Faculty

Two artists walk into a palazzo…

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 23:07:55 +0000

Two artists walk into a palazzo… Rachel Sauer Mon, 08/31/2026 - 17:07

Rachel Sauer

�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder alumna Martha Russo and Professor Emeritus George Rivera currently are displaying art pieces in Venice, Italy, in an exhibit organized by the European Cultural Centre

Let’s wander, as the title of Martha Russo’s work might advise, to a bright, airy space in the Palazzo Mora in Venice, Italy.

There, on a short white platform, is “nomos (cube Venezia),” Russo’s three-dimensional piece sculpted from porcelain, paper clay, wood, metal and paper, among other materials. Its title is derived from the Greek root for “nomad” and can be translated as “to wander” and “to wonder.”

There are a lot of things to feel and question while observing this piece—in person or from every angle in photographs. Is it reaching for the viewer? Sending shoots and tendrils toward them? Does a brief glance from the corner of the eye reveal that it’s actually moving? Are its thousands of pieces a living ecosystem?

George Rivera (left) and Martha Russo (right) outside the Palazzo Mora in Venice, Italy, where their works are featured in the Personal Structures – Confluences exhibit on display through Nov. 22.

In a gallery next door, a different experience: 16 two-dimensional, 11x14 pieces tiled on a wall in an array of earth tones that speak of the Amazonian plants from which the inks were made.

And in the images themselves, a journey through the liminal space between consciousness and unconsciousness, shapes and figures whose meaning may depend on the viewer, giving rise to the title “Mutations: Subconscious Reality Imagery.” Artist George Rivera writes, “These images appear as figurations resembling reality but manifest themselves as completely different in form and color.”

Both pieces are featured in the Personal Structures – Confluences exhibit on display through Nov. 22 in Venice, organized by the European Cultural Centre (ECC) and held concurrently with the famed Venice Biennale international art exhibition. And both pieces have long roots that stretch to the �鶹��Ѱ��.

Russo (MFA’95), whose piece has been shortlisted for the ECC Awards that will be announced in November, is an art and art history alumnus who has shown around the world and who also teaches an interdisciplinary �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder course called Art, Design and Engineering, in which a cohort of upper-level art, environmental design and engineering students learn about sculpture and public installation.

Rivera is a professor emeritus of art and art history—a sociologist by training who pivoted to art and in 1996 became one of the founders, with several �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder colleagues, of the Artnauts collective, whose more than 220 participating artists, including Russo, have worked across art, activism, social practice, peace building and global issues around the world.

As for how their work came to be in a centuries-old palazzo in Venice, well, the art world is small, and it started with an interview.

Enjoying the physical challenges of art

In 2020, writer Ann Landi interviewed Russo for Sculpture magazine. By that point, Russo had grown an international reputation as an artist—showing around the world, known for large-scale pieces that blend media, particularly ceramics, and incorporate abstract shapes that reference the natural world, animal and human forms and fantastical imagery and imaginings.

"I really enjoy the physical challenges of my work,” Russo told Landi. “I also like the science behind it. I was a developmental biology and psychology major, and I had my eye on going to medical school or becoming a psychologist. I was drawn to the materiality and the chemistry of clay.

"nomos (cube Venezia)” by Martha Russo "explores how the abstraction of form, material and gravity couple with a cacophony of color and texture to generate openings for prolonged investigations and enticing a flood of interpretations," Russo explains. (Photo: Matteo Losurdo)

“I loved the idea that you could make clay do different things because of the molecular structure, and that structure made perfect sense to me because I was looking at molecules and thinking about how things generate in the body. The chemistry behind the glazes was also fascinating. To this day, I am drawn to those mysteries and all the infinite possibilities.”

Part of Russo’s interest in the mechanics of the body, she says, arose from a career-ending injury that took her from 1984 U.S. Olympic field hockey hopeful to a Princeton senior recovering from surgery and increasingly drawn to the physical nature of sculpture and ceramics.

In 1991, she and her husband, Joe Ryan, a �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder professor of environmental engineering, moved from New Jersey to Boulder, and several years later Russo began her MFA studies. She taught for 20 years at the Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design, growing her art practice and reputation at the same time and becoming known for her large-scale pieces incorporating hundreds or thousands of pieces that allude to natural forms.

Then came the interview in Sculpture magazine—not her first, but it was the one that caught the eye of ECC curators. They contacted her and asked if she’d be interested in showing in Venice, and they also looked into her colleagues and collaborators, including Rivera.

“Obviously you say yes when you get an invitation like that,” Russo says with a laugh. She immediately began envisioning what she would create for Personal Structures – Confluences.

Celebrate the Artnauts!

The exhibit "Rhizome: Origins" opens with a community celebration Thursday, Sept. 3, and honors 30 years of Artnauts.

Learn more

“I was thinking, ‘I’m going to make a cube, but I want to have four very different experiences on each side,” she explains. “Venice is the most visually stunning place, full of texture, full of color, full of exuberance, so I took all the greatest hits from all past iterations of ‘nomos’ and made a piece that’s very vibrant, colorful, lots of movement with the pieces. I also asked if I could have natural light in the gallery, and they really gave George and me such great spaces.

“They did tell me that outside the (gallery) window I would see a very recently renovated pink and white palazzo and they sent me a picture, so I made a bunch of pink pieces that, when you’re looking at my piece, you see that palazzo. A lot of the time you put up your work and you’re like, ‘I wish I’d done this, I wish I’d done that.’ This is one of the few times I said, ‘I think I just did exactly what I wanted to do,’ and I couldn’t be happier, honestly.”

In “Mutations: Subconscious Reality Imagery” by George Rivera, "images appear as figurations resembling reality but manifest themselves as completely different in form and color," Rivera says.

‘This is reality’

For Rivera, the road to Venice began in Glidden, Texas, where he grew up in poverty with a Mexican mother and a Mexican-American father. He was the first in his family to attend college, where he was able to name and study the disparities and injustices he’d grown up seeing. He pursued sociology, he says, because he wanted to understand racism.

After coming to �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder as a sociology faculty member, Rivera transferred to the Department of Art and Art History after disagreeing with how department decisions were being made, he says. He had studied Chicano art, but says he truly began to understand art as a force for activism, social practice and peace building when he was immersed in it.

In 1996, Rivera and colleagues Garrison Roots, Beth Krensky, Dennis Dalton and Luis Valdovino founded Artnauts, a collective that evolved over time into an artistic force that brings art into places fractured by violence, disaster or upheaval, Rivera explains. Artnauts shows frequently are comprised of two-dimensional prints that can fit into a suitcase on their way to places like Ukraine, Palestine, Colombia or the demilitarized zone at the North Korea-South Korea border.

“It’s the idea that art can be a language all people speak,” Rivera says.

In fact, the idea for “Mutations: Subconscious Reality Imagery” has as one of its roots an experience Rivera had while in Palestine with Artnauts: “We go to places where there’s been social trauma, where things have happened that represent the inhumanity of man against man. So, I was there staying at The Walled Off Hotel in Bethlehem that is owned by Bansky, and it’s located right next to the Aida Refugee Camp.

“While I was there, Israeli forces shot gas cannisters into the camp, and I was inside the hotel and hotel personnel told me, ‘Don’t go outside because your lungs are going to burn and eyes are going to burn.' So, I went back to my room, and I had olive oil made by Palestinians and wine made by Palestinians, and I always bring some paper and some brushes with me, so I used the wine and olive oil and started making images. That’s when the idea occurred to me, to use something that’s indigenous to the area to paint with.”

So, when he later was in Colombia at El Centro de Memoria, Paz y Reconciliación in Bogotá and met a shaman of the Huitoto tribe who invited him into the Amazon rainforest, he learned about inks made from plants that grow there and since then has created a significant body of work with them.

Rivera’s work in Venice harkens to the Artnauts format of two-dimensional pieces that can easily be carried in a suitcase and is titled “Mutations” because, he says, he sees the pieces “as derived from the subconscious, and the subconscious to me is something that exists between consciousness and the unconscious. Right before consciousness enters in, the subconscious is trying to make sense of what it sees. It’s coming up with these images before it locks in and says, ‘This is reality.’

“To me, when I was in the rainforest that idea occurred to me, I looked at what was happening to the rainforest, and I was seeing these things that are not representations of what was in front of me; I was looking through a subconscious lens. That is when, to me, you turn to the spirituality of an object, of a people, you see the spiritual representations before we tell ourselves what reality is.”

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�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder alumna Martha Russo and Professor Emeritus George Rivera currently are displaying art pieces in Venice, Italy, in an exhibit organized by the European Cultural Centre.

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Top photo: European Cultural Centre

Exhibit celebrates 30 years of art not as usual

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 22:00:54 +0000

Exhibit celebrates 30 years of art not as usual Rachel Sauer Mon, 08/31/2026 - 16:00

Rachel Sauer

New �鶹��Ѱ��Art Museum exhibit honoring the Artnauts collective opens with a public celebration from 4 to 6 p.m. Thursday

In nature, rhizomes are plant stems that grow just beneath the soil surface, sending out shoots and sprawling root systems that can produce new plants. An expansive purple cluster of bearded iris, an early-spring patch of asparagus, a rustling stand of bamboo—all grow from the branching, interconnected system of a rhizome.

In art, rhizomes are collectives and communities that flourish in connection and collaboration, in exchange, in branching and spreading into new soil.

You're invited

What: Opening celebration for the exhibit “Rhizome: Origins," celebrating 30 years of the Artnauts

Where: �鶹��Ѱ��Art Museum

When: 4-6 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 3

Who: All are invited

Learn more

The Artnauts are a rhizome.

Founded in 1996 at the �鶹��Ѱ��, the Artnauts—a name that can be interpreted as “art not as usual” or as a play on the exploration and globe-circling of “astronaut”—are celebrating their 30th anniversary with the exhibit “Rhizome: Origins” officially opening Friday at the �鶹��Ѱ��Art Museum.

A celebration of the exhibit and the Artnauts will be held from 4 to 6 p.m. Thursday at the museum, initiating a series of events through the fall semester that celebrate 30 years, hundreds of artists and almost as many exhibits in 27 countries that address themes of peace, human rights, climate, migration, cultural memory and other global issues.

The timing of the exhibit is perfect and poignant: George Rivera, professor emeritus of art and art history and a founder and longtime public face of Artnauts, recently announced that he is retiring from the collective for personal reasons and to make way for new leadership.

“(New leadership) already is having a great positive impact, as members are stepping up to acquire new exhibitions in new countries that we have not yet visited,” Rivera explains. “Wait until you see the new venues that they have planned for exhibitions. We need new visions that go beyond what I set up for us throughout the world. The mission will not change. That will stay the same. Just new places of ‘contention’ (as I call them) will be added to where we go with our vision for a better world.”

Rivera and other Artnauts will be featured in a documentary film about the collective, Art, Not As Usual: The Story of the Artnauts, scheduled for release this fall.

Art as connection

In fact, experiencing an Artnauts exhibit in the United States is something of a rarity. When Rivera and colleagues Garrison Roots, Beth Krensky, Dennis Dalton and Luis Valdovino founded Artnauts in 1996, an aim was to balance the aesthetics of art with its power to connect with people experiencing violence, oppression or disaster.

What else are Artnauts Martha Russo and George Rivera up to? Oh, only showing their work in Venice, Italy!

Ciao, amici!

It started simply if not easily, with Rivera cold calling galleries or schools in countries experiencing serious situations. Because of those situations, Artnauts exhibits needed to be two-dimensional and generally not larger than 8x10—a size that allows the work of 40 artists to fit in a carry-on suitcase.

Over three decades, more than 220 artists have contributed their work to exhibits in Bosnia and Rwanda, Colombia, Palestine and the DMZ between North Korea and South Korea—in all, 27 countries on five continents.

Though the points of commonality between the exhibiting country and the United States may not have been identical, Rivera says, Artnauts has always sought common themes, social issues and experiences.

For Martha Russo (MFA’95), who has been with the collective since 1996 and now serves as its board president, the Artnauts’ mission is about staying true to the essence of art. Its mission aligns with her ideas and beliefs about art and its ability to bring “us back to our rudimentary way of collecting information, namely, through the senses and the body,” she describes in her Artnauts artist statement.

Reflecting history and personal growth

In creating “Rhizome: Origins,” both Artnauts and �鶹��Ѱ��Art Museum curators collaborated to envision an exhibit that reflects the history of the organization and reflects artists’ personal growth, says Hope Saska, �鶹��Ѱ��Art Museum director and chief curator. Also uncommon for an Artnauts exhibit, quite a few featured pieces are three-dimensional, deviating from the idea of art that can fit in a carry-on suitcase.

In 30 years, more than 220 artists have participated in Artnauts exhibits, and they were invited to submit ideas for “Rhizome: Origins.” From these ideas, 22 artists’ work was curated for the exhibit, all of whom have �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder affiliation as faculty, staff or alumni.

The opening celebration Thursday will initiate a slate of events throughout the semester, including:

Artnauts at the CU Art Museum from 2-4 p.m. Friday, an event that will include making activity, artist-led gallery talks and an award ceremony for recipients of scholarships honoring past Artnauts.
Collective Visions: An Artnauts Panel Conversation from 1-2 p.m. Sept. 19 in room IB20 of the Visual Arts Complex, which will feature Artnaut founding members George Rivera and Beth Krensky, joined by Martha Russo, Pamela Beverly-Quigley and Eileen Roscina, in a discussion about the history and future of the artist collective.
Social Sculpture: Artnauts + YOU from 1-4 p.m. Nov. 7, an afternoon of hands-on artmaking activities, talks and art demonstrations with faculty and students from �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder’s Unstable Design Lab.
“Rhizome: Origins” closing celebration from 1-3 p.m. Dec. 12.

Thursday’s opening event will also celebrate the �鶹��Ѱ��Art Museum’s sweet 16th birthday and �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder’s 150th anniversary.

Works by Daniel Henry and George Rivera from the Artnauts "Borderlands" exhibit at the Russian Society of Artists Exhibit Hall and Khabarovsk Academy of Art in Khabarovsk, Russia, in 2001.

"Impermanence #2" by Tsehai Johnson

"Lateral Inheritance" by Michael Dixon

"Healing Grounds" by Valerie Albicker, courtesy of the Sunflower Dreams Project and the artists

"Branching as Mapping" by Barbara Colombo

"Objectal Intent" by Heather Hanson

Did you enjoy this article? Subscribe to our newsletter. Passionate about the �鶹��Ѱ��Art Museum? Show your support.

New �鶹��Ѱ��Art Museum exhibit honoring the Artnauts collective opens with a public celebration from 4 to 6 p.m. Thursday.

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Top image: "Raw Spots" by Suzanne Faris

It’s more than just feeling good or bad

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 21:23:04 +0000

It’s more than just feeling good or bad Rachel Sauer Mon, 08/31/2026 - 15:23

Rachel Sauer

In her recently published book, �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder scholar Antje Richter explores health and the art of living through illness narratives of early medieval China

In his masterpiece The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons, Chinese monk and court librarian Liu Xie observed, “If we melt away our vital energies and cramp the harmonious flow of our vital breath, then holding the writing tablet will hasten our death, and moistening the brush will hack away at our life.”

This might have been a surprising observation from one of the most eminent writers of his time, but nurturing life has long been central to Chinese thought, says Antje Richter, a �鶹��Ѱ�� professor of Chinese in the Department of Asian Languages and Civilizations. In fact, ideas about health and illness significantly shaped the literature and culture of the early Chinese medieval era—about 200 CE to 600 CE. And Liu Xie, who was mainly concerned with writers of literature, may have been the first to present advice about writers’ and knowledge workers’ occupational health.

�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder scholar Antje Richter is a professor of Chinese whose research focus includes early medieval Chinese literature.

In her recent book Health and the Art of Living: Illness Narratives in Early Medieval Chinese Literature, Richter explores how themes of health and illness are woven through the literature of the era, from informal letters between friends to sacred texts and the highly regarded genre of sickbed poetry.

“We as humans are not either healthy or unhealthy,” Richter says. “We are constantly adapting to new states of our body. This is interesting to me as a challenge that we are all facing in one way or the other. And it's not a binary; it's a graduated scale that's constantly evolving.

“In one of the chapters, I write about Sima Qian, the father of Chinese historiography, who was famously emasculated as corporal punishment but chose not to end his life, as was expected of him, but continued working on The Records of the Historian. He didn’t die of the punitive mutilation he suffered, but he coped. He finished this groundbreaking historical work, and everybody in China knows him and his story because we also have one of the letters he wrote. So, I use his example to say adaptation to new states of health is possible and that in the literature of this time we have a very nuanced understanding of what it means to be healthy or well.”

Discovering narratives of health and illness

Richter, whose research focus is the early medieval era in China, came upon this significant theme in Chinese literature while writing her previous book, Letters and Epistolary Culture in Medieval China.

“We have thousands of letters transmitted from that period, and among those letters there was a good portion that mentioned illness, and I found it quite interesting,” Richter explains. “There’s one celebrated calligrapher, Wang Xizhi, and much of what he wrote was transmitted and not thrown away. Even if he wrote, ‘I have terrible diarrhea,’ that letter was preserved.”

During her time researching that book, Richter collaborated with a longtime friend in Boulder, Charles “Chip” Chace, who was a Chinese medicine practitioner, to unlock those letters of Wang Xizhi that deal with illness.

Richter’s research of Wang Xizhi’s letters led her, in 2011, to apply for a grant to study for a semester at the Needham Research Institute, which was founded by famed sinologist and historian of Chinese science Joseph Needham.

“This was when I realized, oh, it’s not only letters that have these illness narratives, but also biographies and poetry and religious texts and stories,” Richter says.

“It’s easy to lose sight of the fact that the hallowed writers of old clearly understood themselves as living, thriving, aging and, often enough, also suffering bodies,” says Antje Richter.

Richter points to the painting on the cover of her book to describe her main intentions in writing it. The painting, held in the Smithsonian’s collection, shows the beloved early medieval poet Tao Qian—also known as Tao Yuanming—being carried in a basket because he was suffering from a foot illness and could not walk on his own. This detail of Tao Qian’s life is reported in early biographies, and in later centuries became popular in painting as well.

Richter says that to her mind, this episode shows that illness sits right in the middle of life and in the middle of Chinese literature and culture—and that she wanted to emphasize this fact and to help connect medieval Chinese studies to the global medical humanities.

How to live

Surviving texts of the literature of early medieval China, including letters, indicate that openly discussing topics of health or illness carried little or no taboo in certain genres, such as letters, Richter says, while high-register poetry only alluded to mundane or graphic physical aspects of life.

Further, Richter believes that the growing esteem of the literary genre of sickbed poetry in medieval China was inspired by Buddhism, particularly the Vimalakirti Sutra, a Buddhist text expounding on ideas of emptiness and the appearances of the world as mere illusions.

Several chapters of the Vimalakirti Sutra are set at the sickbed of a lay Buddhist, who feigns illness so people will come to his bedside and he can preach.

“Then, he and the visitors that come to his sickbed have conversations about, oh, this body is like a bit of foam that cannot be grasped, this body is like a cloud which changes and disappears in an instant, and Chinese poets were very inspired by that,” Richter says. “So, we have this genre of sickbed poetry that first only reflects on the joys of sick leave and the company of friends during this time, but later also on illnesses that ravaged the body and the illusion of existence, the temporariness of our existence.”

Richter notes that while a significant body of illness narratives from the early medieval era have survived, they generally are the narratives of wealthy and connected men. Despite these limitations, Richter says, illness narratives wove with common threads of human experience.

She says she hopes that readers will come away from the book with a strong sense of the lived reality in the Chinese Middle Ages. “It’s easy to lose sight of the fact that the hallowed writers of old clearly understood themselves as living, thriving, aging and, often enough, also suffering bodies,” she says.

“We share many of their concerns: how easy it is to overwork ourselves, how there are points in our lives and biographies where health and illness take center stage, how we are looking for a way to accept illness as part of the human condition. Trying to empathize across centuries and cultures is a good way to practice other types of empathy as well.”

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In her recently published book, �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder scholar Antje Richter explores health and the art of living through illness narratives of early medieval China.

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Top illustration: Scene of poet Tao Qian being carried from scroll "The Lotus Society." (Illustration: Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art)

Rap battles, wrong ravens and Ragnarök

Rachel Sauer — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 16:12:18 +0000

Rap battles, wrong ravens and Ragnarök Rachel Sauer Fri, 08/21/2026 - 10:12

Clay Bonnyman Evans

�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder scholar Mathias Nordvig publishes new book on Old Norse mythology

Ponding the plethora of introductory texts on Old Norse mythology, Mathias Nordvig had an epiphany.

“There are so many set up like dictionaries of myth, so you can look up (the god) Odin, you look up Asgard,” home of the Norse gods, says Nordvig, associate teaching professor in the Department of Germanic & Slavic Languages & Literatures at the �鶹��Ѱ��. “I realized there wasn’t really a book that introduces Old Norse mythology from the vantage point of the literature itself, the sources. I wanted people to know the texts and stories where we get this information.”

Mathias Nordvig is an associate teaching professor in the �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder Department of Germanic & Slavic Languages & Literatures.

The results of that epiphany — and a lot of hard work — have just been published: Old Norse Mythology: An Introduction to the Poetic Edda and Prose Edda (Routledge, 2026; 166 pages with black-and-white illustrations).

Nordvig, who is proficient in Danish, Swedish, Norwegian and Icelandic, presents works and exegesis of the two major sources of Old Norse mythology: the Poetic Edda, a collection of alliterative verse and narrative poems recorded by anonymous authors based on centuries of oral and written tradition; and the Prose Edda, an assemblage of tales written by the Icelandic Christian scholar Snorri Sturluson around 1220 CE.

He describes the Poetic Edda as “complicated,” due to its origins as a collection of verse remembered and composed by unknown authors from verse from ancient folk material — “grand poem” about such things as Odin challenging a giant about wisdom, the creation story and Ragnarök, a kind of Old Norse apocalypse — and subsequently assembled as a single work.

“When they were written down, they were already centuries old. They were reinterpreted and misunderstood in the later context,” says Nordvig, who is proficient in Danish, Swedish, Norwegian and Icelandic. “They are written in different meters and different translators made different choices.”

One poem, “Hindla’s Song,” taken from a book that includes the tales of Viking travel to North America — Christopher Columbus was centuries behind it turns out — is one of the few works in which the female deity Freya “does the walking and talking,” Nordvig says. It recounts the story of Óttarr, who summons Freya to help him identify his ancestry to win an inheritance. She turns him into a boar and rides to the underworld to retrieve the sorceress and seer Hindla, and the two women recount his pedigree in detail.

“Óttarr just happens to be related to every famous Viking that ever existed,” Nordvig says.

In Old Norse Mythology: An Introduction to the Poetic Edda and Prose Edda, �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder Professor Mathias Nordvig presents works and exegesis of the two major sources of Old Norse mythology.

He cites “The Song of Hárbard” as a favorite. In the tale, Thor and a snarky ferryman who just might be the hero’s father Odin in disguise, “have a kind of rap battle,” he says. They trade barbs and boasts about their respective sexual and magical feats as they traverse a flood-swollen river.

“It’s hilarious,” Nordvig says. “There are some wonderful insults in there.”

He describes Snorri’s Edda, as the Prose is also known, as a “more comprehensive presentation of Old Norse mythology to go to when you want to know something or look it up.”

The historian and politician Snorri wrote from his 13^th-century Christian perspective, so he is at pains to inform readers that he doesn’t really believe this stuff. In one section, he shores his position with a frame story in which the gods are merely humans duping a foolish king of Sweden.

“The other is the same kind of setting, only everyone is really drunk,” Nordvig says. “That was the only way he could present the stories.”

Snorri quotes from poems unknown in any other source, and modern scholarship has found that Snorri didn’t always get it right.

“There is this famous idea that Odin the god-king and warrior-king is accompanied by two ravens and two wolves. But he based that on his own extravagant interpretation of poetry. There is no mention of ravens and wolves closely connected to Odin,” he says.

Nordvig also notes that there is crossover between Old Norse mythology and material from the British Isles and Ireland, where Vikings raided and established settlements for 300 years, beginning in the late 8^th century.

“Some of that old Irish charm, the old English charm, shows up in western Norway,” he says.

While published as a textbook, Nordvig says he also wrote with lay readers in mind.

“I tried to make it as accessible as possible, somewhere between academic and popular language,” he says. “I’m trying to open it up for readers, to scratch the surface off and present this wealth of fascinating, sometimes confusing, information.”

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�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder scholar Mathias Nordvig publishes new book on Old Norse mythology.

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Top image: "Der letzte Kampf" by Johannes Gehrts, 1888

Rebecca Safran wins American Ornithological Society Elliott Coues Award

Rachel Sauer — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 00:15:35 +0000

Rebecca Safran wins American Ornithological Society Elliott Coues Award Rachel Sauer Mon, 08/17/2026 - 18:15

The �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder ecology and evolutionary biology professor is recognized for her research on barn swallows and other avian groups, which has taken her across the world

Rebecca Safran, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the �鶹��Ѱ��, has been awarded the Elliott Coues Award by the American Ornithological Society (AOS). The AOS is the world’s largest international ornithological society focused on the scientific study and conservation of birds.

The Elliott Coues Award recognizes outstanding and innovative contributions to ornithological research with no limitation to geographic area, sub-disciplines of ornithology or the time during which the work was done. The award, which consists of a medal and an honorarium, is named in honor of Elliott Coues, a pioneering ornithologist of the western United States and a founding member of the American Ornithologists Union (now AOS).

Rebecca Safran, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder, has been awarded the Elliott Coues Award by the American Ornithological Society.

“I am honored by this recognition of the research we do in our lab group at the �鶹��Ѱ��,” Safran said. “My first-ever scientific meeting was an AOS conference. I attend these meetings with students as often as I can for the best research updates on bird studies from around the world. There is always something new and exciting to learn. I am humbled to receive this award; past awardees are my academic heroes and have inspired much of the work many of us do today.”

In recognizing Safran, the AOS noted that she and her research group have traveled across the world to study barn swallows (Hirundo rustica) and have conducted comparative analyses on other avian groups as part of efforts to study the evolution and maintenance of population differentiation using ecological, genomics and behavioral studies.

Safran and her team established their research lab at the University of Colorado in 2008, where Safran's teaching is focused on speciation and science communication. She is the founding co-director of Inside the Greenhouse, which has a mission to find creative ways to communicate the science of climate change.

In naming Safran as an Elliott Coues Award winner, the AOS said she is passionate about the evolution and conservation of wild bird populations, interdisciplinary collaboration, art-science connections, issues related to belonging in STEM, natural history and providing learning opportunities for students at all stages of their education.

Safran is an AOS elective member (2011) and an elected board member of Environment for the Americas and the Colorado Environmental Film Festival. She is an elected fellow of the AOS (2016), the Animal Behavior Society (2024) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2026).

Safran previously received AOS travel grants in 1999 and 2003 and an AOU research grant in 2001. This support was key for Safran’s research and conference participation during graduate school. Safran noted she is grateful for the support the AOS now provides to members of her team for their research and conference attendance.

Safran said her work is not possible without the collaboration of students and colleagues and through funding by several entities including the AOS and National Science Foundation. Wherever she goes (and sometimes to the dismay of others walking with her), she is always on the lookout for H. rustica and their mud cup nests.

Safran earned her PhD at Cornell University, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at Princeton University.

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The �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder ecology and evolutionary biology professor is recognized for her research on barn swallows and other avian groups, which has taken her across the world.

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A lifetime of dance started on a skateboard

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 23:02:17 +0000

A lifetime of dance started on a skateboard Rachel Sauer Mon, 08/17/2026 - 17:02

When hip-hop icon and legendary choreographer Rennie Harris joins 'The Ampersand' podcast, expect to learn the difference between the backslide and the moonwalk

Listen to The Ampersand

Late last year, New York Times arts critic Brian Seibert, in discussing Rennie Harris’ piece “American Street Dancer,” wrote that “Harris has done more than any other choreographer to reveal and develop the metaphorical and narrative expressivity of American street dance.”

In the world of dance, he’s a legend—named a “Living Legend” by Dance magazine, in fact—yet he’s also the guy you might occasionally see tooling around the �鶹��Ѱ�� campus on a skateboard.

Harris has changed the face of concert dance by introducing hip-hop and street styles in innovative ways, and for 10 years he has been a guest artist in �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder’s dance program.

Rennie Harris has changed the face of concert dance by introducing hip-hop and street styles in innovative ways and for 10 years he has been a guest artist in �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder’s dance program. (Photo: Osamu Inoue)

He recently joined host Erika Randall, �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder dean and vice provost of undergraduate education and professor of dance, on "The Ampersand,” a College of Arts and Sciences podcast. Randall and guests explore stories about ANDing as a “full sensory verb” that describes experience and possibility.

For Harris, that experience and possibility starts with showing up. Hip-hop is a participatory culture, he says, and for those who show up? Well, that’s when the divine happens.

RENNIE HARRIS: My first skateboard was made by a cat, his name is Lewis Bailey. He is part of the younger kids, siblings, of Bill Bailey.

ERIKA RANDALL: Stop it.

HARRIS: Yes, he was my classmate and …

RANDALL: And he built boards? Tell me the story.

HARRIS: We were friends since middle school, parochial school. I went to Roman Catholic, he went to a public school. So, he built boards, and that was how I got my first board.

RANDALL: Did you know who … so, who was Bill Bailey?

HARRIS: Bill Bailey is his father. Bill was a tapper. Pearl Bailey, his aunt. I used to hang out at their house all the time. He's also the first person I saw do the backslide.

We were in recess, and he was gliding across the gravel and everyone stopped. He looked like he was walking, but he was gliding. He was moving backwards, but his feet …

RANDALL: First time you've ever seen it.

HARRIS: Yeah. Knees going foom, like what the heck is that? And he says, oh, my father taught me.

RANDALL: Stop it.

HARRIS: And that's all he said. Later on, we became really close friends.

RANDALL: But he didn't call it moonwalk.

HARRIS: No, no, the original, it's called the backslide. The moonwalk actually goes forward, and it looks like you're walking on the moon.

RANDALL: Yeah, that's moonwalk in hip hop.

HARRIS: That's why it's called the moonwalk in street dance, yeah.

RANDALL: But Earl Snakehips Tucker was doing the backslide …

HARRIS: I saw Bill Bailey in 1933 do it, do the backslide. And he was known for that.

RANDALL: In tap shoes.

HARRIS: So, that's the first time I see it. I meet with—his name was Johnny, Lewis Bailey, but they call him Johnny, Johnny Bailey. Yeah, so he made me a board. And then he started teaching me 360s, spacewalk, walk the dog, helicopter, doing planks …

RANDALL: So, you were breaking on your board.

HARRIS: Yeah, doing handstands and planks on the board. I was like, oh, snap. Yeah, so we should do all that. I said do 360s with two boards.

RANDALL: And you were dancing at the same time

For Rennie Harris, hip-hop is a participatory culture. (Photo: Bob Emmott)

HARRIS: Yeah, all this was happening at the same time.

RANDALL: You were always doing all the things.

HARRIS: Yeah, especially in the summer we would get up and be out of the house by 8 in the morning. We were just out. We were out. And, of course, this is when landlines were …

RANDALL: For people listening at home, that's when there's a phone in the wall and a cord that's attached.

HARRIS: So, at that time we would go out, never went back home until like 11 at night.

RANDALL: So, it wasn't even, ‘It starts to get dark, I want you home, Lorenzo.’

HARRIS: When I was younger, it had to be when the streetlights came on. That was always like 6, 7. You had to be on the block.

RANDALL: Within yelling distance.

HARRIS: ‘I need to be able to see you,’ that kind of thing. And so we would go out 8, 9 in the morning. I'd be across the city three or four times already by the time I got back. We were just walking and doing all kinds of stuff.

RANDALL: And you had a crew.

HARRIS: Yeah. We were skateboard. We played basketball. We'd go to the park. We used to play army man because we all thought we were going to go into the military after high school.

RANDALL: You did?

HARRIS: Oh, that was the plan ...

RANDALL: So, your first performance, can you take us back as a dancer, the first time you made money and when you had the entrepreneurialism, the moxie to say, ‘I'm going to make money on this thing that we've been doing in the community but now I'm going to figure out how to make a living?’

HARRIS: The first time I ever got paid was not performance. I was teaching. And I did this little lecture, Brenda Dixon Gottschild brought me in. I was about 14 or something.

RANDALL: BDG brought you in at 14?

HARRIS: She was at Temple. Yeah.

RANDALL: How did you know her?

HARRIS: I didn't at the time.

RANDALL: How'd she find you?

HARRIS: I have no clue.

RANDALL: That is bizarre. She's one of the greatest dance scholars of all time, and she's bringing in 14-year-old not yet Sir Rennie Harris.

HARRIS: We had become very popular in Philadelphia as a street dance crew. We were poppers, we weren't breakers.

RANDALL: What was your crew's name?

HARRIS: The Scanner Boys. And we became so popular that our name was at city hall. All the programs and all the things, any time there was an event ...

RANDALL: Let's get the Scanner Boys.

HARRIS: They called the Scanner Boys to be the entertainment. You know what I mean.

RANDALL: So, you brought hip hop to the university at 14.

HARRIS: Possibly, yeah.

RANDALL: That's wild.

HARRIS: Because everyone wanted to know what I did.

RANDALL: Yeah, so what did you say? What does 14-year-old Rennie say about popping?

HARRIS: I was just explaining what pop is, we're street dancers, blah blah blah blah.

RANDALL: Did you demo?

HARRIS: Yeah, I demoed. I demoed, I remember that. And I remember sitting in her office at Temple.

RANDALL: She saw a gap, though, in dance studies. She saw that this was not in the books, that this was not in the classroom. This was not in the literature. And you were the first guest then. I'm going to say you were the first.

HARRIS: Yeah, I was a kid.

RANDALL: And you did not have designs yet to be in the Academy or bring hip hop to the …

HARRIS: Oh, no. I will tell you this, because you mentioned something about money earlier. I will tell you this. It was all economics. If you paid me, I'd dance. I was like Tina Turner, your private dancer. That was one of my favorite songs, too.

RANDALL: Oh my God, Tina.

HARRIS: But do you know what I'm saying? So, we would go to different bars, go to lounges, and try to get money from the old people because we knew the old people would be drinking and they would be drunk.

RANDALL: Would you put out a jar or a hat?

HARRIS: We would have a hat, and say we go to the door of the bar and be like, ‘Hey, can we come in and dance?’ And dude was like, ‘Quick, make it quick.’ All right, all right. So, we'll go in and they'll put some music on, and we'll play off the jukebox, play something. And we would dance, and then we'd pass the hat around.

RANDALL: And you would take turns improvising? Or would you run it like a cipher?

HARRIS: It was always an improvisation, and it was always what I would call traditional hip hop busking. We would all stand in a line, do what they call the Soul Clap or the Soul Step, just a two-step to the left. And then we would do a solo, and then sometimes we'd do a routine to break it up. You know what I mean? And really, any kind of choreography was just a means to get to the solo for everyone. And so that's what we did, and then we would put out the hat.

Click play to hear the rest of the conversation!

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When hip-hop icon and legendary choreographer Rennie Harris joins 'The Ampersand' podcast, expect to learn the difference between the backslide and the moonwalk.

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Top photo: Rennie Harris (left) teaching a dance class. (Photo: Patrick Campbell/�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder)

Scott Taylor elected councilor of the American Ornithological Society

Rachel Sauer — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 15:33:13 +0000

Scott Taylor elected councilor of the American Ornithological Society Rachel Sauer Tue, 08/11/2026 - 09:33

�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder researcher will serve as a member of the Society’s governing body and promote its mission to support science that advances the understanding and conservation of birds

Scott Taylor, a �鶹��Ѱ�� professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and director of the Mountain Research Station, has been elected a councilor of the American Ornithological Society (AOS).

In this three-year volunteer term, Taylor, who also is a fellow of the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, will serve as a member of the AOS governing body, which “establishes the direction and strategy of the AOS, makes high-level decisions about AOS’ priorities, oversees the sound financial management of AOS’ resources and ensures legal and ethical integrity of the organization,” according to the organization.

The AOS’ mission is to connect ornithologists, science and bird conservation by “supporting science that advances the understanding and conservation of birds, promoting broad access to ornithological science, supporting ornithologists throughout their career paths and fostering a welcoming, diverse, supportive and dynamic ornithological community.”

�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder scientist Scott Taylor has been elected a councilor of the American Ornithological Society.

In his councilor candidate statement, Taylor noted that he is deeply committed to the AOS “as both a scientific home and a community that has shaped my career. Having benefited from AOS through collaborations, mentorship networks and opportunities to engage with cutting-edge research, I am motivated to give back in a leadership role.”

His involvement with AOS has included serving on committees, organizing symposia and building inclusive community spaces at annual meetings

“I am particularly interested in helping the Society continue to foster a vibrant, inclusive and forward-looking ornithological community while supporting early-career scientists, strengthening connections across disciplines and engaging in effective outreach,” he noted in his candidate statement.

Taylor, who grew up in rural southern Ontario, earned his undergraduate degree in wildlife biology at the University of Guelph and his PhD at Queen’s University. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and worked as a field biologist in South America.

As principal investigator of the Taylor Lab, he leads research focused on hybridization, speciation, evolutionary ecology and population genomics, primarily of birds. He and his colleagues pursue research using natural hybrid zones and recent radiations to understand the genetic bases of traits involved in reproductive isolation, population divergence and speciation, and the impacts of anthropogenic change, including climate change, on species distributions, interactions and evolution.

Taylor also is host of the podcast “Okay, But… Birds,” which has addressed topics ranging from whether birds invented music to how wildfire smoke affects birds and a rumination on whether birdwatching is the original Pokémon with Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer Ed Yong.

“Being elected to AOS Council is an honor,” Taylor said. “I have long worked to help the AOS become a more inclusive society and am impressed by the dedication of the society to their members. In my new role, I’ll continue this work at a larger scale, supporting the next generation of ornithologists and ornithological research.”

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�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder researcher will serve as a member of the Society’s governing body and promote its mission to support science that advances the understanding and conservation of birds.

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Top image: a flock of pelicans in Peru (Photo: Scott Taylor)

Scholar finds rhythm in rock and rhetoric

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 23:23:30 +0000

Scholar finds rhythm in rock and rhetoric Rachel Sauer Mon, 08/10/2026 - 17:23

“A rhythm is predictable, but what makes rhythms exciting sometimes is the fact that they do change… it’s the balance between the predictability and the spontaneity. That’s what makes life worth living,” says Steve Lamos. (Photo: Jesus Ortiz/@optimisticphoto)

Cody DeBos

As a founding member of influential band American Football, currently on tour, �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder Professor Steve Lamos blends music and writing in ‘resonant literacy’

Steve Lamos is relaxing at home during a brief pit stop after touring with his band for two weeks. By Friday, he’ll be on a plane to Japan. Somewhere in between, he finds time to lesson plan and grade papers.

This is normal life for Lamos, an associate professor in the �鶹��Ѱ�� Department of English and Program for Writing and Rhetoric.

Every so often, he trades the world of academia for a tour bus as the drummer and trumpet player for American Football, the influential Midwest emo and math-rock band he co-founded in 1997.

Steve Lamos is an associate professor in the �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder Department of English and Program for Writing and Rhetoric.

This spring, the band released its fourth studio album, “LP4,” its first in nearly seven years.

Now juggling his teaching career with his band’s busiest touring schedule yet, Lamos calls this summer “both a blessing and a little bit of a, wow, you know, be careful what you wish for.”

Hiatus to homecoming

American Football’s new record almost didn’t happen.

Between 2020 and 2023, Lamos stepped away from the band while serving as interim director of the Program for Writing and Rhetoric, a role he describes as a “24/7 type of job.”

Around the same time, unresolved tension within the band came to a head and Lamos was focused on managing more responsibilities at home after a family member fell ill.

“Stepping away was inevitable,” he says.

But as any musician knows, putting down your instrument often comes with a sense of nostalgia for what once was. So, it was absence that brought Lamos back to American Football—realizing that the weight of missing it was greater than "whatever things were demanding that I step away or more than I was aggravated by those things, that’s when I knew,” he says.

The circumstances surrounding his return are why this album means more to him than the three that came before it, including a genre-defining first record.

Want to see your professor on stage?

American Football will perform tour dates through summer and fall 2026, including Sept. 22 at Boulder Theater and Sept. 23 at Red Rocks Amphitheater.

Learn more

“It represents our ability to get back together and do new things. I’m probably the proudest of it of anything I’ve ever done,” he says.

The rhythm of resonant literacy

Lamos kept his two lives strictly separated for many years, but today he’s quite willing to bring them together.

While teaching an upper-division course called Writing with Music, he’s developed a concept he calls “resonant literacy.”

As Lamos explains, it all starts with rhythm.

Within his framework, resonance is what follows.

“Resonance is when rhythm in one body generates rhythms in one or more other bodies,” Lamos says.

Over time, he’s learned to apply the concept as readily to a drum set as to a well-written sentence or the back-and-forth of a good conversation.

Resonant literacy often manifests in Lamos’ classroom. In Writing with Music, students spend a semester narrating the feel of a favorite song, then write a research paper arguing why that feeling should matter to a specific audience.

“Like, what a useless thing,” Lamos says, only half-joking. “Except, if students are doing it right, I routinely get the best work I’ve ever gotten.”

But really, Lamos says the idea is less about music or writing than about how to live. Understanding the rhythms we both create and are subjected to offers us a richer viewpoint as we navigate life’s ups and downs.

“There are ways in which you can influence those rhythms, or even make yourself better at generating them, and then leaving yourself more and more open to the possibility that they resonate, ideally in some sort of transformational way that makes life more vibrant and exciting,” he explains.

Where two worlds meet

When looking for it, Lamos finds that resonance often shows up in unexpected places, too. That includes relationships formed in the classroom that have blossomed into new creative ventures.

Vidushi Goyal was a science-writing student in Lamos’ class about a decade ago. Years after graduating, and coincidentally at the same time as his hiatus from American Football, Goyal shared some of her music.

“Every piece she sent me, I was like, ‘Oh man, this is good. This is even better than the last one.’ So, I asked if she wanted to play with some live drums, and she was in. We did some stuff together and I still get to play with her as a two-piece now and then,” Lamos says.

More recently, �鶹��Ѱ��music student Max Adams organized a concert collaboration with Lamos this spring, arranging several American Football songs for a live ensemble.

Asked to describe it, Lamos’ face lit up.

“One of the cooler experiences I’ve ever had in my life,” he says.

‘ANDing’

For Lamos, making the most of a life defined by two wholly different paths comes down to a word the College of Arts and Sciences has embraced: “ANDing.”

“It’s this idea that part of what arts and sciences is about is this additive thing… taking two things that might seem disparate or even running at cross-purposes, and seeing what happens when you bring them together,” he says.

The label is fitting for a career built on the instincts of rhythm.

Resonance and “ANDing” are, in a sense, two names for the same idea that has carried Lamos from a grad school garage band to a tenured professorship and an international concert venues.

Whether you call it resonant literacy or borrow CU’s branding, the lesson is the same one Lamos wants to pass on to his own teenagers and to any student wondering whether a writing seminar and a rock band can not just coexist but become more than the sum of their parts.

“Do something practical, do something wholly impractical, and figure it out,” he says. “Figure out a way to bring them together, because you're only going to be happy in your life in the long term if you do.”

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As a founding member of influential band American Football, currently on tour, �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder Professor Steve Lamos blends music and writing in ‘resonant literacy.’

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Top image: Steve Lamos (left), Mike Kinsella, Nate Kinsella and Steve Holmes of American Football (Photo: Alexa Viscius)

Meredith Betterton awarded Sloan Matter-to-Life grant

Rachel Sauer — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 20:55:21 +0000

Meredith Betterton awarded Sloan Matter-to-Life grant Rachel Sauer Wed, 08/05/2026 - 14:55

Rachel Sauer

Research aligns with foundation goal to sharpen ‘scientific understanding of the physical principles and mechanisms that distinguish living systems from inanimate matter’

Meredith Betterton, a �鶹��Ѱ�� professor of physics and molecular, cellular and developmental biology, has been awarded a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Matter-to-Life program.

The two-year, $594,487 grant will support Betterton’s ongoing research on microtubules, the small, long tubes inside cells that serve several functions and that Betterton’s research suggests may be less fixed and static than previously thought.

The Sloan Matter-to-Life program aims “to sharpen our scientific understanding of the physical principles and mechanisms that distinguish living systems from inanimate matter, and to explore the conditions under which physical principles and mechanisms guide the complexification of matter towards life.”

�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder scientist Meredith Betterton has been awarded a two-year, $594,487 grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Matter-to-Life program.

Betterton and her research colleagues study microtubules in cells, which help maintain cell structure similar to how beams support a building and also act like highways that move traffic along, she explains.

“Because (microtubules) have this important role as highways that things stick to and then move along, people have thought about them as being kind of fixed,” she says. “You build a microtubule, it’s there to be a highway and then it’s pretty static.

“The thought has been that once they’re there (in the cell), they sit there. Our project has to do with the idea that there might be subtle changes within the (microtubule) structure that act as a signal that sends information—so they act in some ways not as a highway, but like a telephone wire that’s sending signals.”

Building with bricks

Microtubules are built of subunits, called tubulin, that can be compared to bricks, Betterton explains. These tubulin “bricks” are known to make small internal changes to their shape and size; what hasn’t been known is what happens to the rest of the tubulin in the microtubule if one changes. “Imagine packing a lot of bricks together in a wall,” she says. “If you change the shape of one, what happens to the others nearby?”

Several years ago, Betterton and her research group, in collaboration with another team of research colleagues including Radhika Subramanian and Sithara S. Wijeratne at Harvard Medical School, were studying “traffic” along microtubules, which is done by motor proteins. These proteins take “steps” along the microtubule. They also can pile up and cause traffic jams, so Betterton and her colleagues were studying those jams to better understand the motors.

The researchers discovered this phenomenon because the math wasn’t working. “In my group we were working on mathematical modeling of this, and we couldn’t get the model to work,” she says. “We put in measurements, and the equations gave us predictions that were really different from what experiments showed. We found the only way we could get the model to make sense was if something was happening where the motors could talk to each other over really long distances.”

While this action happens on a nanometer scale, “if you scaled it up it would be as if, when you’re driving a car, you could know there’s another car two miles away and how fast it’s driving,” she says. “That really was the initial discovery—this weird, long-range effect that we didn’t know where it was coming from.”

Other research had explored the conformational transitions, or structural shifts in tubulin, and how motor proteins can stick to microtubules and change their state if they bind in large numbers. Betterton and her research group are exploring whether a change of state can happen when motor proteins bind in small numbers and send signals over long distances.

How cells process information

A key aspect of this research, Betterton says, is it explores a different paradigm for how to think about these particular molecules in cells and aims for broader understanding of the way cells process information.

For example, she says, much is known about how neurons in the brain send electrical signals—a vital process for information transmission in the brain—but that process “can only happen in that one type of cell, whereas microtubules are in every cell,” Betterton says. “They could be sensing something happening in one part of the cell, so we’re studying this new way that cells could be responding.”

She adds that there are various potential applications for this avenue of research, including developing more targeted chemotherapy drugs: “There’s one (tubulin) that seems to be resistant to this subtle expansion and contraction. Recent work shows that makes them not as responsive to chemotherapy drugs. Because microtubules are involved in cell division, some first-line chemotherapy drugs for cancer act against microtubules.

“What has been discovered is that some cancers can resist these chemotherapy drugs by switching to this other type of tubulin that doesn’t change shape as well,” she says, adding that understanding more about tubulin expansion and contraction could possibly lead to more effective drugs.

There also could be potential applications in the physics of materials and using microtubules and motor proteins to make new types of materials that are more tunable to specific functions.

“The Sloan program is interested in this research because this specific program is called Matter-to-Life,” Betterton says. “What that’s trying to say of matter is that it’s some collections of molecules, but what about it becomes different between something that’s inert versus something that could be more alive? That’s a really exciting question.”

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Research aligns with foundation goal to sharpen ‘scientific understanding of the physical principles and mechanisms that distinguish living systems from inanimate matter.'

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Top image: Alfred P. Sloan Foundation

The weather’s hot, the books are cool

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 21:31:07 +0000

The weather’s hot, the books are cool Rachel Sauer Mon, 08/03/2026 - 15:31

There’s still plenty of time to dive into a summer reading list, and College of Arts and Sciences authors can meet every reading mood

Friends, it’s hot out—don’t-touch-the-steering-wheel, try-to-fry-an-egg-on-the-sidewalk hot, with scant relief in the forecast.

It’s the sort of weather that calls for a hammock in the shade and a good book. So, even though we’re well into summer and perhaps starting to think about heading back to school, it’s not too late to dive into a summer reading list.

If you’re looking for some recommendations to see you through the rest of summer, the College of Arts and Sciences can help. Our faculty and alumni have written books that cater to a fascinating range of interests—from Roman temple robbery to a middle school student trying to figure things out to an exploration of Colorado’s eeriest places.

So, what are you in the mood to read?

Reading vibe: Creepy but make it Colorado

Suggestion: Eerie Colorado: Mountain Folklore, Monsters and Tales of the Supernatural, by Jack Daly, a lecturer in the �鶹��Ѱ�� Program for Writing and Rhetoric.

Daly explores all things supernatural, unexplainable and unnerving in the Centennial State. Beyond simply organizing these legends in one volume, Daly also grapples with the role supernatural folklore plays in the historical and contemporary culture of Colorado.

Reading vibe: Thinking about the Roman Empire

Suggestion: Stealing from the Gods, by Isabel Köster, a �鶹��Ѱ�� associate professor of classics whose research focus is the history, religion and literature of the Roman Republic and the early Empire.

Ancient Romans often plundered temples in their wars of conquest—sometimes openly and with astonishing scale. Large statues and famous works of art were carried away from foreign lands to Rome, treasuries were emptied and sacred spaces were stripped bare.

Yet, despite how frequently these robberies occurred, Romans still expressed sharp moral outrage about it—not for the plundering itself, but for particular individuals accused of committing it for the “wrong” reasons.

Reading vibe: Remembering forgotten histories of choice and liberal religion

Suggestion: God Bless the Pill, by Samira Mehta, a �鶹��Ѱ�� associate professor of women and gender studies and director of the Program in Jewish Studies.

It's time to remember the often-forgotten history of mid-20th-century Protestant, Jewish and Catholic leaders and believers who embraced birth control as part of God’s plan. In fact, many denominations that were “skeptical to disapproving” in the early 20th century came around to supporting and advocating for birth control and family planning.

Reading vibe: The "A" in AI could also stand for "art"

Suggestion: Lily in a Codebox, by Lee Frankel-Goldwater, an assistant teaching professor of environmental studies at the �鶹��Ѱ��.

In the summer of 2023, Lee Frankel-Goldwater was heavily immersed in Boulder’s poetry community. He was also very aware of the waves that ChatGPT was making in the tech world.

"I started doing some experiments and playing with this AI to see what it could do poetically,” says Frankel-Goldwater. He was already certain AI was going to change everything, and he wanted to see how it might be used to explore new realms of poetics.

Reading vibe: Feeling like a mango

Suggestion: Confessions of a Mango, a mid-grade novel by Katheryn Lumsden, a �鶹��Ѱ�� molecular, cellular and developmental biology alumna, and Nathan Pieplow, an associate teaching professor in the Program for Writing and Rhetoric.

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

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

Reading vibe: Gloriously alive

Suggestion: How it Feels to Be Alive: Encounters with Art and Our Selves, by Megan O'Grady, an assistant professor in art and art history and a former art critic at The New York Times.

“I have often been bludgeoned by art’s beauty, energized or pulverized by its emotional content, vacuum-sealed within its force-field," O'Grady says. "I’ve looked at it and thought, This is exactly what it feels like to remember someone I lost, or, This is what love is, a tenderness toward existence.”

Additionally, she contends, art “provokes unanswerable questions about how to live in a fragmenting society. It enacts transfers of energy, joy and defiance. It suggests new forms of connection and belonging.”

Reading vibe: More reading, please

Suggestion: The Novel Experience, by Helmut Müller-Sievers, a professor of Germanic and Slavic languages and literature.

Helmut Müller-Sievers has an idea to help reignite students’ interest in taking literature courses: Rather than teaching novels as a source of knowledge, academics should encourage young readers to pay attention to the experience of reading.

“Every experience is novel, and every novel is an experience,” he says.

Reading vibe: Science can happen anywhere!

Suggestion: A Life of Science—In Gyms!, a memoir by Doug Seals, a distinguished professor in the Department of Integrative Physiology who chronicles more than four decades in biomedical research.

Imagine a biomedical research laboratory. Chances are, visions of gleaming equipment, climate-controlled rooms, and the hum of precision instruments come to mind.

But what if that lab was really a century-old gymnasium plagued by electrical outages, noise and temperatures that swing with the seasons? Those are just some of the challenges Doug Seals faced while establishing one of the most productive aging research programs in the country.

Reading vibe: Walking through the garden

Suggestion: The Garden, a work of poetry by Julie Carr, professor of English and creative writing and chair of women and gender studies.

Questions of what to do about violence and the spiritual paralysis it can cause let Julie Carr down wandering paths of mystical tradition, of memories of her uncle, of dreams of fire in the dry Colorado grass, of imaginings like fragments of broken glass. And she arrived at The Garden, her recently published book that weaves fractured narratives into reoriented themes of time, war, Jewishness, memory, techno-biology, friendship and grief.

Reading vibe: A road trip through memory

Suggestion: Music for Leaving, a novel by Erika Randall, dean and vice provost of undergraduate education and professor of dance

Meet Eleanor Murphy: She's 61 and on a road trip of reconciliation and reclamation across I-70, a small duffle bag and her childhood hopeless chest of failed dreams beside her on the seat of a 1960s Dodge truck.

On a journey to connect with her sister and her estranged daughter, Eleanor considers themes of longing, relief and hope—sometimes given voice through items she connects with like a peach pit, her engagement ring and a dashboard hula dancer. Along the way, she learns that though leaving is often seen as failure, sometimes it is its own superpower.

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There’s still plenty of time to dive into a summer reading list, and College of Arts and Sciences authors can meet every reading mood.

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