Rachel Sauer

Scholars aim to build community for women in quantum

Rachel Sauer — Fri, 25 Apr 2025 19:46:50 +0000

Scholars aim to build community for women in quantum Rachel Sauer Fri, 04/25/2025 - 13:46

Rachel Sauer

Quantum Scholars Emily Jerris and Annalise Cabra started CU Women of Quantum to help women interested in careers in quantum to network and share experiences

First, the good news: Between 1970 and 2022, the percentage of U.S. women workers in STEM jobs grew from 7% to 26%.

The obvious and not-so-good news is that while women represent almost half the U.S. workforce, they hold only a quarter of STEM jobs. And the numbers get even more stark in quantum fields. A 2022 report from the London School of Economics and Political Science found that fewer than 2% of applicants for jobs in quantum fields are female.

Quantum Scholars Annalise Cabra (left) and Emily Jerris (right) gave a presentation about CU Women of Quantum at the December Quantum Scholars meeting attended by CU President Todd Saliman. (Photo: Casey Cass/91��ý)

However, in the 100 years since German physicist Werner Heisenberg submitted his paper “On quantum-theoretical reinterpretation of kinematic and mechanical relationships” to the journal Zeitschrift für Physik, a July 1925 event that is broadly credited with kick-starting the quantum revolution, the possibilities and potential of quantum science and engineering have grown enormously.

Recognizing that potential, a group of University of Colorado Boulder scholars wants to help ensure that women participate equally and fully in quantum science and engineering.

CU Women of Quantum, founded last semester by Quantum Scholars Emily Jerris and Annalise Cabra, aims to be a community of support, connection, mentorship and networking for women interested in pursuing careers or research in quantum fields.

“Our primary focus,” Cabra explains, “is just to create a space where we can come together, share our experiences and create relationships that are lasting.”

100 years of quantum

Both Jerris and Cabra say that this is an exciting time to be in quantum science and engineering. Not only did the United Nations declare 2025 as the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology, and not only did Colorado Gov. Jared Polis last week announce the Blueprint for Advancing K–12 Quantum Information Technology, but research happening on the 91��ý campus and in Colorado is swiftly expanding the boundaries of quantum technology.

However, they also add that as exciting as this time is, women in quantum fields still face some of the same roadblocks that women in STEM always have.

“I think if you asked most of the women in the club or just in a STEM major if they’ve had a moment where a peer or coworker has talked down to them or they felt not necessarily fully included in a project because they were the only woman in the group, I think most probably have,” Jerris says. “So, it’s nice to have a space to talk about that—how to navigate situations like that. A lot of us do research, too, and those types of situations are also really prevalent in the research space.”

Jerris and Cabra worked with Michael Ritzwoller, a physics professor of distinction and Quantum Scholars co-founder, and physics Professor Noah Finkelstein to create CU Women of Quantum, which is open to all students, as a place for not only female Quantum Scholars, but for women across campus who are interested in pursuing careers in quantum science, technology or engineering.

Annalise Cabra (left) works with Brooke Nelson (right), a career advisor for the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences, on her resume during a recent CU Women of Quantum meeting.

Supporting women in quantum

One of the group’s aims is creating networking and mentorship opportunities for members by asking professors and women working in quantum fields to speak at group meetings. This has included Alex Tingle, a 91��ý physics alumna and senior technical project engineer at Quantinuum, who was named one of the Wonder Women of the Quantum Industry by the Quantum Daily.

CU Women of Quantum gatherings also focus on skill-building, including a recent meeting at which Brooke Nelson, a career advisor for the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences, gave a presentation on creating and honing a resume.

“One of our goals is to help (CU Women of Quantum members) narrow in on their interests and build connections,” Cabra says. “And then also having opportunities to see how women in their shoes were able to navigate and build careers in quantum. I think it’s important for a lot of women in the field, too, to go back and encourage other women who are just starting out or just getting interested in quantum.”

The members of CU Women of Quantum also get together for study sessions, “because even if we’re not taking the same classes, with other women you can feel more open and not like you’re the outlier in the group.”

Both Cabra, who is graduating next month, and Jerris, who is completing her third year, are interested in pursuing careers in a quantum field, bolstered by the support they’ve found in CU Women of Quantum.

“It’s so fascinating because it’s just so unintuitive,” Cabra says. “It makes your brain think in such crazy ways, from the ways particles behave to the ways stars don’t collapse or do collapse, to parallel universes, and it all goes back to quantum. I think it’s just so exciting to study.”

Jerris adds that often the common perception of quantum science and technology is that “it’s kind of magic or something we don’t totally understand, but we actually do have a pretty good understanding of quantum. We know what’s going on and can model it, and we’re maybe just one step behind with how we can actually manipulate things. So, it’s not magic; it’s something we do know a lot about and we’re learning more every day.”

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Quantum Scholars Emily Jerris and Annalise Cabra started CU Women of Quantum to help women interested in careers in quantum to network and share experiences.

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Top image: Casey Cass/91��ý

In the archaeological record, size does matter

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 14 Apr 2025 15:24:57 +0000

In the archaeological record, size does matter Rachel Sauer Mon, 04/14/2025 - 09:24

Rachel Sauer

91��ý archaeologist Scott Ortman and colleagues around the world explore relationships between housing size and inequality in PNAS Special Feature

If the archaeological record has been correctly interpreted, stone alignments in Tanzania’s Olduvai Gorge are remnants of shelters built 1.7 million years ago by Homo habilis, an extinct species representing one of the earliest branches of humanity’s family tree.

Archaeological evidence that is unambiguously housing dates to more than 20,000 years ago—a time when large swaths of North America, Europe and Asia were covered in ice and humans had only recently begun living in settlements.

Between that time and the dawn of industrialization, the archaeological record is rich not only with evidence of settled life represented by housing, but also with evidence of inequality.

91��ý archaeologist Scott Ortman partnered with colleagues Amy Bogaard of the University of Oxford and Timothy Kohler of the University of Florida on a PNAS Special Feature focused on housing size in the archaeological record and inequality.

In a Special Feature published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), scholars from around the world draw from a groundbreaking archaeological database that collects more than 55,000 housing floor area measurements from sites spanning the globe—data that support research demonstrating various correlations between housing size and inequality.

“Archaeologists have been interested in the study of inequality for a long time,” explains Scott Ortman, a University of Colorado Boulder associate professor of anthropology who partnered with colleagues Amy Bogaard of the University of Oxford and Timothy Kohler of Washington State University to bring together the PNAS Special Feature. (Special Features in PNAS are curated collections of articles that delve into important topics.)

“For a long time, studies have focused on the emergence of inequality in the past, and while some of the papers in the special feature address those issues, others also consider the dynamics of inequality in more general terms.”

Kohler notes that "we use this information to identify the fundamental drivers of economic inequality using a different way of thinking about the archaeological record—more thinking about it as a compendium of human experience. It’s a new approach to doing archaeology.”

Patterns of inequality

Ortman, Bogaard and Kohler also are co-principal investigators on the Global Dynamics of Inequality (GINI) Project funded by the National Science Foundation and housed in the 91��ý Center for Collaborative Synthesis in Archaeology in the Institute of Behavioral Science to create the database of housing floor area measurements from sites around the world.

Scholars then examined patterns of inequality shown in the data and studied them in the context of other measures of economic productivity, social stability and conflict to illuminate basic social consequences of inequality in human society, Ortman explains.

“What we did was we crowdsourced, in a sense,” Ortman says. “We put out a request for information from archaeologists working around the world, who knew about the archaeological record of housing in different parts of world and got them together to design a database to capture what was available from ancient houses in societies all over world.”

Undergraduate and graduate research assistants also helped create the database, which contains 55,000 housing units and counting from sites as renowned as Pompeii and Herculaneum, to sites across North and South America, Asia, Europe and Africa. “By no stretch of the imagination is it all of the data that archaeologists have ever collected, but we really did make an effort to sample the world and pull together most of the readily available information from excavations, from remote sensing, from LiDAR,” Ortman says.

The housing represented in the data spans non-industrial society from about 12,000 years ago to the recent past, generally ending with industrialization. The collected data then served as a foundation for 10 papers in the PNAS Special Feature, which focus on the archaeology of inequality as evidenced in housing.

Housing similarities

In their introduction to the Special Feature, Ortman, Kohler and Bogaard note that “economic inequality, especially as it relates to inclusive and sustainable social development, represents a primary global challenge of our time and a key research topic for archaeology.

In the PNAS Special Feature published Monday, researchers from around the world describe evidence of inequality found in archaeological data of housing size. (Cover image: Johnny Miller/Unequal Scenes)

“It is also deeply linked to two other significant challenges. The first is climate change. This threatens to widen economic gaps within and between nations, and some evidence from prehistory associates high levels of inequality with lack of resilience to climatic perturbations. The second is stability of governance. Clear and robust evidence from two dozen democracies over the last 25 years that links high economic inequality to political polarization, distrust of institutions and weakening democratic norms. Clearly, if maintenance of democratic systems is important to us, we must care about the degree of wealth inequality in society.”

Archaeological evidence demonstrates a long prehistory of inequality in income and wealth, Ortman and his colleagues note, and allows researchers to study the fundamental drivers of those inequalities. The research in the Special Feature takes advantage of the fact “that residences dating to the same chronological period, and from the same settlements or regions, will be subject to very similar climatic, environmental, technological and cultural constraints and opportunities.”

Several papers in the Special Feature address the relationship between economic growth and inequality, Ortman says. “They’re thinking about not just the typical size of houses in a society, but the rates of change in the sizes of houses from one time step to the next.

“One thing we’ve also done (with the database) is arrange houses from many parts of the world in regional chronological sequences—how the real estate sector of past societies changed over time.”

The papers in the Special Feature focus on topics including the effects of land use and war on housing disparities and the relationship between housing disparities and how long housing sites are occupied. A study that Ortman led and conducted with colleagues from around the world found that comparisons of archaeological and contemporary real estate data show that in preindustrial societies, variation in residential building area is proportional to income inequality and provides a conservative estimator for wealth inequality.

“Our research shows that high wealth inequality could become entrenched where ecological and political conditions permitted,” Bogaard says. “The emergence of high wealth inequality wasn’t an inevitable result of farming. It also wasn’t a simple function of either environmental or institutional conditions. It emerged where land became a scarce resource that could be monopolized. At the same time, our study reveals how some societies avoided the extremes of inequality through their governance practices.”

The researchers argue that “the archaeological record also shows that the most reliable way to promote equitable economic development is through policies and institutions that reduce the covariance of current household productivity with productivity growth.”

GINI Project data, as well as the analysis program developed for them, will be available open access via the Digital Archaeological Record.

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91��ý archaeologist Scott Ortman and colleagues around the world explore relationships between housing size and inequality in PNAS Special Feature.

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Tales as old as time … yet we still love them

Rachel Sauer — Fri, 04 Apr 2025 15:36:10 +0000

Tales as old as time … yet we still love them Rachel Sauer Fri, 04/04/2025 - 09:36

Rachel Sauer

With yet another Snow White adaptation currently in theaters, 91��ý scholar Suzanne Magnanini reflects on the enduring appeal of fairy tales

Once upon a time—this time, in fact, and many of the ones that came before it—there was a story that never grew dull in its telling.

It possibly leaped the porous cultural and national borders of narrative, carried by caravans or ships or ethernet cables and planted in the ready imaginations of successive generations of story lovers—those who tell them and those who hear them.

Maybe it’s the story of a young person who ventures into the unknown, where they encounter magic and beasts of all sizes and a resolution specific to the tale’s time and place. Maybe there really even are fairies involved.

Suzanne Magnanini, a 91��ý associate professor of Italian and chair of the Department of French and Italian, notes that fairy tales' malleability helps them remain fresh and relevant over centuries of retellings.

And we never seem to tire of hearing about them.

The recent theatrical release of Disney’s live-action Snow White—one of countless retellings of the tale over more than 400 years—highlights the place of honor that fairy tales occupy in cultures around the world and in the hearts of people hearing them for the first time or the thousandth.

One of the reasons they remain fresh through countless years and iterations is their malleability, says Suzanne Magnanini, a University of Colorado Boulder associate professor of Italian and chair of the Department of French and Italian. “The Italian author Italo Calvino, who also edited a seminal collection of Italian folktales, writes of fairy tales as being like a stone fruit, where you have that hard core center that is always the same—you’ll usually recognize a Sleeping Beauty story, for example—but the fruit can be radically different around that.”

Stories of time and place

As a researcher, Magnanini has published broadly on fairy tales, including her 2008 book Fairy-Tale Science: Monstrous Generation in the Fairy Tales of Straparola and Basile. She began studying fairy tales while working on her PhD, finding in them a fascinating dovetailing between her interests in monstrosity and otherness.

“As a scholar, I take what’s called a social-historical approach,” she explains. “I’m really interested in all those little details that link a tale to a very precise place in time where it was told, and I’ve written about the ways in which fairy tales are used to elaborate on and think about scientific theories of reproduction that hadn’t really been nailed down at the time—questions that were still being circulated about whether humans could interbreed with animals, for example, and would that produce a monstrous child?

“You look at a some variations of Beauty and the Beast, like Giovan Francesco Straparola’s story of a pig king, where it’s a magical version of these questions, and maybe what’s actually happening is that fairy tales are a way to think through the anxieties and interests of the time.”

Fairy Tales at 91��ý

The ATU Index is one of the search elements that Suzanne Magnanini and her students are including as they develop the database for Fairy Tales at 91��ý. The project aims, in part, to improve access and searchability of the more than 2,000 fairy tale collections that are part of the Rare Books Collection at Norlin Library.

The project is a partnership between undergraduates and graduate students under the direction of Magnanini and Sean Babbs, instruction coordinator for the University Libraries' Rare and Distinctive Collections, as well as Hope Saska, CU Art Museum acting director and chief curator, who has trained students in visual-thinking strategies. The project is supported by Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program, the ASSETT Innovation Incubator, the President’s Teaching Scholars Program and the University Libraries.

Fairy Tales at 91��ý will host a showcase of CU's fairy tale collection from 3:30 to 4:45 p.m. April 16 in Norlin Library M350B. Learn more here.

Though fairy tales may be spun in response to what’s happening in a specific time and place, they also often address concerns that aren’t specific to one location or culture but are broadly pondered across humanity. “Andrew Teverson has written that fairy tales are literature’s migrants because they can move across borders, they can move across boundaries and then make themselves at home and assimilate to a certain extent in different cultures,” Magnanini says.

For example, the Brothers Grimm heard a tale called “Sneewittchen” (Snow White) from folklorist Marie Hassenpflug, as well as from other sources, and included it as tale No. 53 in their seminal 1812 Grimm’s Fairy Tales. However, says Magnanini, there was a similar tale called “The Young Slave” in Giambattista Basile’s 1634 work Pentamerone. In fact, Snow White is type 709 in the Aarne–Thompson–Uther Index (ATU Index), which catalogs and describes common motifs and themes in fairy tales and folklore around the world.

Not so happily ever after

The origins of many fairy tales can be traced as far back as ancient Greece, Rome and China, Magnanini says, which speaks to their ability not only to help people of particular times and places explore their anxieties and questions, but to address the feelings that have been central to the human condition almost since our species emerged from caves.

“When I think about fairy tales, I think about number of characteristics that make them really appealing across time and space,” Magnanini says. “If you think about it, the protagonists are almost always young people heading out into the world—much like our students are heading out—leaving home behind, having to make their way in world, facing challenges. That experience can be very transformational, so in a way these stories are all about metamorphosis and change.

“A lot of times that’s when you’re living your life in Technicolor and all the emotions are new. So, even if you’re no longer in that moment of life, fairy tales tap into experiences like the first falling in love, the first adventure from home. And they often end right after the wedding, so you don’t see someone having to do their taxes or being like, ‘Oh, my god, I’ve been in this relationship for 30 years and I’m bored.’ I think part of the reason we don’t get tired of fairy tales is because they capture this fleeting time in life.”

“If you think about it, the (fairy tale) protagonists are almost always young people heading out into the world—much like our students are heading out—leaving home behind, having to make their way in world, facing challenges," says 91��ý scholar Suzanne Magnanini. (Photo: Disney Studios)

While fairy tales, particularly as they’ve been interpreted and simplified by Disney, are stereotyped as having “and they lived happily ever after” endings, fairy tales pre-Disney more commonly ended with justice served, Magnanini says. For example, the version of “Snow White” in the 1812 Grimm’s Fairy Tales ends with the evil queen being forced to step into a pair of red-hot iron shoes and dance until she dies.

“A lot of people will say, ‘Oh, it’s the happy ending that’s the appeal of fairy tales,’ but it’s important to remember the vast majority of fairy tales end with the deliverance of justice—something really unjust has happened, someone has been discriminated against, there’s some evil in the world, and justice is delivered,” Magnanini explains. “People who study the formal aspects of fairy tales always talk about how the ‘happy ending’ is found in justice.

“Disney Studios has a tendency to remove the ambiguity from these tales and remove most of the violence—simplifying them in a lot of ways. If you read the French version of Beauty and the Beast, Charles Perrault’s version, there were other siblings in there; there was a complex family structure with complex interactions and a lot of really heavy issues—the family must deal with economic disaster.”

In fact, the field of fairy tale scholarship addresses everything from feminist interpretations of the stories to the ways in which children use fairy tales to help navigate psychosexual rites of passage. Generations of authors have told and continue to retell these familiar stories through different lenses of gender, sexuality, geography, racial identity, economic status and many, many others.

“What makes these stories different, and what I think is a big part of the appeal of fairy tales, is the magic or the marvel,” Magnanini says. “For it to be a fairy tale, scholars would say there has to be magic in there—not just the presence of magic, but magic that facilitates the happy ending by allowing the protagonist to overcome whatever obstacles are in the way of what they desire, maybe the marriage, the wealth, the happy ending. There’s something so satisfying about that, because it doesn’t happen in your quotidian day-to-day life. I mean, imagine if you met a talking deer.”

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With yet another Snow White adaptation currently in theaters, 91��ý scholar Suzanne Magnanini reflects on the enduring appeal of fairy tales.

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Top image: Disney Studios

Picturing climate change in the West

Rachel Sauer — Wed, 02 Apr 2025 20:57:22 +0000

Picturing climate change in the West Rachel Sauer Wed, 04/02/2025 - 14:57

Rachel Sauer

What began as a hobby for 91��ý economics undergrad Lucas Gauthier came together as a photographic portfolio documenting the already-evident and potential effects of climate change

Lucas Gauthier and his family moved to Colorado when he was in 6th grade, and after a decade of fairly frequent moves—both parents were in the military—this is where everything made sense: mountains for climbing, runs for skiing, trails for hiking and rivers for rafting.

They took some convincing, but eventually his parents let him venture out on his own—forays that grew longer and longer and took him farther and farther into the Colorado wilderness.

Lucas Gauthier, a senior majoring in economics, has photographically documented his adventures in western landscapes since he was in high school.

About four or five years ago, he began taking pictures along the way, usually on his phone. The photography wasn’t the point, necessarily, “but I found that, especially in Colorado, hiking puts you in some very beautiful places,” he explains. “I hike, and the pictures happen while I’m hiking.”

A through line for what had become a large portfolio of photographs emerged in spring 2024. Gauthier, a senior majoring in economics with a focus on natural resource management, was taking ENLP 3100—Complex Leadership Challenges, a class that requires students to complete three projects during the semester.

The first two projects were more technically focused, but the third emphasized creating something of personal value. So, Gauthier thought about all the places in Colorado that he loves, scrolling through both his memories and his photos. He realized that what began as an almost offhanded hobby was actually documenting places that would be or already were altered by climate change.

From that realization was born Climate Change in the West: A Photographic Journal, a multimedia project that incorporates not only data about things like wildfire, heat wave and drought risk and their potential for significant economic impact, but makes it personal with the scenes of incomparable beauty he has witnessed and documented.

“My interest in water specifically came from my interest in hiking and skiing and an interest in all outdoor sports,” Gauthier says. “When people say there’s going to be less rain, less precipitation, that’s a big deal for me.

“I worked and lived in Breckenridge, which is a tourism-dependent area, so if there’s not enough water, that’s weeks of ski season that are lost, and there might not be a rafting season, so that’s where you start to see the overlaps between how climate change is affecting natural systems and the actual economic impacts on livelihoods.”

Capturing what he sees

“My interest in photography has been in capturing this broad swath of environments that we get to play in—as a way to memorialize the experience for myself, and also to share it with others,” Gauthier says.

He took two photography classes in high school, neither of which focused on outdoor or landscape photography, “but I do think those gave me a good idea for how to compose photos and set them up, how to look for different lighting and visual elements,” he says. “They got me in the mindset of thinking, ‘This is something that strikes me, and I’ll see if I can frame it in way that works with what I want to capture.’”

Gauthier was also in high school when he began tackling ever-more-ambitious climbs and started working his way through Colorado’s 58 fourteeners, a goal he completed over the summer. Of those 58, he climbed at least 45 solo.

“(Climbing solo) is kind of a mix of preference and necessity,” Gauthier explains. “It’s easier when the only person you have to plan for logistically is yourself. And when you’re trying to beat lighting and thunder, it’s best to move light and fast.”

However, he never moves so fast that he can’t look around and, if he’s able, to capture what he’s seeing in a photograph. And he returns to certain favorite places, enough that he can compare them season by season or year by year.

“We’ve had a mix of good and bad snow years, but it’s been very noticeable when a particular area that usually has good (snow) coverage into May or June has already melted,” he says. “And there have been times when I’ve hiked through area and a few years later it’s a burn scar, which is a very visceral sense of change in the environment.

“Then there are little things like aspens are yellowing at a different date, wildflowers are blooming and stop blooming at different times. While it’s not as black and white a change, moving those transition points is definitely something that adds up in aggregate.”

Factors of climate change

Now, as he works his way through Colorado’s 100 highest peaks—he’s summited more than 80—and completes his bachelor’s degree, he still is conceptualizing what it all means. Many climate change models are forecast to take decades—if not centuries—to happen, but Gauthier is already seeing anecdotal evidence of them. What does that mean for how he exists in the outdoors and what he’s going to do after he graduates?

“I feel like there is a lot of doom and gloom, and I definitely feel that, but at the same time I am very much a person who feels like I have to say what I’m going to do about it,” he says. “With my area of emphasis in environmental economics, it’s about acknowledging that we have these issues and asking how we address them through actual, tangible means. For me, that means engaging in actual political and broader social processes. When I’m engaged in something, I feel less powerless.

“I think the main point that I wanted to communicate with this project was emphasizing how each of these different factors of climate change are integrated,” he says. “Fires affect water quality, flooding affects agriculture and all of it impacts places that I and a lot of other people love.”

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What began as a hobby for 91��ý economics undergrad Lucas Gauthier came together as a photographic portfolio documenting the already-evident and potential effects of climate change.

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Black History Month celebration emphasizes building the ‘beloved community’

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 22:07:13 +0000

Black History Month celebration emphasizes building the ‘beloved community’ Rachel Sauer Mon, 02/03/2025 - 15:07

Rachel Sauer

While speakers acknowledged the change and uncertainty of the moment, they encouraged hope and the importance of continuing to work toward justice

The afternoon began with a karibu, the Swahili word for “welcome”—not just to the Glenn Miller Ballroom or the University of Colorado Boulder campus, but to the beloved community “where everybody is included and nobody is excluded,” said Reiland Rabaka, founder and director of the Center for African and African American Studies (CAAAS), in opening the CAAAS Day Black History Month celebration Saturday afternoon.

The celebration came, as several of the speakers acknowledged, during a time of great change, when many are feeling the anxiety that often accompanies uncertainty.

CU President Todd Saliman (left) and Reiland Rabaka, Center for African and African American Studies founder and director, emphasized the importance of compassion in the present moment.

“I have spent many decades watching progress and regress,” said 91��ý Chancellor Justin Schwartz. “We seem to step forward and then back and then forward again.”

In emphasizing the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s observation that, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” Schwartz noted that the arc “is not smooth like a rainbow,” but rough and jagged. “The arc does not bend on its own, people bend the arc. Collectively, we bend the arc toward justice.”

Todd Saliman, president of the University of Colorado, told those in attendance that “we are not changing anything until we are required to do so by a lawful order. We’ll keep our eye on the ball and continue to do our work. At this point, there’s very little we’ve been required to do lawfully.”

Saliman added that the University of Colorado remains committed to all of Colorado and encouraged people to “approach each other with compassion right now.”

CU Regent Wanda James, the second Black woman and third Black regent in the history of CU, was forceful in pointing out the lack of Black leadership within the CU system, while Annett James, president of the NAACP of Boulder County, emphasized the importance of accurately told history during Black History Month.

“History must be approached as a discipline rooted in fact,” James said, “not interpreted by those who wrote it.”

Boulder Mayor Aaron Brockett, while acknowledging the “struggle, setback and oppression” in Boulder’s history, said that “in the days and years to come, we will continue to build the beloved community here in Boulder.”

Carrying the theme of building the beloved community, Rabaka emphasized that “we are going to keep doing this and we shall not be moved.”

Nandi Pointer (right), a PhD student in the College of Media, Communication and Information, performs with her brother, Shegun Pointer.

CU Regent Wanda James (center, black baseball cap) observed that "this is a deep Black History Month for us for a lot of reasons."

91��ý Chancellor Justin Schwartz emphasized that the "arc (of the moral universe) does not bend on its own, people bend the arc."

Denver musician Enmanuel Alexander performs at the CAAAS Day Black History Month celebration.

Reiland Rabaka, a 91��ý professor of ethnic studies, said that in the work of building the beloved community, "we are going to keep doing this and we shall not be moved.”

Angel Anderson (left) and Tyreis Hunt (white shirt), both MFA students in the 91��ý Department of Theatre and Dance, and Constance Harris, an MFA graduate from the department, perform with Parris Fleming (on trumpet).

Denver musician Parris Fleming (left, on trumpet) performed with (left to right) Tyreis Hunt, Constance Harris and Angel Anderson; Hunt and Anderson are MFA students in the 91��ý Department of Theatre and Dance, and Harris is an MFA graduate from the department.

While speakers acknowledged the change and uncertainty of the moment, they encouraged hope and the importance of continuing to work toward justice.

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Where is today's cool hand Luke?

Rachel Sauer — Fri, 24 Jan 2025 20:08:48 +0000

Where is today's cool hand Luke? Rachel Sauer Fri, 01/24/2025 - 13:08

Rachel Sauer

In honor of what would have been Paul Newman’s 100th birthday, 91��ý film historian Clark Farmer considers whether there still are movie stars

Movies did not invent stars—there were stars of theater, opera and vaudeville well before moving pictures—but movies made them bigger and more brilliant; in some cases, edging close to the incandescence of a supernova.

Consider a star like Paul Newman, who would have turned 100 Jan. 26. Despite being an Oscar winner for The Color of Money in 1987 and a nine-time acting Oscar nominee, he was known perhaps even more for the radiance of his stardom—the ineffable cool, the certain reserve, the style, the beauty, the transcendent charisma that dared viewers to look away.

“There are still actors we like and want to go see, so I’d say there still are movie stars but the idea of them has changed,” says 91��ý film historian Clark Farmer, a teaching assistant professor of cinema studies and moving image arts.

Even now, 17 years after his death in 2008 at age 83, fans still sigh, “They just don’t make stars like that anymore.”

In fact, if you believe the click-bait headlines that show up in newsfeeds every couple of months, the age of the movie star is over. In a 2022 interview with Allure magazine, movie star Jennifer Aniston opined, “There are no more movie stars.” And in Vanity Fair’s 2023 Hollywood issue, star Ana De Armas noted, “The concept of a movie star is someone untouchable you only see onscreen. That mystery is gone.”

Are there really no more movie stars?

“There are still actors we like and want to go see, so I’d say there still are movie stars, but the idea of them has changed,” says University of Colorado Boulder film historian Clark Farmer, a teaching assistant professor of cinema studies and moving image arts. “I think that sense of larger-than-life glamor is gone, that sense of amazement at seeing these people on the screen.

“When we think of what could be called the golden age of movie stars, they had this aristocratic sheen to them. They carried themselves so well, they were well-dressed, they were larger than life, the channels where we could see them and learn about them were a lot more limited. Today, we see stars a lot more and they’re maybe a little less shiny and not as special in that way.”

Stars are born

In the earliest days of film, around the turn of the 20th century, there weren’t enough regular film performers to be widely recognized by viewers, Farmer says. People were drawn to the movie theater by the novelty of moving pictures rather than to see particular actors. However, around 1908 and with the advent of nickelodeons, film started taking off as a big business and actors started signing longer-term contracts. This meant that audiences started seeing the same faces over and over again.

By 1909, exhibitors were reporting that audiences would ask for the names of actors and would also write to the nascent film companies asking for photographs. “Back then you didn’t have credits, you only had the title of the film and the name of the production company, so people started attaching names to these stars—for example, Maurice Costello was called Dimples.”

As the movie business grew into an industry, and as actors were named in a film’s credits, movie stars were born. In 1915, Charlie Chaplin conflagrated across screens not just in the United States, but internationally, Farmer says.

Rock Hudson and Elizabeth Taylor, seen here in a publicity photo for Giant, were two of Hollywood's biggest stars during the studio period. (Photo: Warner Bros.)

“You could say that what was produced in Hollywood was movies, but studios were also actively trying to produce stars—stars were as much a product as the movies,” Farmer says. “There was always this question of could they take someone who had some talent or some looks or skills like dancing or singing, and would they only rise to the level of extra, would they play secondary characters, or would they become stars? Would people see their name and want to come see the movies they were in?

“Stars have this ineffable quality, and studios would have hundreds of people whose job it was just to make stars; there was a whole machinery in place.”

During Hollywood’s studio period, actors would sign contracts with a studio and the studio’s star machinery would get to work: choosing names for the would-be stars, creating fake biographies, planting stories in fan magazines, arranging for dental work and wardrobes and homes and sometimes even relationships.

For as long as it has existed, the creation and existence of movie stars has drawn criticism from those who argue that being a good star is not the same as being a good actor, and that stars who are bigger than the films in which they appear overshadow all the elements of artistry that align in cinema—from screenwriting to cinematography to acting and directing.

“There’s always been a mixture of people who consider film primarily a business and those who consider it primarily art,” Farmer explains. “Film has always been a place for a lot of really creative individuals who weren’t necessarily thinking of the bottom line and wanted to do something more artistic, but they depended on those who thought about it as a business. Those are the people asking, ‘How do you bring people in to see a movie?’ Part of that can be a recognizable genre, it could be a recognizable property—like a familiar book—but then stars are one more hook for an audience member to say, ‘I like Katherine Hepburn, I like her as an actress and as a person, and she’s in this movie so I’ll give it a try.'

“One of the biggest questions in the film industry is, ‘How can we guarantee people will come see our movie?’ And the gamble has been that stardom is part of that equation.”

Evolving stardom

As for the argument that movie stars cheapen the integrity of cinema, “I don’t think they’re bad for film as an art form,” Farmer says. “Audiences have this idea of who this person is as a star or as a performer, which can make storytelling a lot easier. You have this sense of, ‘I know who Humphrey Bogart is and the roles he plays,’ so a lot of the work of creating the character has already been done. You can have a director saying, ‘I want this person in the role because people’s understanding of who this person is will help create the film.’ You can have Frank Capra cast Jimmy Stewart and the work of establishing the character as a lovable nice guy is already done.”

"Faye Dunaway wears a beret in Bonnie and Clyde and beret sales go off the charts. People went to the movies, and they recognized and admired these stars," says 91��ý film historian Clark Farmer. (Photo: Warner Bros.)

As the movie industry evolved away from the studio system, the role of the movie star—and what audiences wanted and expected from stars—also began changing, Farmer says. While there was still room for stars who were good at doing the thing for which they were known—the John Waynes who were excellent at playing the John Wayne character—there also were “chameleon” stars who disappeared into roles and wanted to be known for their talent rather than their hair and makeup.

As film evolved, so did technology and culture, Farmer says. With each year, there were more channels, more outlets, more media to dilute what had been a monoculture of film.

“Before everyone had cable and streaming services and social media, movies were much more of a cultural touchpoint,” Farmer says. “People wanted to dress like Humphrey Bogart or Audrey Hepburn. Faye Dunaway wears a beret in Bonnie and Clyde and beret sales go off the charts. People went to the movies, and they recognized and admired these stars.

“One of the markers of stardom is can an individual actor carry a mediocre film to financial success? Another would be, are there people who have an almost obsessive interest in these stars, to the point of modeling themselves after star? Stars tap into a sort of zeitgeist.”

However, the growth and fragmentation of media have meant that viewers have more avenues to see films and more ways to access stars. Even when A-listers’ social media are clearly curated by an army of publicists and stylists, fans can access them at any time and feel like they know them, Farmer says.

“Movies are just less central to people’s lives than they used to be,” Farmer says. “There are other forms of media that people spend their time on, to the point that younger audiences are as likely to know someone who starred in a movie as someone who’s a social media influencer. But that’s just a different kind of stardom.

“I think the film industry really wants movie stars, but I’m not sure viewers necessarily care all that much. Again, it’s always the question of, if you’re spending millions and millions of dollars on a product and you want a return on that, how can you achieve that without making another superhero movie or another horror movie? The industry wants movie stars and audiences just want to be entertained.”

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In honor of what would have been Paul Newman’s 100th birthday, 91��ý film historian Clark Farmer considers whether there still are movie stars.

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Shining a light on the ‘forever’ in forever chemicals

Rachel Sauer — Thu, 23 Jan 2025 17:30:54 +0000

Shining a light on the ‘forever’ in forever chemicals Rachel Sauer Thu, 01/23/2025 - 10:30

Rachel Sauer

91��ý chemist Niels Damrauer and his research colleagues use visible light to break environmentally persistent carbon-fluorine bonds in PFAS

The strength of the bond between carbon and fluorine can be both a positive and a negative. Because of its seeming unbreakablility, food doesn’t stick to Teflon-coated frying pans and water rolls off rain jackets rather than soaking in.

However, these bonds are also what put the “forever” in “forever chemicals,” the common name for the thousands of compounds that are perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS). PFAS are so commercially abundant that they can be found in everything from candy wrappers to home electronics and guitar strings—to say nothing of their presence in industrial products.

Niels Damrauer, a 91��ý professor of chemistry, and his research colleagues are using visible light to break environmentally persistent carbon-fluorine bonds in PFAS.

The C-F bond is so difficult to break that the products containing it could linger in the environment for thousands of years. And when these molecules linger in a human body, they are associated with increased risk for cancer, thyroid disease, asthma and a host of other adverse health outcomes.

“There are a lot of interesting things about those bonds,” says Niels Damrauer, a University of Colorado Boulder professor of chemistry and fellow in the Renewable and Sustainable Energy Institute. “(The C-F bond) is very unnatural. There are a lot of chemical bonds in the world that natural systems have evolved to be able to destroy, but C-F bonds are uncommon in nature, so there aren’t bacteria that have evolved to break those down.”

Instead of long-used methods of breaking or activating chemical bonds, Damrauer and his research colleagues have looked to light. In a study recently published in the journal Nature, the scientists detail an important finding in their ongoing research, showing how a light-driven catalyst can efficiently reduce C-F bonds.

“What we’re really trying to do is figure out sustainable ways of making transformations,” Damrauer explains. “We’re asking, ‘Can we change chemical reactivity through light absorption that we wouldn’t necessarily be able to achieve without it?’ For example, you can break down PFAS at thousands of degrees, but that’s not sustainable. We’re using light to do this, a reagent that’s very abundant and that’s sustainable.”

A foundation of spectroscopy

An important foundation for this research is spectroscopy, which can use light to study chemical reactions that are initiated with light, as well as the properties of molecules that have absorbed light. As a spectroscopist, Damrauer does this in a number of ways on a variety of time scales: “We can put light into molecules and study what they do in trillionths of a second, or we can follow the paths of molecules once they have absorbed light and what they do with the excess energy.”

Damrauer and his colleagues, including those in his research group, frequently work in photoredox catalysis, a branch of photochemistry that studies the giving and taking of electrons as a way to initiate chemical reactions.

“The idea is that in some molecules, absorption of light changes their properties in terms of how they give up electrons or take in electrons from the environment,” Damrauer explains. “That giving and taking—giving an electron is called reduction and taking is called oxidation—so that if you can put light in and cause molecules to be good reducers or good oxidizers, it changes some things you can do. We create situations where we catalyze transformations and cause a chemical reaction to occur.”

Damrauer and his research colleague Garret Miyake, formerly of the 91��ý Department of Chemistry and now at Colorado State University, have collaborated for many years to understand molecules that give up electrons—the process of reduction—after absorbing light.

Using light as a reagent to activate carbon-fluorine bonds, rather than heat or precious metal-based catalysts, is a much more sustainable solution, says 91��ý researcher Niels Damrauer.

Several years ago, Miyake and his research group discovered a catalyst to reduce benzene, a molecule that’s notoriously difficult to reduce, once it had absorbed light. Damrauer and his graduate students Arindam Sau and Nick Pompetti worked with Miyake and his postdoc and students to understand why and how this catalyst worked, and they began looking at whether this and similar catalysts could activate the C-F bond—either breaking it or remaking it in useful products. This team also worked with Rob Paton, a computational chemist at CSU, and his group.

They found that within the scope of their study, the C-F bond in molecules irradiated with visible light—which could, in principle, be derived from the sun—and catalyzed in a system they developed could be activated. They found that several PFAS compounds could then be converted into defluorinated products, essentially breaking the C-F bond and “representing a mild reaction methodology for breaking down these persistent chemicals,” they note in the study.

Making better catalysts

A key element of the study is that the C-F bond is “activated,” meaning it could be broken—in the case of PFAS—or remade. “C-F bonds are precursors to molecules you might want to make in chemistry, like pharmaceuticals or other materials,” Damrauer says. “They’re a building block people don’t use very much because that bond is so strong. But if we can activate that bond and can use it to make molecules, then from a pharmaceutical perspective this system might already be practical.”

While the environmental persistence of PFAS is a serious public health and policy concern, “organofluorines [containing C-F bonds] have a tremendous impact in medicinal, agrochemical and materials sciences as fluorine incorporation results in structures imparting specific beneficial attributes,” Damrauer and his colleagues write.

By pursuing systems that mitigate the negative aspects of C-F bonds and harness the positive, and using the abundant resources of visible light and organic molecules, Damrauer says he hopes this research is a significant step toward sustainably producing products that use light as a reagent rather than heat or precious metal-based catalysts.

While the catalytic process the researchers developed is not yet at a level that it could be used on PFAS in the environment at a large scale, “this fundamental understanding is really important,” Damrauer says. “It allows us to evolve what we do next. While the current iteration isn’t good enough for practical application, we’re working to make better and better catalysts.”

Xin Liu, Arindam Sau, Alexander R. Green, Mihai V. Popescu, Nicholas F. Pompetti, Yingzi Li, Yucheng Zhao, Robert S. Paton and Garret M. Miyake also contributed to this research.

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91��ý chemist Niels Damrauer and his research colleagues use visible light to break environmentally persistent carbon-fluorine bonds in PFAS.

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CU president urges Quantum Scholars to think critically and creatively

Rachel Sauer — Tue, 10 Dec 2024 23:20:49 +0000

CU president urges Quantum Scholars to think critically and creatively Rachel Sauer Tue, 12/10/2024 - 16:20

Rachel Sauer

At the program’s December meeting, Todd Saliman reaffirmed CU’s commitment to the quantum education and research happening on campus

The way University of Colorado President Todd Saliman sees it, “(quantum) is a sector where Colorado is uniquely well-situated... I want us to be the one. I want us to be front of the line. I want us to be leading the world.”

As for the Quantum Scholars he was addressing Wednesday evening, their mission is to think “critically and creatively, and be dynamic human beings,” Saliman said.

Professor Noah Finkelstein co-directs Quantum Scholars with Michael Ritzwoller. (Photo: Casey A. Cass/91��ý)

Saliman was a guest speaker at the December meeting of Quantum Scholars, a program conceived in the University of Colorado Boulder Department of Physics and the College of Engineering and Applied Science (CEAS) that offers undergraduate students opportunities to learn about the quantum field, including connections with local industry leaders and introduction to new quantum technology.

The Quantum Scholars program includes undergraduates studying physics, engineering and computer science and aims to advance quantum education and workforce development through professional development, co-curricular activities and industrial engagement.

“We’re trying to extend what the Quantum Scholars are learning in class to make their education even more marketable and relevant,” said Michael Ritzwoller, a physics professor of distinction and Quantum Scholars founder with CEAS Dean Keith Molenaar. “More than 80% of our graduates eventually work in industry, so Quantum Scholars helps fill that gap.”

Scott Davis (PhDPhys’99), CEO of Vescent Technologies Inc. and a member of the Department of Physics advisory committee, told students at the Wednesday meeting that they are “at a special place” and cited the National Quantum Initiative Reauthorization Act (S. 5411), introduced in the U.S. Senate last week, which would authorize $2.7 billion over the next five years for quantum research and development at federal agencies and shift focus “from basic research to practical applications.”

“So much of that started because of this institution,” Davis said. “We’re really just at the beginning, and we need CU to keep doing what you’re doing—technical development, workforce development, inventing the future.”

Supporting scholars

For Denali Jah, a senior majoring in engineering physics who has been a Quantum Scholar since the program began in spring 2023, the benefits of participating in it are many. The $2,500 that Quantum Scholars receive during the academic year—supported by the Department of Physics and CEAS, as well as contributions from alumni, industry and external partners—gave his budget some wiggle room so he could participate more fully in research and community initiatives.

CU President Todd Saliman (left) spoke to Quantum Scholars at the program's monthly meeting. (Photo: Casey A. Cass/91��ý)

“I was looking for some way to contribute to the physics department and really put my stamp on CU before I left,” Jah says. “Professor Ritzwoller and I were talking and he said, ‘I really want a quantum hackathon to happen here at CU,’ so Annalise Cabra and I organized the quantum hackathon.

“It was a really great success on the whole, and a great opportunity for Quantum Scholars to be able to get some industry initiatives that were much better integrated into our program. One way that I see Quantum Scholars is we’re a curation of student opportunities. Everybody is really working to be able to create more and more initiatives and opportunities throughout campus.”

Luke Coffman, a senior studying physics and mathematics, is leveraging his time as a Quantum Scholar to study “useful ideas for quantum computation,” he noted during the Wednesday meeting. Specifically, he’s interested in molecular simulation for qubit systems and suggested that perhaps quantum sensing will happen before quantum computation.

“Theoretical quantum computing will always be hot,” added Noah Finkelstein, a professor of physics and Quantum Scholars co-director.

In response to a question from Alexander Aronov, a junior studying mechanical engineering, about whether quantum science is in a period of over-hype, Davis noted that the technology field broadly has long existed in a cycle of hype and bust: “Is that happening in quantum?” he asked. “I take a fairly broad view of what it means to be in quantum systems and a quantum player.

“Exploiting quantum to our benefit is not hype; it’s real… It’s been slowly building for a long time, especially the amount of money (dedicated to quantum research and development) on the public side because of national security aspects. We exploit the laws of physics to the advantage of humanity, and that’s not going anywhere.”

Saliman said that as an institution, CU is committed to quantum—to building and leveraging public and private partnerships that help fund the research and development of which Quantum Scholars are or will be a part. “Our job is to support smart people, and translating the discoveries made here into practical applications is going to help pay for it.”

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At the program’s December meeting, Todd Saliman reaffirmed CU’s commitment to the quantum education and research happening on campus.

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CU President Todd Saliman (second from left) talks with (left to right) professors Noah Finkelstein and Tobin Munsat, Scott Davis and Professor Michael Ritzwoller. (Photo: Casey A. Cass/91��ý)

Exploring the ‘musical audacity’ of funk

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 09 Dec 2024 15:30:16 +0000

Exploring the ‘musical audacity’ of funk Rachel Sauer Mon, 12/09/2024 - 08:30

Rachel Sauer

In a newly published book, 91��ý Professor Reiland Rabaka delves into the culture and sound of music’s ‘best-kept secret’

Barely two months into the ‘70s, Funkadelic—led by George Clinton, Jr.—released something of a musical manifesto with the song “Good Old Music”:

Everybody’s gettin’ funky

In the days when the funk was gone

I recall not long ago

When the funk it was goin’ strong.

91��ý Professor Reiland Rabaka (left) recently published The Funk Movement: Music, Culture, and Politics.

In hindsight, the lyrics hint not only at funk’s musical and cultural impact, but at the forgotten shadows in which funk has often lived.

“One of the many reasons funk frequently is not understood to be funk has to do with its ghettoization within the music industry and White music critics’ tendency to lazily lump most post-1945 Black popular music under the ‘rhythm & blues’ moniker,” writes musicologist Reiland Rabaka.

“In other words, because White music critics often serve as musical gatekeepers for White music fans, telling them what is ‘hip’ and ‘hot’ and what is not, most White folks never developed an ear for, or serious appreciation of, classic funk in the ways they did for pre-funk Black popular music such as blues, jazz, rhythm & blues or even soul music.”

Rabaka, a University of Colorado Boulder professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies and director of the Center for African and African American Studies, aims a scholar’s eye at funk in his newly published book The Funk Movement: Music, Culture, and Politics. Originally scheduled for 2025 release, a deluge of pre-orders prompted publisher Routledge to release it in late October.

“(Funk is) this musical gumbo, where you’ve got all these different kinds of music and not just distinctly Black music,” Rabaka explains. “African American culture is a hybrid heritage—we’re talking about an incredibly creolized culture, and as Black folk in America, we’re not searching for some sort of purity. Music reflects our multiple traditions and heritages and also allows us to live out loud. The musical audacity in funk, even if it’s just for three minutes and 30 seconds, when Parliament Funkaldelic says dance without constrictions, we’re dancing without constrictions.”

No rap without funk

The Funk Movement joins Black Power Music! Protest Songs, Message Music, and the Black Power Movement, released in 2022, and Black Women's Liberation Movement Music: Soul Sisters, Black Feminist Funksters, and Afro-Disco Divas, released in 2023, in Rabaka’s ongoing exploration of the confluences of music, culture, identity, politics, place and people.

"It’s not a coincidence that James Brown comes out and says, ‘Say it out loud, I’m Black and I’m proud’ after Martin Luther King was assassinated,” says Reiland Rabaka. (Photo: James Brown performing in the Musikhalle in Hamburg, Germany, February 1973. Heinrich Klaffs/WikiCommons)

He comes to this work not only as a scholar, but as a musician: “I was the kid from the projects who got bussed to these incredible creative arts schools,” he says. “From there, I was able to get a truckload of music scholarships, which is how I became the first person in my family to go to college.

“I really feel like my musicology is coming full circle, coming back to where I started. I was a performing jazz musician and have a performing arts degree, so in a way I’m what social scientists call a participant researcher—I’m deeply involved in a lot of the music I write about. It lends my work a kind of insider’s knowledge, a kind of intimacy with my subject. I’m not just somebody writing to achieve tenure; these are passion projects to me.”

Rabaka came to funk not only loving the music but fascinated by its place at the nexus of the women’s liberation movement, the sexual revolution, the Black power movement, the evolving civil rights and gay rights movements and all the other political and social upheavals of the 1970s. However, he acknowledges in his book that funk—both the music and the culture—is often subsumed into musical movements that are more broadly familiar to non-Black audiences.

“Most funk, both as a genre of music and a cultural movement, has not resonated with non-Black fans of Black popular music the way a lot of pre-funk Black popular music has,” Rabaka writes. “It is like funk is one of the best kept secrets of Black popular music, even though it, more than any other post-war Black popular music genre, laid the foundation for the mercurial rise of rap music and hip-hop culture in the 1980s and 1990s.”

In other words, Rabaka says, “there’s no rap, no hip-hop, without funk.”

Award winner

Reiland Rabaka’s book Black Women's Liberation Movement Music: Soul Sisters, Black Feminist Funksters, and Afro-Disco Divas was recently named Best History in the category Best Historical Research in Recorded Blues, R&B, Gospel, Hip Hop or Soul Music in the 2024 Association for Recorded Sound Collections (ARSC) Awards for Excellence.

The goal of the ARSC Awards Program, according to the organization, “is to recognize and draw attention to the finest work now being published in the field of recorded sound research.”

In the book, Rabaka, a professor in the University of Colorado Department of Ethnic Studies, critically explores the ways the soundtracks of the Black Women’s Liberation Movement often overlapped with those of other 1960s and 1970s social, political and cultural movements, such as the Black Power Movement, Women’s Liberation Movement and sexual revolution. His research reveals that “much of the soul, funk and disco performed by Black women was most often the very popular music of a very unpopular and unsung movement: The Black Women’s Liberation Movement.”

Rabaka and his fellow award winners will be recognized at an awards ceremony during ARSC’s annual conference in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in May.

Say it out loud

However, funk—like the broader umbrella of “art” under which it lives—can be difficult to define; listeners know it when they hear it. And it’s more than music: “It’s the sound and the aesthetics of Black bohemia,” Rabaka says.

In his book, Rabaka approaches the funk movement as it encapsulates both the music and the culture of funk, focusing on the golden age of funk that’s generally categorized between 1965 and 1979. He notes that while funk is often dismissed as simple party music, it addressed and embodied the upheaval and frustrations of the times in which it was born.

“To adequately interpret funk, one needs to understand key moments in African American history and culture, especially the struggle to end racial segregation that culminated in the 1960s and the beginning (and unfulfilled promises) of the era of racial integration in the 1970s,” Rabaka writes.

“Funk can be interpreted as ‘a discourse of social protest’ and ‘the critical voice of a post-Civil Rights Movement counterculture’ that challenged mainstream histories that attempt to nicely and neatly paint the 1960s as the decade of racial segregation and the 1970s as the decade of racial integration, ‘equal opportunity,’ and ‘ubiquitous optimism.’”

When Marvin Gaye asked “What’s Going On,” Rabaka says, Sly Stone answered several months later with “There’s a Riot Goin’ On.”

“In the book I say it’s not a coincidence that James Brown comes out and says, ‘Say it out loud, I’m Black and I’m proud’ after Martin Luther King was assassinated,” Rabaka says. “There was mass disillusionment, mass depression, so funk is also a deeper and darker sound, a grittier sound. It exists in a lot of levels, where it can be good-time music, sure, but sometimes there are a lot of heavier topics and themes that go on in funk.”

Rabaka is particularly fascinated with the women of funk and is already working on a book that brings them out of the shadows.

“Funk, I argue, was a Black popular music response to the hippie movement, to the women’s movement, to Stonewall even,” Rabaka says. “Black America has a way of refracting things that are going on in mainstream America, saying, ‘How does that speak to us?’”

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In a newly published book, 91��ý Professor Reiland Rabaka delves into the culture and sound of music’s ‘best-kept secret.'

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Top image: Earth, Wind & Fire perform in 1982 (Photo: Chris Hakkens/WikiCommons)

Racing for climate action at 18,000 feet

Rachel Sauer — Thu, 05 Dec 2024 15:14:08 +0000

Racing for climate action at 18,000 feet Rachel Sauer Thu, 12/05/2024 - 08:14

Rachel Sauer

Invited by the king of Bhutan, 91��ý PhD student Clare Gallagher completed the 109-mile Snowman Race to bring attention to the realities of climate change

Usually when Clare Gallagher runs 100 miles, she does it all at once—a day that’s alternately punishing and exhilarating and at the furthest boundaries of what her body can do.

The 109-mile Snowman Race was different. It spanned five days across the Himalayas and saw 16 of the most elite ultramarathoners from around the world traversing multiple mountain passes approaching 18,000 feet.

Clare Gallagher (left) was invited by Bhutanese King Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck to run the 109-mile Snowman Race ultramarathon. (Photo: Snowman Race)

“As far as ultramarathons go, it was not that crazy a distance—we were doing about a marathon a day,” Gallagher explains. “But it took so, so long because these mountains are just so high. We started in Laya (Bhutan), which is about 13,000 feet in elevation, and went up from there.”

Gallagher, a PhD student in the University of Colorado Boulder Department of Environmental Studies and the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR), was invited by the king of Bhutan to participate in the 2024 Snowman Race held at the end of October. It was the second time the race was held—an event envisioned by Bhutanese King Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck to draw international attention to the stark realities of climate change in Bhutan and around the globe.

“Once we actually got there and were literally on top of these glaciers, I could see his point,” Gallagher says. “His goal is for international trail runners like myself to help share the story of what we saw, and what I saw is that the glaciers are melting.”

Running 100 miles

Before she vividly learned that a journey of 100 miles begins with a single step, however, Gallagher was simply a girl who liked to run. She ran track as an undergraduate at Princeton and kept running in Thailand, where she moved after graduating to teach English. While there, she signed up for the inaugural Thailand Ultramarathon almost on a whim and ended up winning.

Learn more

Read more about Clare Gallagher's experiences in Bhutan in an essay she wrote for Outside magazine.

The races she entered grew in length, and in 2016, at age 24, she ran the Leadville Trail 100 for the first time and won. “I had been reading Outside magazine, and I always looked up to some of the women who preceded me (in ultramarathons),” Gallagher says.

“I thought they were really badass, and trail running seemed a lot more interesting than track—I’d gotten really burned out in undergrad, but to race in a beautiful mountain environment, in places that are so remote, really appealed to me.”

Clare Gallagher (front row, far left in purple shirt) and 15 ultramarathon colleagues from Bhutan and around the world completed the five-day Snowman Race. (Photo: Snowman Race)

She won the 2017 Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc CCC, setting a course record, and went on to win the 100-mile Western States Endurance Run in 2019, the Black Canyon 100K in 2022 and the Leadville 100 again, also in 2022. She was invited to run the inaugural Snowman Race in Bhutan that year, but she’d started her PhD program, and her schedule couldn’t accommodate the training.

When she was invited to the second Snowman Race in 2024, despite still being in graduate school, she eagerly accepted. The 16 participants were evenly split between Bhutanese and international runners, “and the Bhutanese runners destroyed us,” Gallagher says with a laugh.

“The physiology of running at altitude is pretty fascinating. A lot of the literature is finding that aspects of this ability are genetic, so if you don’t live at these altitudes and if you can’t afford to be acclimating for a month, your experience is going to be really different. It’s probably the gnarliest race I’ve ever done, and I got wrecked by altitude. People thought I might do well because I’m from Colorado—and I was using an altitude tent beforehand a little bit, but I was also taking my PhD prelims and didn’t want to be sleeping in it. So, I got destroyed.”

She did, most importantly, finish the race, and the slower pace she adopted in acquiescence to the altitude allowed her more time to look around.

‘Please send our message’

The Snowman Race course follows the historic, high-altitude Snowman Trek route, beginning in Laya and ending in Chamkhar, and summitting a series of Himalayan passes—the highest of which is 17,946 feet.

"My experiences in Bhutan reminded me that I also feel a lot of hope and a lot of motivation to do what I can do, and smile while I’m at it," says Clare Gallagher (foreground, running in Bhutan), a 91��ý PhD student in environmental studies. (Photo: Snowman Race)

“On day three we were up almost to 18,000 feet, and I’m walking and kind of sick with altitude, but I still had never felt the immensity of what I felt in the Himalayas,” Gallagher says. “The race route goes really close to glaciers well over 18,000 feet, and I’ve honestly never felt so scared. I could tell these glaciers were melting and the sun was so hot.

“The story of Bhutan is that these glaciers are melting at a much faster rate than predicted and are then creating these big alpine lakes that break through their levy walls or moraines and flood villages. We ran through one of these most at-risk villages—it takes seven days to get there by horse—and the people who live there don’t want to be forced to move. So, they were saying, ‘Please send our message back to your countries, we’re scared of our glaciers obliterating us.’”

And even though her PhD research focuses on plastic pollution in oceans, “even the issue of plastic pollution was apparent up there,” Gallagher says. “The interconnectedness of our world became so, so apparent up there. A piece of plastic trash up there is going to degrade really fast because of the high altitude and super harsh alpine environment, and then all those chemicals are going to go downstream. There’s not ton of trash in Bhutan, but plastic pollution is still a part of this story.”

She adds that Bhutan, like many smaller nations, is vulnerable to the impacts of climate change despite having one of the smallest carbon footprints on the planet, and she rues that it takes runners from western nations flying there—another carbon-intensive activity—to draw attention to the seriousness of climate change.

“A really surprising take-home from this journey was how spiritual the experience was,” Gallagher says. “All of my fellow Bhutanese runners were praying at mountain passes, and any time there was a meditative stupa, they were stopping and praying to the mountain deities, thanking them for safe passage.

“I really do feel there’s some connection between caring for this planet and each other and all the plants and animals on this planet. I feel like that reverence is something I’ve been missing in my work as an environmentalist. The phrase ‘climate change’ has taken on an almost corporate flavor, but in Bhutan things aren’t emails or PowerPoints or slogans, they’re real. Climate change is not just a phrase; it means melting glaciers. So, I’m interested in taking that depth and reverence for the land and living things and beings and asking, ‘OK, what are our problems here in Colorado? What are our challenges?’”

A hazard of the field in which she’s immersed is extreme climate anxiety, and Gallagher says she’s worked to focus day-to-day on “taking care of what I can take care of and acknowledging my present. My experiences in Bhutan reminded me that I also feel a lot of hope and a lot of motivation to do what I can do, and smile while I’m at it. I feel a lot of gratitude for being alive at this time in history and asking, ‘What are we going to do with this moment?’”

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Invited by the king of Bhutan, 91��ý PhD student Clare Gallagher completed the 109-mile Snowman Race to bring attention to the realities of climate change.

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Top photo: Clare Gallagher runs the Snowman Race in Bhutan. (Photo: Snowman Race)

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