Faculty

Paul Sutter honored as 2024 Professor of Distinction

Anonymous — Fri, 18 Oct 2024 21:28:50 +0000

Paul Sutter honored as 2024 Professor of Distinction Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 10/18/2024 - 15:28

College of Arts and Sciences leadership and peers recognize history professor’s service, teaching and research with the award

Paul Sutter, a University of Colorado Boulder professor of history, has been named the 2024 College Professor of Distinction by the College of Arts and Sciences in recognition of his exceptional service, teaching and research.

The college presents this prestigious award annually to current faculty members who are scholars and artists of national and international renown and who are recognized by their college peers as teachers and colleagues of exceptional talent. Honorees hold this title for the remainder of their careers in the College of Arts and Sciences at CU Boulder.

“Being named a Professor of Distinction is a career honor, and I am deeply appreciative of my wonderful colleagues in the History Department who nominated me for this award, and those around campus who supported my nomination,” Sutter notes.

Sutter’s research focus is U.S. and global environmental history. He is the author of Driven Wild: How the Fight against Automobiles Launched the Modern Wilderness Movement (2002) and Let Us Now Praise Famous Gullies: Providence Canyon and the Soils of the South (2015).

CU Boulder Professor Paul Sutter is the author of many accalimed essays and books, including Driven Wild: How the Fight against Automobiles Launched the Modern Wilderness Movement and Let Us Now Praise Famous Gullies: Providence Canyon and the Soils of the South.

In Driven Wild, Sutter details an aspect of his longtime intellectual fascination with wilderness and U.S. environmental history: “Historians had long studied the centrality of the wilderness idea in American history, from its importation as a filter for viewing the colonial landscape to its role as a shibboleth of the postwar environmental movement, and I was fascinated by the same questions that preoccupied many of these scholars: How was it that a nation founded upon an antipathy for the wilderness had come to cherish and protect it? What had produced this intellectual and cultural sea change?”

In addition, Sutter is the co-author of The Art of Managing Longleaf: A Personal History of the Stoddard Neel Approach (with Leon Neel and Albert Way, 2010), and the co-editor of Environmental History and the American South: A Reader (with Christopher Manganiello, 2009) and Coastal Nature, Coastal Culture: Environmental Histories of the Georgia Coast (with Paul Pressly, 2018).

His current book project, Pulling the Teeth of the Tropics: Environment, Disease, Race, and the U.S. Sanitary Program in Panama, 1904-1914, is an environmental and public health history of the construction of the Panama Canal.

In addition to his books, Sutter has also written a number of influential essays on environmental historiography, including a state-of-the-field essay in the Journal of American History (June 2013), and he is the series editor for Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books, published by the University of Washington Press. He has received major fellowships from the Smithsonian Institution, the Huntington Library, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Library of Medicine/National Institutes of Health, the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, and the National Humanities Center.

Sutter earned his BA in American studies from Hamilton College and his PhD from the University of Kansas. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Virginia from 1997 to 2000 and a member of the History Department at the University of Georgia from 2000 to 2009. He joined CU Boulder as an associate professor of history in 2009 and was named professor in 2016.

Sutter served as Department of History chair from 2017-2021. He is a faculty affiliate in the Department of Environmental Studies and in the Center of the American West, and he has just joined the Advisory Board of the Ted Scripps Fellowships in Environmental Journalism.

Did you enjoy this article? Subcribe to our newsletter. Passionate about history? Show your support.

College of Arts and Sciences leadership and peers recognize history professor’s service, teaching and research with the award.

Traditional

White

A reincarnated Elizabeth I greets friendly audiences, even in Scotland

Anonymous — Tue, 15 Oct 2024 20:09:27 +0000

A reincarnated Elizabeth I greets friendly audiences, even in Scotland Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 10/15/2024 - 14:09

Rachel Sauer

Actor and theater scholar Tamara Meneghini brings the long-ruling monarch to life in a solo performance that earned rave reviews at the recent Edinburgh Festival Fringe

Historical figures are so easily flattened into two dimensions—all stiff pleats and inscrutable expressions rendered in oils.

The challenge for artists and scholars, then, is how to lift these figures from the canvas—to regard them in three dimensions, to allow them foibles and failings and humanity.

For Tamara Meneghini, that meant more than just donning a red wig and pounds of brocade as one of the most famous women in Western history. It meant studying the time in which Elizabeth I of England lived—researching what influenced her behavior in her time period, how she interacted with people, what games she played, how she followed the rules and how she broke them.

Tamara Meneghini, an associate professor in the CU Boulder Department of Theatre and Dance, performed to rave reviews as the titular monarch in "Elizabeth I: In Her Own Words" at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

To become Elizabeth I onstage, Meneghini had to understand the monarch as a human woman and bring her to life for modern audiences who may believe there’s nothing new to understand about her.

So, audiences at Scotland’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe in August were surprised and then delighted to rediscover the queen they thought they knew. Playing the not-so-popular-in-Scotland monarch in the one-woman performance “Elizabeth I: In Her Own Words,” Meneghini performed before full theaters and to glowing reviews.

“The key to fringe festivals is audiences want you to connect,” explains Meneghini, an associate professor in the University of Colorado Boulder Department of Theatre and Dance. “You have to connect. The audience can’t be just audience. The way our piece was set up, it worked really nicely that audience felt like A) they were in the presence of the queen and B) they could not leave, they were there with me in the moment, in this meta sort of space. I was interacting with them as the queen, but in a very specific circumstance we had created.”

Becoming Elizabeth

Meneghini’s interest in Elizabeth I grew, in part, from her interest in styles and plays from different time periods—"the ways in which we behave in those time periods, how changes in clothing, dances, culture, protocols can affect behavior,” she explains.

While working at the University of Nebraska Lincoln, where she taught before joining the CU Boulder faculty in 2008, Meneghini developed a concert of early Renaissance music that involved era-specific instruments such as sackbuts and crumhorns. However, she also wanted to bring in elements of theater and approached Carole Levin, a pre-eminent scholar of Elizabeth I and women in the Renaissance era.

“Carole was pivotal because what we created was a fictitious meeting between Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots,” Meneghini says. “Part of that was crafting this improvisation with students that was really cool. It ended up being a combination of theater and film and history, and it was just a blast.”

Fast forward to 2016, when CU Boulder was honored as a stop for the first-ever national touring exhibition of Shakespeare’s First Folio.

Tamara Meneghini as Elizabeth I outside Edinburgh's Craigmillar Castle (left) and onstage (right) as the long-ruling monarch.

“When the Folio came through, I was doing a period styles class, and I was asked to create something for the Folio visit,” she says. “I immediately thought of Elizabeth I—the idea of Elizabeth, the time period, Shakespeare’s plays. I know they never met, but she certainly influenced his plays, so I started working on this thing based on Carole’s series of lectures that she did about Elizabeth.”

The initial performance was a duet, with Meneghini playing Elizabeth in front of projected images from the time period to which Levin had access. Meneghini and her acting partner—Bernadette Sefic, a CU Boulder BFA/acting graduate and recent MFA graduate of the Old Globe and University of San Diego Shiley Graduate Theatre Program—performed at universities and sometimes in community theaters, and in costumes designed by theater colleague Markas Henry.

“As the costume as story went on, Elizabeth is becoming more and more like a real person,” Meneghini says. “The portraiture that we have of her was largely staged by how her council and her parliament wanted her to look. We wanted this piece to be an opportunity to see Elizabeth as the woman, as the human, as someone audiences could relate to.

“Markas and I talked a lot about this costume coming apart, and he made this thing that’s close to 30 pounds—the costume is immense—that gradually sheds layers through the performance.”

Fringe opportunities

Two years ago, CU Boulder graduate Penny Cole, founder of Flying Solo! Presents, approached Meneghini about creating a solo show and put her in contact with a Scottish theater scholar who asked whether she’d be interested in performing at Edinburgh Fringe.

If you go

What: "Elizabeth I: In Her Own Words"

Who: Tamara Meneghini, associate professor in the CU Boulder Department of Theatre and Dance

When: 4 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 19

Where: Savoy Denver, 2700 Arapahoe St.

Learn more

Meneghini sought Levin’s expertise, as well as that of Denver-based theater guru Sabin Epstein, to craft a solo play from what began as lectures. The 55-minute play, for which Levin is credited as writer, is based on Elizabeth’s own writings. It eschews the projected images of the original duet performance—a lot of which featured the men in Elizabeth’s life—to create an intimate space between Elizabeth and the audience, Meneghini says.

She performed “Elizabeth I: In Her Own Words” several times in New York City before her 14 performances at Edinburgh Fringe, where it was a hit.

“People there are crazy about their royals,” Meneghini says with a laugh. “Elizabeth is not a popular monarch in Scotland; in fact, she’s almost an antagonist. So, when I first performed it in New York, people went nuts about it, but I didn’t think they were going to like it as much in Scotland, so that was a happy surprise.

“In fact, I went to do this photo shoot at Craigmillar Castle, where Mary Queen of Scots convalesced and planned her husband’s murder, and people were coming up to me—I was in full regalia—and saying, ‘Oh, Queen Mary, Queen Mary.’ So, I had to say, ‘No, I’m Elizabeth,’ and they’d run away.”

Thanks to the play’s reception at Edinburgh Fringe, Meneghini is now developing it into a full, 120-minute performance. She also will perform it Oct. 19 in the Denver Fringe Festival. And still, she says, there’s always more to learn about Elizabeth.

“One of my biggest takeaways (from performing at Edinburgh Fringe) was people came out of the show saying, ‘Oh, my gosh, I have a totally different perspective of her as a person. She wasn’t this awful woman, she really struggled with these decisions that she made,’” Meneghini says. “What I’ve learned in my own research with her is that she was a complicated person like we all are, didn’t take any of the decisions that she had to make in her life lightly. When I’m doing the show—whether it’s here, when I was in Edinburgh—I’m constantly reading more about her, and every day is bringing something new.”

Did you enjoy this article? Subcribe to our newsletter. Passionate about theatre and dance? Show your support.

Actor and theater scholar Tamara Meneghini brings the long-ruling monarch to life in a solo performance that earned rave reviews at the recent Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

Traditional

White

For some mammals, warming temperatures mean higher elevations

Anonymous — Tue, 15 Oct 2024 17:45:59 +0000

For some mammals, warming temperatures mean higher elevations Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 10/15/2024 - 11:45

In her Distinguished Research Lecture, CU Boulder Professor Christy McCain will highlight how certain traits in some mammal and insect populations indicate who is at greatest risk from climate change

Colorado’s small, mountain-dwelling mammals are moving higher—not for better views or real estate, but because climate change is forcing them to.

This finding is based on a 13-year study of 27 rodent and four shrew species in Colorado’s Front Range and San Juan mountains—research that included trapping, tagging and releasing the various mammals to better understand their range.

While the findings are more complex than a simple trend of animals moving up the mountain, they spotlight the sobering possibility that climate change could force some mammals from Colorado entirely.

Christy McCain, a professor in the CU Boulder Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and curator of vertebrates in the CU Museum of Natural History, will discuss mountain biodiversity and climate change in her Distinguished Research Lecture Nov. 14.

“We’ve been talking about climate change in the Rockies for a long time, but I think we can say that this is a sign that things are now responding and responding quite drastically," Christy McCain, the study’s lead author, told Denver 7 in Feb. 2021.

McCain, a professor in the University of Colorado Boulder Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and curator of vertebrates in the CU Museum of Natural History, uses mountains as natural experiments to study biodiversity, ecological theory, global change, montane ecology and range limits.

She will discuss mountain biodiversity and climate change in her Distinguished Research Lecture Nov. 14, highlighting the research her lab has done to understand how animals—mostly vertebrates and insects—are distributed on mountains around the world.

She and her research colleagues have found that different groups of animals, driven by their evolutionary history and climate, show distinctive patterns. For example, mountain biodiversity for rodents, salamanders and moths is quite different from birds, bats and reptiles.

The conservation priorities for each group of mountain organisms are closely tied to elevational diversity patterns, land-use change and complex interactions with a rapidly warming and drying climate. McCain will explore these topics through case studies of mammal populations in the Front Range and San Juan Mountains and carrion beetles—examining how various physiological traits like heat and desiccation tolerance may be critical to responses to climate change.

About Christy McCain

McCain received dual bachelor’s degrees in wildlife biology and studio art from Humboldt State University, was a natural-resources and protected-areas specialist in the Peace Corps Honduras and earned her PhD in ecology and evolutionary biology from the University of Kansas.

She was a postdoctoral fellow at the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis at the University of California Santa Barbara before coming to CU Boulder as an assistant professor in 2008.

If you go

What: 124th Distinguished Research Lecture, Mountain Biodiversity and Climate Change

Who: Professor Christy McCain of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and CU Museum of Natural History

When: 4-5 p.m. Nov. 14, followed by a Q&A and reception

Where: Chancellor's Hall and Auditorium, Center for Academic Success and Engagement (CASE)

McCain studies how montane organisms are distributed on mountains around the world and how those populations and species are influenced by human land use and climate change. Her research spans topics across ecology and evolution to understand and conserve biodiversity.

Funded by the National Science Foundation through several grants, her research has appeared in more than 60 peer-reviewed journals, including Science, Ecology Letters, Ecology and Global Change Biology, among others.

McCain is the curator of vertebrate collections in the CU Museum of Natural History, where she is a steward for the continued protection and use of museum specimens for understanding and conserving the world’s biodiversity. Over the years, she has taught mammalogy as well as other topics in field biology, creative conservation messaging and mountain ecology and conservation.

About the Distinguished Research Lectureship

The Distinguished Research Lectureship is among the highest honors given by faculty to a faculty colleague at CU Boulder. Each year, the Research and Innovation Office requests nominations from faculty for this award, and a faculty review panel recommends one or more faculty members as recipients.

The lectureship honors tenured faculty members, research professors (associate or full) or adjoint professors who have been with CU Boulder for at least five years and are widely recognized for a distinguished body of academic or creative achievement and prominence, as well as contributions to the educational and service missions of CU Boulder. Each recipient typically gives a lecture in the fall or spring following selection and receives a $2,000 honorarium.

McCain and Jamie Nagle, a professor of physics, have been recognized with 2024-25 Distinguished Research Lectureships. Nagle will give his lecture Feb. 6, 2025.

Top image: Eli Allan/Unsplash

Did you enjoy this article? Subcribe to our newsletter. Passionate about ecology and evolutionary biology? Show your support.

In her Distinguished Research Lecture, CU Boulder Professor Christy McCain will highlight how certain traits in some mammal and insect populations indicate who is at greatest risk from climate change.

Traditional

White

He will, he will rock you

Anonymous — Thu, 10 Oct 2024 13:11:59 +0000

He will, he will rock you Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 10/10/2024 - 07:11

Rachel Sauer

Pursuing a passion for music, CU Boulder economist Murat Iyigun transforms from recognized expert on economics of the family and economic history to regional rock star with a growing musical reputation

In a low-key pub and grill on a quiet street in Littleton, Colorado, it’s about 10 minutes to 8 on a Saturday night, and the renowned economist seems to be in six places at once.

He’s sound checking his guitar and finalizing plans with the light technician and joking with the singers and ticking through the set list with the drummer and donning a dusky green bomber jacket and wraparound shades.

The dance floor in front of the stage is empty for now, but it won’t be for long. At a little after 8, members of the steadily growing audience put down their forks and drinks to welcome—as they’d been invited, as the musicians had been introduced—the Custom Shop Band.

Murat Iyigun is a professor of economics focusing on the economics of the family and economic history.

A kaleidoscope of colored lights flashes from the rafters toward the stage as lead singers Amy Gray, Mckenna Lee and Abbey Kochevar begin an iconic refrain: stomp-stomp-clap, stomp-stomp-clap.

“Buddy you're a boy, make a big noise, playin' in the street, gonna be a big man someday,” Gray sings, achieving the stratospheric, Mercurian growl and grandeur of the original. “You got mud on your face, you big disgrace, kickin' your can all over the place. Singin'…”

The renowned economist leans toward his mic and joins the immortal chorus: “We will, we will rock you.”

It wasn’t so much a threat as a promise. For the next four hours, minus breaks between sets, the band founded by Murat Iyigun, a University of Colorado Boulder professor of economics and former economist with the Federal Reserve Board in Washington, D.C., would rock everyone there.

And they would rock hard.

‘You should listen to Queen’

The question, then, is how does a scholar and economist widely known for his research on the economics of the family and economic history come to be on a pub-and-grill stage on a Saturday night, slaying licks originally conceived by Brian May?

“Life is funny, isn’t it?” Iyigun admits.

The story starts, as not many rock stories do, in Ankara, Turkey. The son of a Turkish father and a Turkish-American mother, Iyigun grew up during a tumultuous time in Turkey, when older kids might stop him on the street to ask whether he was a leftist or a rightist. Still, he says, he was lucky and maybe even a little sheltered, while some of his older sisters’ friends became victims of the left/right violence.

It was that violence, in fact, that caused his older sister’s university to be shut down for seven months. To continue her chemistry studies, she transferred to The Ohio State University, but not before leaving her LP collection to her younger brother.

“I was about 13, and I was counting the days to when she left in July because I was going to be getting all the LPs,” Iyigun recalls with a laugh. “‘Hotel California’ was huge that summer, and then there was Cat Stevens, ELO. I was totally captivated even though, compared to now, things were so closed for us. Going to the U.S. was like going to Mars. But in terms of music and Western culture, especially among urban secular Turks, we followed everything.

Murat Iyigun was inspired to learn to play the guitar after hearing Queen's album Live Killers. (Photos: The Custom Shop Band)

“Now you can get all the vinyls and they’re easy to come by, but at that time people basically made tapes that everyone shared around. There was all this bootleg stuff that would come from Europe, and someone in Istanbul would press some vinyls, but I was never sure if they had an agreement (with the record labels) or if those were counterfeit.”

At the tender age of 13, Iyigun was more into the mellow side of rock n’ roll. A few years deeper into his teens, however, and he discovered KISS. Visiting family in the United States during the summer of ’78—a time that might be considered the fever-pitch apex of the band’s makeup years—Iyigun acquired all things KISS: T-shirts, posters, tapes, you name it.

It might have been the following summer, he doesn’t remember exactly, that he went camping with friends and met one of the great platonic loves of his teenage years—an older girl who inadvertently changed his life.

“She said, ‘You should listen to Queen, they’re a great band,’” Iyigun recalls. “So, I asked someone to make me a tape of the Live Killers album, and that was it.”

It says something about what happened to him, listening to that album, that he currently has—in a glass case in his Boulder home—a replica of May’s immortal Red Special guitar, signed by May. Iyigun also bought Red Special replicas for both of his daughters.

He heard Live Killers and had to learn to play guitar, is the point. Then he and some of his friends, including an ambassador’s son whose presence allowed them to practice at the Swiss embassy in Ankara, formed a band. Iyigun absolutely loved it, but making it as a rock musician in a Muslim country in the 1980s started to strike him as increasingly impossible.

“I thought, ‘OK, I need to get my act together,’” Iyigun says, so he came to the United States to earn an MBA at Boston University and then a master’s and PhD in economics at Brown University.

His parents had given him a Les Paul guitar when he graduated high school and began studying business administration at Hacettepe University—“in Turkey back then you just didn’t have these instruments, so for my parents I know this was very costly,” he explains—and as a graduate student at Brown he bought an amp and noodled around at home.

The Custom Shop Band includes, left to right, lead guitarist Murat Iyigun; singers Amy Gray, Mckenna Lee and Abbey Kochevar; drummer Kevin Thomas; bassist Elliot Elder; and keyboardist Tone Show. Steve Johnson (not pictured) also is a member of the band. (Photo: The Custom Shop Band)

But then life happened. He was beginning his career, he had a wife and young children, he was working toward tenure, and he just didn’t have time to play, for more than a decade.

Then, about 15 or so years ago, at a time he was hardly ever playing guitar, his daughters and wife gave him the game Guitar Hero for Father’s Day. He played it a bit and realized the game console was an instrument in its own way, so with typical focus “I thought, ‘I need to learn to play it well,’” he says. “It’s nothing like guitar playing, but I thought I could learn to do this, and then I was thinking about how I used to play. And that’s when I brought out my guitar.”

Learning through blues jams

“Once I started to come back to it, I realized some of my fundamentals had gone,” Iyigun says. “So, I started by taking these baby steps. I immediately hooked up with a great music teacher, Jeff Sollohub, a Berklee (College of Music) graduate and super nice guy, and every two weeks I’d work with him on a new song, on composition and things like that.

“Within a year or two, I realized I’m only going to get so good if I don’t actually go out and play. By the time I came back to it, there were so many more resources online, YouTube and things like that, and I still got a lot of joy out of playing at home. But I quickly realized there’s a limit to how much I can improve unless I get out and play. That’s when I discovered blues jams, which are the easiest way to go play live even though blues is super difficult to play well.”

He went to multiple blues jams a month around metro Denver and endured the “painful, painful learning process.” A significant moment of clarity and focus came when he saw the parallels between being onstage playing and lecturing in front of a full classroom or at an economics conference.

“I had a lot of embarrassing days where the ride home would be miserable, and I did that for a couple of years, and I was discovering other jams and just kept playing,” he says. “The limitation of blues jams, though, is you pack all the gear, get in the car, drive 40 minutes, get on the list, then the person running the jam will put these bands together and you play for 20 minutes. So, I drove there an hour, waited an hour, spent this time to play 20 minutes—and 18 minutes of that was painful.

“But after doing that a couple years, this blues band of three guys needed a guitar player, and they’d seen me play, so they said, ‘Do you want to join a band?’ I joined for about a year, and there was this point where I’m like, ‘Yeah, this is what I want.’”

Inside, though, he was still the kid obsessed with KISS and Queen who knew all the guitar greats, not just the blues ones. He was treasurer for Mile High Blues Society, but he wanted to play rock.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1GsmjeOjVPs]

Joining the band

The Custom Shop Band—the name is a reference to the custom guitars Iyigun plays—came together in a way that could be interpreted as either patchwork or destiny: friends of friends, acquaintances who know a guy, calls and emails that began with, “Hey, are you interested in being in a band?”

Elliot Elder, the Custom Shop Band bass player and a 2022 CU Boulder graduate in jazz bass performance, was recommended by a mutual friend. Amy Gray, the original in what is now a trio of lead singers, was recommended to Iyigun by another mutual friend:

“I was singing with another band and had recently left them when I got a message from Murat,” Gray says. “He saw me in a video from that band, and he said they were looking for someone to do backups and fill in when their lead at the time was not available.

“So, I looked them up, I went to a show to see what they sounded like and saw that they played some fun songs, that they as instrumentalists all sounded good, so I thought, ‘Why not, let’s give it a chance, they all seem very nice’ and I jumped in and went with it.”

Murat Iyigun joins in on harmony during the Custom Shop Band's set list of "hits, with a twist."

Gray recruited Kochevar, whom she knew from performing with her in theater, and Lee, who had recently moved to Colorado from California and whom she knew through mutual friends. And that’s how the Custom Shop Band has worked: Iyigun founded it and continues to act as band leader and manager, but in every other way it’s a democracy.

“Murat is an awesome band leader,” Elder says. “One of the reasons why a lot of bands don’t get past a certain point, in my opinion, is the band leader doesn’t have the flexibility and communication skills to manage situations where lineups change, things change on short notice, people have different ideas about how a song should be played. Murat’s emailing venues, scheduling gigs, managing lineups and all the while teaching at CU. He puts a lot of work into it. You meet a lot of people in the music scene who don’t communicate, who don’t get details to people on time, but Murat is definitely an exception.”

The band, which also includes Kevin Thomas on drums and either Tone Show or Steve Johnson on guitar and keyboards, practices in-person when adding a new song to the set list or a new musician, but otherwise its members practice at home with versions of the songs that Iyigun sends to everyone. In keeping with the band’s democratic ethos, every member brings song suggestions to the table.

At any given show, the Custom Shop Band may open with Queen’s “We Will Rock You,” and soon thereafter play “Flowers” by Miley Cyrus and “It’s Raining Men” by The Weather Girls, which might be followed by a mashup of Foreigner’s “Jukebox Hero” and Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love.”

On a Saturday night in September, at a pub and grill on a quiet street in Littleton, “So What” by P!nk gets booties to the dance floor in a joyful melee. A dude to the left is lost in his own world of intricate air guitar and a lady on the right has divested herself of shoes. A little later, as the band plays Cheap Trick’s “I Want You to Want Me,” the air guitarist to the left reaches a fever pitch as the band’s lead guitarist, who also happens to be a renowned economist, absolutely wails on the solo.

And transitioning smoothly into Sweet’s “Ballroom Blitz,” the dancefloor still throbbing, the economist is grinning wide.

He will rock you.

Did you enjoy this article? Subcribe to our newsletter. Passionate about economics? Show your support.

Traditional

White

Building bridges between Boulder and Ukraine

Anonymous — Wed, 18 Sep 2024 16:21:58 +0000

Building bridges between Boulder and Ukraine Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 09/18/2024 - 10:21

Rachel Sauer

CU scholar Rai Farrelly is partnering with English language teachers in Ukraine this semester through a U.S. Department of State program

In some of Rai Farrelly’s first meetings with her new colleagues, they warned her that the air raid sirens might go off while she’s observing their classes.

If that happens, she recalls them telling her, they’ll run down to the bunker in the basement and hope that a nationwide effort to increase internet capacity in subterranean locations has reached their schools and universities. And then they’ll pick up where they left off, because students are still eager to learn, and her colleagues’ job is to teach them.

Farrelly, a teaching associate professor and Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) director in the University of Colorado Boulder Department of Linguistics, is virtually partnering with educators in Ukraine this semester through the U.S. Department of State English Language Specialist Program.

Rai Farrelly, a teaching associate professor and TESOL director in the CU Boulder Department of Linguistics, is virtually partnering with educators in Ukraine this semester through the U.S. Department of State English Language Specialist Program.

The Ukrainian educators are part of the State Department’s Access Program and work with either teenagers in after-school programs or undergraduate students training to be teachers in any subject because “Ukraine has a plan to start teaching all their content in English coming up very soon,” Farrelly explains.

In her role as an English Language Specialist (ELS), Farrelly will observe classes and partner with teachers in Ukraine on strategies and methods for teaching large, mixed-level English classes. Farrelly’s TESOL students at CU Boulder also will partner with English language students in Ukraine via virtual conversation sessions.

“Our realities are worlds apart,” Farrelly says, “yet we'll be connected online and building community together.”

Educational collaboration

Farrelly, whose teaching experience has taken her around the world—from Armenia to Tanzania, where she co-founded Project Wezesha to help support students from rural areas who are pursuing post-secondary education—qualified as a State Department ELS several years ago.

To qualify as an ELS, an educator must have a master’s or PhD in TESOL or applied linguistics and the ability to partner with teachers and students around the world either in person or virtually. The program, which is organized through U.S. embassies and regional language officers around the world, focuses on “delivering and maintaining quality English language programs overseas and promoting mutual understanding between the U.S. and other countries.”

During the COVID pandemic, Farrelly accepted virtual ELS positions in South Korea and then Panama. Last semester, her pedagogical grammar class at CU taught English through a virtual cross-cultural exchange with learners at a language school in Arequipa, Peru.

“I have a really nice relationship with colleagues at this school, and they were like, ‘Rai, send your teachers,’” Farrelly says. “Because of that, we have had three CU students teach there, so this program really opens up doors, and I’m going to be working with them again this semester.”

The teachers in Ukraine with whom Farrelly is collaborating this semester have mentioned many of the challenges that English language teachers worldwide face: how to scaffold instruction in classes that contain everything from absolute beginners to intermediate-level speakers; when and how to correct pronunciation and grammar; how to group students during oral exercises; how to invite participation in a way that helps students feel excited to speak.

To help her support the teachers in Ukraine, Farrelly is even arranging a Zoom session with the 14-year-old daughters of three of her friends “so I can do a playful interview on the gender dynamics in class and what their teachers do in a U.S. class to make it comfortable for them,” she says. “That’s one of the concerns that my colleagues in Ukraine have expressed, that 14-year-old boys won’t work with girls and how can they get them to work in groups.”

Seeing people as people

Farrelly says her experiences working with English-teaching colleagues around the world—including in Indonesia and Russia—have taught her the vital importance of a “community of practice and what it means to work closely with teachers who ‘speak your language,’” she says.

I just like approaching teacher development collaboratively and creating bonds with people. I love the relationships you form with other teachers—those connection moments where you’re like, ‘Oh, my gosh, I’m dealing with that same issue!’ And the next thing you know, ideas start forming.”

One of the biggest and most pervasive challenges in the TESOL field is the incorrect notion that anybody who speaks English can teach it. “Decades ago, anyone could step off a plane, and if you looked like me and talked like me, you could get a job,” Farrelly says. “Meanwhile, teachers in those countries who go through pedagogical training, who get degrees in teaching English, weren’t getting jobs.

“Even now, there are a lot of short TEFL or TESOL certificates you can get online. Meanwhile, I’m the director of the TESOL program at CU, and my students are taking five or six courses with me to earn a TESOL certificate. There’s a depth and breadth of proper preparation that goes beyond how to teach a language. It’s about understanding individual differences, personalities, motivations, culture, how your (first language) influences acquisition, classroom management, curriculum design. There’s so much that goes into it that’s beyond simply speaking English.”

In her ELS role, Farrelly says a significant focus is teacher mentoring and teacher development: “I’m such a huge fan of collaboration, especially among teachers,” she says. “So much of what I’ve done is grounded in working with teachers, and I never want teachers to see me as this expert outsider who’s coming in and telling them what to do. I just like approaching teacher development collaboratively and creating bonds with people. I love the relationships you form with other teachers—those connection moments where you’re like, ‘Oh, my gosh, I’m dealing with that same issue!’ And the next thing you know, ideas start forming.”

The fact that Ukraine is a country at war and that geopolitics add a complicated layer to Farrelly’s collaboration with teachers there—in fact, she doesn’t mention her previous experience with teachers and students in Vladimir, Russia—underscores the importance of global partnerships, she says.

“It helps you see people as people and humanizes everyone,” she says. “That’s one of the main aims of State Department programs. It’s access for learners and mentoring for professionals, but it’s about bridging those gaps and promoting cross-cultural understanding. It doesn’t matter where you’re from, at the end of day we can all find so many commonalities.”

Did you enjoy this article? Subcribe to our newsletter. Passionate about linguistics? Show your support.

CU scholar Rai Farrelly is partnering with English language teachers in Ukraine this semester through a U.S. Department of State program.

Traditional

White

Samuel Ramsey receives the prestigious Lowell Thomas Award

Anonymous — Tue, 17 Sep 2024 19:26:37 +0000

Samuel Ramsey receives the prestigious Lowell Thomas Award Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 09/17/2024 - 13:26

Once frightened of insects, Ramsey has become a leader in the field of entomology

Samuel Ramsey, assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Colorado Boulder, is one of this year’s recipients of the Lowell Thomas Award.

The Lowell Thomas Award, named after broadcast journalist and explorer Lowell Thomas and given by The Explorers Club, recognizes “excellence in domains or fields of exploration,” according to the award announcement. In particular, the award celebrates “individuals who have grit, tenacity, are undaunted by failure, and endure all obstacles, finding a way forward to discovery and results that expand the limits of knowledge.”

Samuel Ramsey (left) working with the chieftain of a hill tribe village in Thailand to sample domesticated bees for parasites. (Photo: Shin Arunrugstichai/Syzgy Media Co.)

Ramsey, also known as “your friendly neighborhood entomologist,” didn’t always like insects. They used to terrify him. But in the second grade he conquered his fears by learning about insects at his local library.

Now, more than 25 years later, Ramsey is one of the most innovative and distinguished thinkers in the field of entomology. His research has won him numerous awards, including first place in the International Three-Minute Thesis Competition, the American Bee Research Conference’s Award for Distinguished Research and the Acarological Society of America’s Highest Award for Advances in Acarology Research.

Ramsey—a member of the Explorers Club 50, class of 2024—also runs a nonprofit, the Ramsey Research Foundation, which seeks to protect pollinator diversity.

Ramsey’s fellow awardees this year are zoologist Carole Baldwin, ocean conservationist Ellen Pikitch and geothermal scientist Andrés Ruzo. Past recipients include Kathy Sullivan, E. O. Wilson, Kris Tompkins, Isaac Asimov, Sir Edmund Hillary and Carl Sagan.

The 2024 Lowell Thomas Awards Dinner takes place in Austin on Nov. 1.

Top image: Samuel Ramsey researching bee biodiversity in Thailand. (Photo: Shin Arunrugstichai/Syzgy Media Co.)

Did you enjoy this article? Subcribe to our newsletter. Passionate about ecology and evolutionary biology? Show your support.

Once frightened of insects, Ramsey has become a leader in the field of entomology.

Traditional

White

Stephen Graham Jones slashes his way into Texas literary history

Anonymous — Fri, 06 Sep 2024 19:34:25 +0000

Stephen Graham Jones slashes his way into Texas literary history Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 09/06/2024 - 13:34

The CU Boulder Ineva Baldwin Professor of English is part of a Texas Literary Hall of Fame induction class that includes Cormac McCarthy and Molly Ivins

Stephen Graham Jones, author of bestselling horror novels The Angel of Indian Lake and The Only Good Indians, among other award-winning works, has been inducted into the Texas Literary Hall of Fame.

Born in Midland, Texas, Jones relocated to Boulder in 2008, where he continues to serve as the University of Colorado Boulder Ineva Baldwin Professor of English.

CU Boulder Ineva Baldwin Professor of English Stephen Graham Jones has been inducted into the Texas Literary Hall of Fame, a recognition whose previous recipients include Larry McMurtry and Sandra Cisneros.

“When I moved away from Texas for Colorado, I kind of suspected Texas might forget about me, even though a lot of my novels since then have been set there,” he says.

But if Jones’ admission into the state’s Literary Hall of Fame is any indication, Texas didn’t forget about him.

Established in 2004, the Texas Literary Hall of Fame recognizes the literary contributions of the Lone Star State’s most celebrated writers. Inductees are announced every two years by the Texas Christian University (TCU) Mary Couts Burnett Library, the TCU AddRan College of Liberal Arts, the TCU Press and the Center for Texas Studies.

“The Texas Literary Hall of Fame showcases top literary writers across the nation,” Sonja Watson, dean of the AddRan College of Liberal Arts, says on the Texas Literary Hall of Fame website. “This group of inductees follows a long list of others who demonstrate how Texas has shaped the cultural landscape of their writings.”

Joining Jones this year as he enters the Hall of Fame are Sergio Troncoso, Cynthia Leitich Smith, Jan Seale, Molly Ivins, Tracy Daugherty and Cormac McCarthy. Past honorees include Larry McMurtry and Sandra Cisneros.

“Colorado is home now, but Texas will always be where I'm from, and I'm honored and thrilled to be inducted into the Texas Literary Hall of Fame,” says Jones. “My father-in-law’s photo is in the Texas Capitol, which I always thought pretty special. This, to me, is that same kind of special.”

The official induction ceremony will take place on Oct. 29.

Did you enjoy this article? Subcribe to our newsletter. Passionate about English? Show your support.

The CU Boulder Ineva Baldwin Professor of English is part of a Texas Literary Hall of Fame induction class that includes Cormac McCarthy and Molly Ivins.

Traditional

White

Who is Kamala Harris?

Anonymous — Tue, 06 Aug 2024 21:46:19 +0000

Who is Kamala Harris? Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 08/06/2024 - 15:46

Jennifer Ho

Kamala Harris’ identity as a biracial woman is either a strength or a weakness, depending on whom you ask

Who is Kamala Harris?

Though Harris has had a very public life in politics for decades, speculation about who exactly she is and what she stands for has circulated across social media platforms and news stories for several years.

Many of these conversations focus on the historic nature of Harris’ presidential candidacy, since she is a mixed-race, Jamaican and Indian woman who does not have biological children and who was born to two immigrant parents in Oakland, California.

Jennifer Ho is a professor of Asian American studies in the CU Boulder Department of Ethnic Studies and director of the Center for Humanities and the Arts.

As I’ve previously written about Harris’ mixed-race identity, some have questioned how authentic her Black or Asian identities are. Interest in Harris’ familial background and race was reignited on July 31, 2024, when Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump falsely suggested that Harris has misled voters about her racial and ethnic identity.

“I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black and now she wants to be known as Black. So, I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?” Trump asked during an interview with the National Association of Black Journalists in Chicago.

By saying this, Trump tapped into the long history of racism in America, where some white people have defined racial categories and policed the boundaries of race.

More than 33 million Americans identify as multiracial and likely see themselves reflected in Harris’ layered background. But many Republicans are also trying to use Harris’ identity against her.

For ardent Trump supporters, Harris may seem to represent all that they oppose, including woke politics and Democrats being “controlled by people who do not have children,” as Trump’s running mate JD Vance has said.

For Democrats, Harris represents the U.S.’s multiracial, feminist future.

Which means, what people believe about Harris largely depends on the party they already plan to vote for more than who the Democratic presidential nominee really is.

Harris and her many firsts

Many political observers and voters alike agree that Harris has breathed new life into the Democratic Party, precisely because she is a Black-South Asian woman. Many Asian American, Black, Latino and female voters see elements of themselves in Harris: the celebration of her ethnic cultures, her achievements as a person of color, and her unprecedented and pathbreaking model being a woman of color who is the nominee of a major party seeking the highest office in the country.

A variety of fundraising meetings in July and August centered on the identities of those who support Harris.

Black women for Harris, Black men for Harris, white women for Harris, white dudes for Harris, South Asians for Harris, LGBTQ+ people for Harris, among others, have all gathered in Zoom meetings that had tens of thousands of attendees—one even had a record-breaking 200,000 attendees. These online gatherings have jointly raised more than $15 million for Harris.

The number and diversity of people rallying for Harris shows her widespread appeal. Harris’ white male supporters – a key voting demographic for Democrats—also show how Harris’ candidacy is inclusive to many different kinds of people.

Inclusivity may be a keyword of Harris’ campaign, especially in opposition to her rival’s campaign. Vance’s comments about childless cat ladies has spawned endless memes tapping into the rancor of people who recognize the insensitivity and ignorance of such a remark.

Audience members cheer for Kamala Harris at a rally in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, July 23. (Photo: Jim Vondruska/Getty Images)

Harris’ supporters have responded to the GOP’s critiques of her and turned them into positive political memes celebrating her identity, attesting to Harris’ popularity with a younger, media-savvy electorate.

Using Harris’ identity against her

Republicans, meanwhile, are questioning Harris’ qualifications precisely based on her ethnic and racial identity, calling her a “DEI” candidate. This is a reference to the term “diversity, equity and inclusion.” The exact definitions of DEI can vary, but in workplaces or school settings it can look like treating everyone equally and fostering a culture where all people, regardless of their background or identities, feel welcomed. DEI policies intend to respond to the historic oppression that marginalized people have faced.

As the scholar Susan Harmeling wrote recently, “The term ‘DEI hire’ actually implies that only heterosexual, white men are qualified for such high leadership positions.”

Some in the GOP have renamed the DEI acronym “Didn’t Earn It.” U.S. Reps. Tim Burchett and Harriet Hageman both have disparaged Harris as a DEI hire, with Hageman going a step further by saying that Harris is “intellectually, just really kind of the bottom of the barrel.”

The gender factor

Harris is the second woman major-party presidential nominee, following Hillary Clinton’s candidacy in 2016. So far, Harris doesn’t seem to be facing persistent questions about whether women are fit to lead, as Clinton once did.

But Harris has faced both sexist and racist comments, particularly online. One 2021 study found that 78% of disparaging sexist and racist comments on Twitter, now called X, during November and December 2020 were directed at Harris.

Some Republicans have continued making sexist attacks on Harris in this election campaign. In a July 3, 2024, social media post, Jackson Lahmeyer, the head of the group Pastors for Trump, called Harris a “ho,” or whore, riffing off a right-wing meme of “Joe and the Ho.”

Christian nationalist Lance Wallnau took to social media on July 22 to call Harris a representative of the “spirit of Jezebel.” Other conservative pundits have claimed that Harris slept her way to the top, citing an early relationship she had with Willie Brown, a prominent Democratic politician from San Francisco and later speaker of the California State Assembly, as the reason for her success.

This false story of Harris’ romantic past aligns with old stereotypes of Black women being promiscuous, rooted in the rape of Black women by white slave owners during antebellum slavery.

And the tactic of questioning Harris’ authentic racial background could apply not just to Harris but to nearly all multiracial people.

Yet there are millions of Americans who identify as multiracial and see in Harris their own story.

Top image: Kamala Harris speaks at a campaign rally in West Allis, Wisconsin, July 23. (Jim Vondruska/Getty Images)

Jennifer Ho is a professor of Asian American studies in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder.

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

Kamala Harris’ identity as a biracial woman is either a strength or a weakness, depending on whom you ask.

Traditional

White

CU Boulder scholars honored as 2024 Guggenheim Fellows

Anonymous — Thu, 13 Jun 2024 14:52:18 +0000

CU Boulder scholars honored as 2024 Guggenheim Fellows Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 06/13/2024 - 08:52

Rachel Sauer

Researchers Emily Yeh and Brian Catlos are recognized for prior career achievements and exceptional promise

Two University of Colorado Boulder scholars have been named 2024 Guggenheim Fellows, recognizing not only their prior career achievements but also their exceptional promise.

Emily Yeh, a professor of geography and College of Arts and Sciences professor of distinction, and Brian Catlos, a professor of religious studies and director of the CU Mediterranean Studies Group, are among a group of scholars, scientists, artists and writers representing 52 scholarly disciplines and artistic fields, who “are meeting (humanity’s existential) challenges head-on and generating new possibilities and pathways across the broader culture as they do so,” noted Edward Hirsch, award-winning poet and president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, in announcing the fellowships.

The monetary award that accompanies the Guggenheim recognition will support Yeh in writing a book about global geographies of weather modification in the context of climate change adaptation and growing discussions about geoengineering.

Emily Yeh has conducted a significant amount of research in China and Tibet, and first became interested in cloud seeding through a Chinese project called Sky River, or Tian He.

“It’s going to be an expansion of my previous research on cloud seeding,” Yeh explains. “Cloud seeding as a practice has been around since the 1950s, but a lot of people don’t really know that it happens.

“I think it’s really important right now for two reasons: One is climate change and drought, with cloud seeding being seen as a form of climate adaptation which is being adopted by countries around the world. The second is the growing interest in stratospheric aerosol injection, a form of geoengineering, for climate mitigation, and the public conflation of this with cloud seeding.”

Yeh, who has conducted a significant amount of her scholarly research in China and Tibet, first became interested in cloud seeding through a Chinese project called Sky River, or Tian He: “There were a whole bunch of reports about how the Chinese government was going to move water vapor from the Himalayas and channel it over the Tibetan Plateau to the north. I started following that issue, and through that realized that even though that idea of channeling water vapor itself isn’t a reality, some of the ideas behind it are very revealing of certain imaginations of nature that also underpin the Chinese state’s discourse of ‘ecological civilization.’”

She says that in some of the Tibetan villages she’s visited on the border of Sichuan and Gansu provinces, few safety precautions accompany cloud seeding measures, so that rockets can fall without warning on herders’ pastures. They experience cloud seeding as a form of injustice, she explains. At the same time, experiences raise questions about what cloud seeding operations claim versus what effects they have. “Overclaiming of results is leading to conspiracy theories, like the idea that recent flooding in the United Arab Emirates was caused by cloud seeding rather than climate change,” Yeh says.

Boulder, as a national and international center of cloud seeding research and technology, is an ideal place to study not only cloud seeding in the context of drought in the American west, Yeh notes, but also institutional and political economic contexts for cloud seeding research and practice globally.

Reassessing history

For Catlos, the Guggenheim recognition will support him in writing An Age of Convergence: Christians, Muslims and Jews in the Pre-Modern Mediterranean, a culmination of his scholarship to date showing when, how and why members of these three faith communities—which hail from Africa, the Middle East and Europe—together laid the foundations of Western modernity.

“Traditionally, the way we’ve conceived of the West has been this sort of western European, essentially Christian culture that coalesced in the Middle Ages and led to Anglo-European culture and society today,” Catlos explains. “That’s based on a lot of assumptions and perspectives that are rooted in 19th century ideas of how society works—some racist, some colonial, some rooted in notions that the fundamental building block of history is the nation.

Brian Catlos' research centers on Christian-Muslim-Jewish relations and the medieval Mediterranean, and he has authored and co-authored books related to this research.

“These are ideas that became popular in the 19th century, a great age of nationalism, racism and colonialization as well. When we look at data and pull back from presumptions and prejudices, what we see is that what became the modern West—western Anglo-European culture and society—emerged out of a much broader historical background.”

In 650 CE, as Islam began expanding from the area west of the Indus River to the Atlantic Ocean and all the way around the Mediterranean, a common telling of the history of that time holds that the area was uniformly Abrahamic in terms of faith and culture. “There’s this idea that the three religious cultures were divided and oppositional—and they were to certain degree—but they also were deeply enmeshed and influenced each other both through polemic and also through collaboration and shared knowledge.”

Another prevalent myth, Catlos says, is that there were distinct spheres: a Christian sphere, a Muslim sphere, “maybe a Latin-Christian sphere, a Christian and Byzantine sphere, a Christian and Muslim sphere, and they were somehow coherent, homogenous social, cultural and political entities in opposition with each other,” Catlos says.

“That’s not really the case. There were lots and lots of Muslims and Jews living in Christian lands and vice versa. The division was not really there except in certain contexts.

“Think about crusade and jihad, about Christianity and Islam, about this clash of civilizations. If we look at the political and economic history of the pre-modern period in the larger Mediterranean world, we see that both of these spheres are broken into a whole range of different kingdoms, city states, etc. that in fact are in competition with each other, for number of reasons, not the least of which is geography and how it impacted the way that resources appear and are accessed.”

Rather than a united front of Muslim states vs. Christian states, Catlos says, “we see competition between Muslim states with each other, Christian states with each other, Muslims and Christian principalities seeking alliances with each other against rivals of their own faith. Much of the history of the West that we are taught is distorted and needs to be reassessed.”

Did you enjoy this article? Subcribe to our newsletter. Passionate about arts and sciences? Show your support.

Researchers Emily Yeh and Brian Catlos are recognized for prior career achievements and exceptional promise.

Traditional

White

Josef Michl, chemist who loved mountains, passes away

Anonymous — Wed, 15 May 2024 18:53:36 +0000

Josef Michl, chemist who loved mountains, passes away Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 05/15/2024 - 12:53

CU Boulder professor of chemistry recalled as great scientist, teacher, colleague, friend, mentor and lover of the outdoors

Josef Michl, a professor of chemistry at the University of Colorado Boulder, passed away May 13 while on a visit to Prague. He was 85.

Colleagues describe him as a great scientist, teacher, colleague, friend and mentor, as well as a valuable member of the CU Boulder Department of Chemistry. Born in Prague and raised in the former Czechoslovakia, Michl joined the department in 1991.

Michl created fields and set research agendas in chemistry, making seminal contributions in diverse disciplines—including organic and inorganic and materials synthesis photochemistry, laser spectroscopy and magnetic resonance and theoretical and computational chemistry. His scientific legacy will echo for generations, colleaugues say.

CU Boulder Professer Josef Michl created fields and set research agendas in chemistry, making seminal contributions in diverse disciplines. (Photo: Neuron Foundation)

Equally adept at theoretical and experimental work, Michl was a prolific scientist who published almost 600 articles, held 11 patents and co-authored five books.

He was inducted into the National Academy of Sciences in 1984. Among many other awards he received, he was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an honorary member of the Czech Learned Society, a Guggenheim Fellow, a Sloan Fellow and a recipient of the Schrödinger Medal.

He left Czechoslovakia in 1968, completed postdoctoral work with R.S. Becker at the University of Houston, with M. J. S. Dewar at the University of Texas at Austin, with J. Linderberg at Aarhus University, Denmark, and with F. E. Harris at the University of Utah, where he stayed and became a professor in 1975 and served as chairman from 1979-1984.

He held the M. K. Collie-Welch Regents Chair in Chemistry at the University of Texas at Austin from 1986-1990, after which he moved to CU Boulder. In 2006, he accepted a joint appointment as a research director at the Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Prague.

Michl held close to a hundred visiting professorships and named lectureships; delivered hundreds of invited lectures at institutions and conferences; served on many professional and editorial boards, advisory councils and committees; and organized several international meetings.

Michl cared deeply about the Department of Chemistry and left a generous gift that will fund the Josef and Sara Michl Chair of Chemistry.

“Josef was a true intellectual whose interests were deep and broad,” colleagues say. He was fluent in a dozen or more languages, studied literature and history, loved the outdoors and traveled the world with his wife, Sara. They hiked many of the planet's mountain ranges.

“When in doubt, go up,” he said, applying this principle to life and work. He inspired many colleagues, students and postdocs who will miss his brilliance, humor and sanguine disposition.

Michl is preceded in death by Sara, who passed away in 2018. He survived by his brother, Jenda, son, Jenda, and his grandson, Mason.

Top photo provided to Economic Magazine by Josef Michl

Passionate about chemistry? Show your support.

CU Boulder professor of chemistry recalled as great scientist, teacher, colleague, friend, mentor and lover of the outdoors.

Traditional

White

Faculty

Paul Sutter honored as 2024 Professor of Distinction

Related Articles

A reincarnated Elizabeth I greets friendly audiences, even in Scotland

Related Articles

For some mammals, warming temperatures mean higher elevations

Related Articles

He will, he will rock you

Related Articles

Building bridges between Boulder and Ukraine

Related Articles

Samuel Ramsey receives the prestigious Lowell Thomas Award

Related Articles

Stephen Graham Jones slashes his way into Texas literary history

Related Articles

Who is Kamala Harris?

Related Articles

CU Boulder scholars honored as 2024 Guggenheim Fellows

Related Articles

Josef Michl, chemist who loved mountains, passes away

Related Articles