wanted my story to be.”

��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� alumna Julie Chavez (Span’00) describes learning to advocate for herself and let go of her perfectionist tendencies, embracing the motto “be adequate,” in her memoir Everyone But Myself.

That is, until her story found her.

When anxiety and perfectionism culminated in a debilitating panic attack and a paralyzing sense that she was always falling short no matter how hard she tried, Chavez’s world irrevocably changed.

After navigating many obstacles to accessing mental health services, working with a therapist to put her own proverbial oxygen mask on before tending to her family and finally learning to advocate for herself and let go of her perfectionist tendencies, she emerged with a new motto— “be adequate”—and the idea for the book she needed to write.

Told with humor and honesty, Chavez’s new memoir, Everyone But Myself, released last year and named a Washington Post noteworthy book and a USA Today bestseller, chronicles her journey from the depths of a crushing mental health crisis to a life filled with joy and purpose. Chavez spoke with Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine to explain the story behind the story.

Question: What motivated you to write Everyone But Myself?

Chavez: I knew that if I was going to write a book, it would have to have value for readers. Even though I loved writing, I didn’t see myself as a fiction writer and I didn’t think I had a story to tell.

But then I had my annual review with my principal. Over the prior year, my mental health had taken a nosedive, and I thanked her for having shared her own struggles with me during that time. Her candor really helped me through what I call my ‘mid-mom crisis’—which I later learned is something that many over-extended working moms struggle with as our elementary grade kids grow into humans who don’t need us intensely as they once did.

She said, ‘That’s what you should write your book about.’ That was when I realized that my story could truly be helpful for someone else.

Question: Who is Everyone But Myself for?

Chavez: I wish it hadn’t taken debilitating anxiety for me to finally understand that my self-care and creating boundaries around my own happiness was not only good, but necessary.

So, I wrote this for all the readers who see themselves in my story. It’s for the perfectionist moms, the anxious moms, the moms who, in trying to do their best for their families, have inadvertently abandoned themselves.

In her memoir Everyone But Myself, ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� alumna Julie Chavez chronicles her journey from the depths of a crushing mental health crisis to a life filled with joy and purpose.

It’s also for all the moms who feel they don’t ‘deserve’ help. I love my life and my family so much. I feel grateful that I get to live a relatively comfortable life. And yet, even with all the privilege I’ve been afforded, I was taken aback at how aggressively and how quickly my mental health declined—and how hard it was to find a therapist when I needed one.

We tend to put our suffering on a ‘sliding scale’ or to minimize it by comparing it to other people’s problems but the truth is, when it’s hard, it’s hard, and it’s OK to ask for help.

Question: What challenges did you encounter on the road to publication?

Chavez: The book you have in your hands is my fourth rewrite. I can’t tell you how many times I asked myself whether it was worth it.

I started writing in the spring of 2019 and by the end of the year I had 30,000 words, which I thought was a book. It wasn’t. Then, I attended a class on publishing, where I learned that without a platform, it would be extremely difficult to find a publisher, particularly for a memoir.

So, I started working with a hybrid publisher, who recommended a rewrite. Meanwhile, [publisher] Zibby Owens’ Book Club published an essay of mine, which was an excerpt from the book, which did really well. Zibby ended up taking me on as one of her first acquisitions, and I parted ways with the hybrid publisher.

Following advice from Zibby’s team, I started a fresh rewrite. Instead of a memoir, it was an essay collection, but it just didn’t work. So now, I had an agent and I was starting with a blank page, which is actually kind of backward. Usually you get an agent once you have a fully written manuscript. I finished that version in December of 2022 and the book was published just over two years later.

Through it all, I had to re-learn the same lesson I learned in the pages of my book—that I had to keep showing up, remember my “why,” and not be too attached to the outcome.

Question: What has surprised you over the course of your publishing journey?

Chavez: There’s been a surprising number of women who have said, ‘You are telling my exact story.’ So many have said that after reading my story, they understand what they’re going through, which has been wonderful.

That was always my hope—that my book could be a friend to them and to open the door to the kinds of conversations we need to have.

But my favorite thing is when someone says they’re giving it to a friend or asks me to sign it for their sister.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� alumna Julie Chavez reflects on her new memoir, which chronicles her journey through a mental health crisis to finding a new motto: ‘Be adequate.’

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��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� religious studies professor says Twelver Shi’ism is open to discourse

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 17 Mar 2025 15:09:22 +0000

��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� religious studies professor says Twelver Shi’ism is open to discourse Rachel Sauer Mon, 03/17/2025 - 09:09

Bradley Worrell

Associate Professor Aun Hasan Ali’s book about Islam’s School of Hillah explores the dynamics and formation of Twelver Shi’ism, arguing that the faith was open to diverse intellectual traditions

Twelver Shi’ism, the largest branch of Shi’ite Islam, tends to be viewed as fundamentally authoritarian, particularly as seen through the lens of the ideology of the Iranian government.

Aun Hasan Ali, associate professor in the University of Colorado Boulder Department of Religious Studies whose area of focus is on Islamic intellectual history, particularly pre-modern Twelver Shi’i traditions, says he believes that modern perceptions of the faith have been colored by the 1979 Iranian Revolution.

“It was an unprecedented moment in a lot of ways, because for the first time in the history of Shi’ism, you had a theory of government where the jurist was the head of the state,” he says. “Traditionally, there was always a kind of separation between those two spheres.”

Aun Hasan Ali, ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� associate professor of religious studies, argues that modern perceptions of Twelver Shi'ism have been colored by the 1979 Iranian Revolution.

As a result, Ali says the idea took root among some in the West and also in the Muslim Sunni tradition that Shi’i clerics were free to make whatever political or religious decisions they pleased, because they were not bound by the history of tradition. However, that’s not an accurate portrayal of how jurists and other followers come to decisions in Twelver Shi’i religious tradition, he adds.

Instead, Ali makes the case that Twelver Shi’ism is better understood as a “discursive tradition,” which, as defined by noted cultural anthropologist Talal Asad, involves researching foundational Islamic texts, such as the Quran and the writings of exemplary historical Shi’i religious figures, for context. Ali says his own definition of discursive tradition is tied less to foundational texts and more to how noted Shi’i religious figures interpreted those texts, as that is how most followers of the faith first engage on religious topics.

“In the same way that someone addressing ethics in contemporary philosophy needs to address (Immanuel) Kant, for instance, I view that as a parameter of the conversation,” he explains. “Similarly, when it comes to Islamic tradition, there are important figures that one needs to address. So, in the simplest terms, a discursive tradition should be thought of as a conversation across time and space among experts.”

In contrast to the idea that scholars make decisions based solely upon their authority, Ali contends that thinking of the Twelver Shi’i faith as a discursive tradition means the faith continually remains open to discussion, debate, mediation and modification.

Ali’s ideas on discursive tradition were shaped in part by his PhD dissertation on the School of Hillah, a center of religious learning that played a major role in preserving and promoting Twelver Shi’i Islamic religious traditions, while also being open to integrating diverse intellectual traditions, during its formative years, from the 12th to 14th centuries. Ali’s revised dissertation was published in 2023 by I.B. Taurus as the book, The School of Hillah and the Formation of Twelver Shi’i Islamic Tradition, which is being translated into Arabic for wider distribution.

Recently, Ali spoke with Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine about the importance of the School of Hillah in the formation of Twelver Shi’ism and its profound effect on the Shi’i faith today. His answers have been lightly edited and condensed for space considerations.

Question: Why does the School of Hillah take root in what is now southern Iraq?

Ali: Hillah becomes a center of scholarship for two reasons. One is that you have a (regional) Shi’i dynasty come to power that patronizes these scholars. The second reason is that you have the Mongol invasion in the 13th century, which pushes a lot of people looking to escape that devastation southward.

So, you end up with a concentration of scholars who are sought-after in the region. People travel to Hillah from the Levant, from Bahrain and from Iran. They travel there because they were seeking expert education, and the major figures of Hillah were the undisputed experts. (Students) came there to receive that kind of education in the same way that today somebody might come to CU seeking a world-class program in astrophysics. The same thing was happening in Hillah; they came there to learn from these masters.

With the Mongol invasion, sure, there’s devastation, but there are also opportunities. There are trade routes that enrich particular families in the area, and, as we all know, education requires money, so the influx of wealth also becomes a reason why they’re able to offer patronage to those scholars.

In The School of Hillah and the Formation of Twelver Shi’i Islamic Tradition, which is being translated into Arabic for wider distribution, author Aun Hasan Ali explores the School of Hillah, a center of religious learning that played a major role in preserving and promoting Twelver Shi’i Islamic religious traditions.

Question: Is the School of Hillah equivalent to what we would think of today as a university or maybe a seminary?

Ali: Certainly, it’s different in the sense that it’s not primarily organized in brick-and-mortar institutions. It’s more unstructured. Classes took place in the home of an individual, a prominent scholar.

It’s similar in the sense of curriculum. What I mean is that certain texts come to be understood as definitive of a tradition. And that’s part of the reason why Hillah is so important. A lot of the texts that we think of today as being definitive of Shi’i tradition were written in Hillah and continue to be studied today, so we can think of it in terms of there is, not uniformity, but an expectation that anybody who masters this tradition would read these texts. In that sense, it’s similar.

It’s also similar in the sense of structures of authority. Just as someone wishing to put forth a view in, let’s say, American jurisprudence, has to engage particular jurists; similarly, somebody wishing to put forward a view in Shi’i theology has to engage with the views of particular jurists. So, structures of authority can be similar in that way. The idea of a curriculum can be similar in that way, but it’s not organized as a single space in primarily brick-and-mortar institutions.

That was actually one of the points in the book. The organizing principle of the School of Hillah is these large families in which particular types of expertise is concentrated. So, one family may have an expertise in genealogy; another family may have an expertise in philosophy; while another family may have an expertise in law. These large families (in the community) structure the School of Hillah. And, of course, people intermarry between these families, so it becomes a network of intellectuals.

Question: For the students who completed their studies at Hillah, did they generally go on to become clerics and religious scholars?

Ali: If we look at the contemporary Twelver Shi’i tradition, it runs the full gamut. Before you have modern schools, people learn basic numeracy and literacy in religious institutions, which is the same as it was in the West.

Some of those people, after getting basic literacy and numeracy, go on to become merchants or preachers, for example. A smaller group will become teachers within the institution, and then a (small percentage) of those will become the next generation of masters of the tradition. Most people don’t reach that level, because it takes a long time—we’re talking maybe 20 years or more—to be considered competent within that tradition. It’s a very grueling process, and most people leave before they finish the entire process.

Question: Can you talk about how your idea of discursive tradition contrasts with the idea of jurists having the authority to make whatever decisions they want?

Ali: That’s exactly the idea I was pushing back against in the book—this kind of free-for-all idea about authority. That’s not to say authority isn’t important, or that jurists don’t exercise that kind of authority. But again, they do it within the horizons of possibility that are shaped by discursive tradition, as a conversation across space and time.

And yes, there’s a kind of push and pull where a really important figure can push a conversation forward, can expand at the horizons of possibility, but it’s not an arbitrary process. It’s a process that’s linked to the past at the same time that it looks ahead.

Question: Were there any major developments or contributions that came out of the School of Hillah that made a profound impact on Islam today?

Ali: Philosophy becoming integrated into theology is something that we can look to Hillah for, within the Shi’i world. That development takes place earlier within the Sunni world, but in the Shi’i world, Avicenna’s philosophy, or Avicenna’s metaphysics, comes to be integrated into Shi’i theology. In that time period, the integration of mysticism into Shi’ism is also something that happens in Hillah.

"There’s a kind of push and pull where a really important figure can push a conversation forward, can expand at the horizons of possibility, but it’s not an arbitrary process. It’s a process that’s linked to the past at the same time that it looks ahead."

When we think of (Islamic) law, that’s really one of the most important contributions that happens at Hillah, and you see the integration of advanced mathematics and advanced science into law. For example, in Islamic law, figuring out the direction of prayer from a distance, given the curvature of the earth is also a complicated thing, which leads to advanced discussions of science and mathematics integrated into the chapter on ritual prayer, for instance. Those would be a few examples.

At Hillah, you also have the production of these kinds of biographical dictionaries. So, when Muslims evaluate a piece of information, part of the way they evaluate it is by looking at who communicated that information. You can imagine that it would be very useful to have a kind of a biographical dictionary, where you could look up a particular individual and see what they were like. Were they known to be somebody who had scholarly expertise? Were they known to be somebody who was an upright person? Or were they known to be unscrupulous in the way that they narrated information? These kinds of biographical dictionaries, which facilitate legal discussions and conversations, were produced at Hillah.

Question: Despite the School of Hillah’s contributions to Islamic thought, you say there is not much scholarship about it. Why do you think that is?

Ali: I believe a lot of it has to do with the history of Islamic studies in the West—and that only in recent years has Shi’ism gotten the attention it deserved. Previously, scholars who studied Islam largely dealt with Sunni sources. And so, even when they talked about Shi’ism, they were talking about it through the lens of Sunni authors and Sunni sources.

This is despite the fact that Shi’ites—while making up somewhere between 15 and 20 percent of the (Muslim) population—their contributions, intellectually, to Islamic tradition has been disproportionate.

Things started to change in the 1980s and 1990s, but even among scholars focused on Shi’ism, they have tended to focus on its origins, or trying to explain how the Iranian Revolution happened, so in both of those ways Hillah was ignored.

Question: Do you have any particular hopes for your book?

Ali: In general, the book has been received well. I think that people (in Islamic studies) recognize this was a crucial period in Shi’i religious history that hadn’t really been sketched out the way I did in the book.

In terms of contributing to a broader discussion, my hope is the book brings together theoretical conversations in religious studies with meticulous historical scholarship. In Islamic studies, it’s sometimes separated by people who do theoretically rigorous projects and people who do meticulous historical scholarship. I tried to do both, and I hope that the book contributes to bridging the gap between these two different approaches within Islamic studies.

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Associate Professor Aun Hasan Ali’s book about Islam’s School of Hillah explores the dynamics and formation of Twelver Shi’ism, arguing that the faith was open to diverse intellectual traditions.

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Historian still making a strong case for Black Majority

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 06 Jan 2025 22:53:30 +0000

Historian still making a strong case for Black Majority Rachel Sauer Mon, 01/06/2025 - 15:53

Bradley Worrell

CU Adjunct Professor Peter H. Wood’s seminal 1974 book on race, rice and rebellion in Colonial America recently celebrated its 50th anniversary with an updated version

If Peter H. Wood wants to stump some University of Colorado history majors about early American history, he’ll ask them which of the original 13 colonies was the wealthiest before the American Revolution and also had an African American majority at the time.

“Often, they will see it as a trick question. Some might guess New Jersey or New York or Connecticut, so most people have no idea of the correct answer, which is South Carolina,” says Wood, a former Rhodes Scholar and a Duke University emeritus professor. He came to the ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� Department of History as an adjunct professor in 2012, when his wife, Distinguished Professor Emerita Elizabeth Fenn, joined the department.

Peter H. Wood has been an associate professor at ��Ҵ�ý�ƽ�� for more than a dozen years, following a lengthy career teaching American history at Duke University.

South Carolina colonial history is a topic with which Wood is intimately familiar, having written the book Black Majority: Race, Rice and Rebellion in South Carolina, which was first published in 1974 and has been described as one of the most influential books on the history of the American South of the past 50 years. W. W. Norton published a 50th anniversary edition of the book in 2024.

Recently, Wood spoke with Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine about how he first brought the story of colonial South Carolina to light, reflecting on how the book was received at the time and why this part of history remains relevant today. His responses have been lightly edited for style and condensed for clarity.

Question: How did you become aware of this story of colonial South Carolina, which was unfamiliar to many Americans in 1974 and perhaps still is today?

Wood: I knew when I was an undergraduate that I wanted to study early American history. After a two-year stint at Oxford in the mid-1960s, I came back to Harvard for graduate school.

At that time, the Civil Rights Movement was going on. I’d been very interested in those events, as most of my generation was, and I wanted to see how I could put together my interest in interracial problems with my interest in early American history.

What I found was that early American history was very New England-oriented in those days. Ivy League schools were cranking out people writing about the Puritans, and when they wrote about the South, they would mainly write about Virginia. They talked about Jefferson and Washington. South Carolina had hardly been explored at all. There are only 13 British mainland colonies, after all, so to find that one of them had scarcely been studied was exciting.

Specifically, I was motivated by the Detroit riot in 1967, watching it unfold on television in the summer of 1967. Roger Mudd, the old CBS reporter, was flying over Detroit in a helicopter the way he’d been flying over Vietnam. He was saying, ‘I don’t know what’s going on down there.’ I realized that he was supposed to be explaining it to us, but he didn’t really have a very good feel for it himself. No white reporters did.

And the very next morning I went into Widener Library at Harvard and started looking at colonial history books to see if any of them covered Black history in the very early period … and South Carolina was completely blank. So, that was what set me going.

Question: If there wasn’t any significant scholarship about South Carolina prior to the American Revolution, particularly about African Americans living there, how did you conduct research for your book?

Wood: I went to the South Carolina State Archives in Columbia, not knowing what I would be able to find. I understood that if I did find materials, they would be written by the white colonists … because enslaved African Americans were not allowed to read and write. There wasn’t going to be anybody who was African American keeping a diary.

But what I did find was that the records were abundant. That’s partly because these enslaved people were being treated as property; they had a financial value. So, when I would open a book, there would be nothing in the index under ‘Negroes’ (that was the word used in those days). But I would look through the book itself and there were all kinds of references to them. They just hadn’t been indexed, because they weren’t considered important.

At every turn, there was more material than I expected, and often dealing with significant issues. …

And when you’re researching early African American history, you learn to read those documents critically. The silver lining of that sort of difficult research is that it forces you to be interdisciplinary and to use any approach you can.

Black Majority by CU Associate Professor Peter H. Wood was updated for its 50th anniversary in 2024. First published in 1974, the book broke new ground in showing how important slaves were to the South Carolina economy in Colonial times.

So, I ended up using some linguistics and some medical history (about malaria) and especially some agricultural history. Most people back then—and most Americans still today—don’t realize that the key product in South Carolina was rice. I argued successfully and for the first time in this book that it seemed to have originated with the enslaved Africans. The gist of the book is that these people were not unskilled labor; they were skilled and knowledgeable labor, and it was a West African product (rice) that made South Carolina the richest of the 13 colonies.

Question: With regard to Black Majority, you made the statement, ‘Demography matters.’ What do you mean by that?

Wood: I realized early on that demography was a very radical tool in the sense that it obliges you, or allows you, to treat everybody equally. In other words, to be a good demographer, you have to count everybody: Men, women and children, Black and white, gay and straight—everybody counts equally. As a born egalitarian, that was appealing, especially in a period where there were lots of radical ideas bouncing around that I was a little leery of.

But demography seems very straightforward, as in: All I have to do is count people. So, the very title of the book, Black Majority, is a demographic statement. It’s not saying, ‘These people are good or bad’ or anything else. It’s just saying, ‘Here they are.’ It becomes what I call a Rorschach test, meaning it’s up to the reader as to what they want to make out of these basic facts. …

The book—especially in those days—was particularly exciting for young African Americans, because they’d been told they didn’t have any history, or that it was inaccessible.

Remember, this was even before Alex Haley had published Roots. I actually met Alex while he was working on his book, because I was one of the only people he could find who was interested in slavery before the American Revolution. Most of the people who were studying Black history—which was only a very small, emerging field in those days—were either studying modern-day Civil Rights activities and Jim Crow activities, or maybe the Civil War and antebellum cotton plantations.

Question: You initially undertook your research on this topic to write your PhD dissertation. At what point in the process did you think your findings could make for a good, informative book?

Wood: Very early on, I thought I wanted to write a book. I mean, I wanted to be able to publish something and I wanted to start at the beginning. … If I could go all the way back to 1670, when this colony began, and find records, and tell the story moving forward—instead of going backwards from the Civil Rights movement—I wanted to do that.

If I could write a book about that, then it would show lots of other people that they could write a book about Blacks in 18th-century Georgia or 19th-century Alabama, for example. All of those topics had seemed off limits at the time.

So, I was going to start at the beginning and move forward and see how far I had to go to get a book. I thought, ‘I’ll probably have to go up to 1820,’ but by the time I got to 1740, by the time I got through the Stono Rebellion—which was the largest rebellion in Colonial North America, in 1739, and it was unknown to people—I had enough for a book.

I had enough (material) for a dissertation so I could get my degree, but I also had enough for a book. And, luckily for me, it was just at the time when there was a lot of pressure on universities to create Black Studies programs, in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

That put a lot of pressure on New York publishers to find books about Black history. And so, Alfred Knopf in New York took the book and gave me a contract within two weeks. I was very lucky in that regard: That was a moment where it was just dawning on everybody that, ‘My goodness! There’s a huge area here where we have not shone a searchlight.’ …

I'll tell you a funny story. At Knopf, they said, ‘You should go talk to our publicity director,’ because they were excited about this book. I walked into her office, and she was this burly, blonde advertising woman. Her face just dropped. She said, ‘Oh, Dr. Wood, I thought you were Black!’ And then she brightened up. ‘That’s all right,’ she said. ‘I'll get you on the radio.’ (laughs)

Peter H. Wood, here exploring chimney remains, is revising his book Strange New Land: Africans in Colonial America, which will be published in an expanded edition this year.

So, that just illustrates, if I’d been Black, it would have been even better, but at that point, anything was grist for the mill, especially if it was opening up new territory in American history.

Question: That actually raises a question: Did you face any criticism as a white author writing about Black history, like author William Styron did?

Wood: That was the controversy about William Styron’s 1967 book, The Confessions of Nat Turner. Styron was a white Connecticut author, and quite well-informed and well-intended. He had been raised in Virginia himself, so he’d grown up with versions of this story.

He was not a historian. Still, he wanted to try to write about Nat Turner’s rebellion from Turner’s perspective. So, he had the freedom of a novelist, of trying to put himself inside Nat Turner’s head. That effort was troublesome to a lot of folks.

It bothered some Black folks because it was a white author trying to do that and showing a complicated version of things. It was also upsetting to some white folks. If they knew about Nat Turner at all, it was that he was some crazy madman who killed people, so the idea that you should try to get inside his head, that was upsetting to them.

But, in answer to your question, I was lucky in that … the critique that white people shouldn’t do Black history had not really taken hold. At that time (1974), very little was being written about African Americans in Colonial times … and so there was a desire for anything that could shine some light on the subject.

Question: Why do you think Black Majority has maintained its staying power over the years? And what changes were made for the 50th-anniversary edition that W. W. Norton published?

Wood: As I’ve said, it came along at the right time. Along with other works, it opened up a whole new area, and so early African American history is now a very active field.

When I did the revisions for this 50th-anniversary edition, I didn’t change it drastically, because it is a product of the early 1970s, of 50 years ago. I think the points I made then have held up pretty well. That’s why I’d say it has been influential in the academic community, but for the general public, not so much.

Question: Why do you think that is?

Wood: It’s very hard to change the mainstream narrative, especially in regard to our childhood education about early American history. From elementary school on, we hear about Jamestown and about the Puritans; we learn that colonists grew tobacco in Virginia, but almost nothing beyond that. …

I think that’s part of our failing over the last 50 years. The idea of having a national story that everyone can agree upon has fallen apart, and I wish we could knit it back together. It may be too little, too late. But if we if we can ever manage to knit it back together in a more thorough, honest way, African Americans in Colonial times will be one of the early chapters.

Twenty years ago, I worked on a very successful U.S. history textbook called Created Equal, where I wrote the first six chapters. Even then, our team was trying to tie all of American history together in a new and inclusive way—one that everyone could understand and share and discuss. … I hope that book, and Black Majority, is more relevant than ever.

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CU Adjunct Professor Peter H. Wood’s seminal 1974 book on race, rice and rebellion in Colonial America recently celebrated its 50th anniversary with an updated version.

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Top image: Remnants of rice fields along the Combahee River in South Carolina. (Photo: David Soliday/National Museum of African American History and Culture)

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