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

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

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

Cody DeBos

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

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

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

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

Giustina Renzoni, 91��ý MFA alumna, is the director of historic properties at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in New Mexico.

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

A path shaped at 91��ý

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

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

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

“I chose 91��ý because it offered a program that encouraged interdisciplinary thinking. I was interested in exploring art history alongside visual culture, often through sociohistorical frameworks,” Renzoni says.

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

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

How place helps us understand art

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Balancing preservation with public access

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reinterpreting O’Keeffe’s legacy 40 years later

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Drawing out the soul of AI

Rachel Sauer — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 13:00:28 +0000

Drawing out the soul of AI Rachel Sauer Tue, 04/21/2026 - 07:00

Tiffany Plate

Why 91��ý Professor Lee Frankel-Goldwater believes in the poetic potential of collaborating with artificial intelligence

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, an assistant teaching professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. 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.

So, he prompted AI to create a poem, then shared it at a Boulder open mic poetry night that summer—mentioning to the audience how he created it. He received mixed reviews, to say the least.

Lee Frankel-Goldwater, a 91��ý assistant teaching professor of environmental studies, presented the AI-produced poetry at a TEDx Boulder talk in September 2025.

While some artists in the audience felt threatened and dismissed it, he says, “other people came up to me afterward and said, ‘I really see what you were trying to do there.’” His point was simply to encourage people to think about the ways that technology—like the printing press or laser cutter—have changed the course of art over the years. And to consider how one might see AI in the same light.

The open-mic experience sparked something for Frankel-Goldwater and his childhood pal, Eric Raanan Fischman, also a poet. They began playing around with AI until they teased out some groundbreaking works of cyborg poetics. The works came together in a book published last year, Lily in a Codebox, which is challenging people to think about how they might interact with AI in creative ways.

Linking art and technology

While he currently teaches environmental studies courses (e.g., Environmental Education: From Theory to Practice), Frankel-Goldwater got his undergraduate degree in computer science. He focused his thesis on exploring how technology could enhance artistic expression.

“I created a musical composition based off of a collaboration with a hidden Markov model, an early neural-network AI system, and publicly available sunspot data—linking natural systems, art and technology together,” Frankel-Goldwater says. “I've been thinking about this kind of stuff for a really long time.”

Years later, in 2013, Frankel-Goldwater attended the Summer Writing Program at Naropa University, where Fischman was already a student. He fell in love with Boulder and everything that comes with it—going hiking, writing poetry and being with incredible people (it was “a deep poetic experiential melting pot!” Frankel-Goldwater says).

He returned to 91��ý to earn his PhD and jumped right back into the poetic community. By the time 2023 rolled around, Fischman was helping run Naropa’s Summer Writing Program, and Frankel-Goldwater was a regular presence at poetry events.

The conversations that began at the open mic that summer inspired them to take their exploration of AI poetics further. They began laying the foundation for a concept that would later become a benchmark of their experiments: the Dickinson-Turing Test. The test, Frankel-Goldwater says, is all about “the space between observer and observed.”

In other words, could an AI-generated poem evoke the experience of art made by a human and cause people to be not just emotionally but also physically moved, à la Emily Dickinson: “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off,” Dickinson wrote in a letter, “I know that is poetry.”)

In that era of ChatGPT, though, the poems AI was producing were “missing a certain kind of flavor, or that touching human quality,” Frankel-Goldwater says. In other words, they were definitely not passing the Dickinson-Turing test.

“ChatGPT has millions of examples of human poems, but that’s actually a big problem. What it was producing looked like some weak, modernized version of an 1850s Eurocentric poetic expression. It's just not that interesting.”

So, they kept tinkering, and for Frankel-Goldwater, finding a way to guide this AI to co-create novel poetics became a bit of an obsession.

Lily in a Codebox includes the code and AI prompts that helped create the poems.

The eureka moment

After weeks spent trying to help the AI replicate a human poetic voice—without success—they changed tactics. They told it to forget all the rules and guidelines it had learned about poetry from the centuries of examples it had absorbed. Instead, they told it to write for an AI audience.

The result was not quite human—and definitely not something they’d ever seen before. The poem was a mixture of English words and code, demonstrating how it could generate poetic means and symbols unique to itself, as an AI writing for other AI.

“When we put in this one prompt, we didn't know that was going to be the ‘strike gold’ moment,” Frankel-Goldwater says.

When the pair then asked the AI to explain the poem, it said it included a hexadecimal color code for black ({000000}) to symbolize “the vast and infinite nature of the digital realm.” And at the end of the poem, it used special characters to represent an abstract form of communication that might not mean much to humans, but “could carry a wealth of meaning for an AI audience.”

Frankel-Goldwater and Fischman further prompted the AI to forego typical poetic forms almost altogether, encouraging it to experiment with new symbols and computer-like elements to create a visual style of poetry. The AI named it “Neo-Binary Visual Verse” and developed poems made purely of lines and shapes to convey concepts and meaning.

Embracing collaboration

The artistic intention and novelty behind the AI’s poetry was mind-blowing to Frankel-Goldwater and Fischman. They began to see the potential for AI to open their minds and challenge their own ways of creating poetry.

Instead of dismissing AI—or feeling threatened by it—Frankel-Goldwater hopes that artists can look to AI and ask how it can be used to push the boundaries of artistic possibility. “What new can be done for art? What can we see as possible that we can then play with on our own?” he asks.

Another hoped-for side effect of equipping AI to produce this kind of art is to steer it away from just being used in a for-profit business case. “Corporations are in an AI superpower arms race,” says Frankel-Goldwater. “Along the way, where do the people come in and say, ‘No, this is what it could be used for’?”

To that end, Frankel-Goldwater has spearheaded the AI Literacy Ambassadors Program at CU, which brings together faculty and instructors to collaboratively tackle the challenges of teaching in the age of AI—and figuring out how to leverage it to enhance their own teaching amidst a critical awareness of the concerns. He’s also begun a partnership with the Jefferson County Parks System to support the integration of generative AI into their high school environmental education programs to foster research skills and place-based awareness.

“We need people to be playing with and defining what these tools are capable of,” Frankel-Goldwater says. “Because otherwise the corporations are going to do it for us. So, if things like this can help shape the conversation a little bit, then I think we must try.”

Visit the project website to learn more about their work.

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Why 91��ý Professor Lee Frankel-Goldwater believes in the poetic potential of collaborating with artificial intelligence.

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Artist encourages talking with your mouth full

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

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

Kayleigh Wood

As the featured artist at a recent Black Cube event, 91��ý's Alvin Gregorio emphasized how getting primal and getting to know each other—and yes, sharing meals—makes better people

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

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

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

Alvin Pagdanganan Gregorio, a 91��ý associate professor of art and art history, was the featured artist at a recent Black Cube Talk With Your Mouth Full potluck event, which featured ube cheese pandesals. (Photo: Alvin Gregorio)

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

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

Sharing meals, lowering your defenses

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

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

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

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

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

Caring for the person–not just the portfolio

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

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

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

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

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

‘Art shifts the vibe’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘The best part of my week’

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

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

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

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

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

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As the featured artist at a recent Black Cube event, 91��ý's Alvin Gregorio emphasized how getting primal and getting to know each other—and yes, sharing meals—makes better people.

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

Exhibit explores identity through ancient coins

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

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

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

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

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

The exhibit features coins from the collection of John Nebel, including one minted by Brutus that celebrates the Ides of March, as well as Roman coins from 91��ý’s Wilton Jaffee collection. It builds on work done by students in Dusinberre’s Fall 2025 class on Greek coins.

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

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

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Outstanding faculty and staff honored at 2026 recognition reception

Rachel Sauer — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 22:41:46 +0000

Outstanding faculty and staff honored at 2026 recognition reception Rachel Sauer Thu, 04/16/2026 - 16:41

College of Arts and Sciences faculty and staff recognized for excellence in teaching, scholarship and other work at annual highlight of the academic year

Faculty and staff from across the University of Colorado Boulder College of Arts and Sciences were honored at the Recognition Reception held Thursday afternoon in the Norlin Library.

College of Arts and Sciences Dean Daryl Maeda (left) with Shemin Ge (right), distinguished professor of geological sciences and winner of a 2026 College Scholar Award.

Deans of division Irene Blair, Sarah E. Jackson and John-Michael Rivera, along with College of Arts and Sciences Dean Daryl Maeda, honored faculty and staff for their outstanding achievements during the 2025-2026 academic year.

Awarded recognitions include:

College Scholar Awards
Kahn Family Community Teaming Fund
Kayden Awards
ASCEND Awards
Cogswell Award for Inspirational Instruction
Collaborative Access and Innovation Award
College Professor of Distinction
Sesquicentennial Scholars
CU Distinguished Professors
A&S Staﬀ Employees of the Year
Promotion to Full Professor
Tenure and Promotion to Associate Professor
Promotion to Teaching Professor
Promotion to Associate Teaching Professor

See all recognized faculty and staff

Deans of division John-Michael Rivera (left), Irene Blair (second from right) and Sarah Jackson (right) congratulate Laura DeLuca, a teaching assistant professor of anthropology and ASCEND Award winner.

Dean Daryl Maeda (second from left) congratulates Gavin Liang (white shirt), faculty affairs coordinator and a college employee of the year.

Deans of division John-Michael Rivera (left), Sarah Jackson (second from left) and Irene Blair (second from right) congratulate Shelley Copley (right), a professor of molecular, cellular and developmental biology and College Scholar Award winner.

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College of Arts and Sciences faculty and staff recognized for excellence in teaching, scholarship and other work at annual highlight of the academic year.

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College of Arts and Sciences names 2026 Van Ek Scholars

Rachel Sauer — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 17:18:26 +0000

College of Arts and Sciences names 2026 Van Ek Scholars Rachel Sauer Wed, 04/15/2026 - 11:18

Twenty-six students receive one of the college’s most prestigious honors, recognized for their exemplary academic achievement and meaningful contributions to the campus and broader community

The College of Arts and Sciences has awarded the Jacob Van Ek Scholarship—one of the college’s highest honors—to 26 outstanding undergraduates.

Named in honor of Jacob Van Ek (1896–1999), the award commemorates his remarkable contributions to the university. Van Ek joined 91��ý in 1925 as a young assistant professor shortly after earning his doctorate from what is now Iowa State University. Within three years, he rose to the rank of full professor and, by 1929, was appointed dean of the College of Liberal Arts—a role he held until 1959.

The following students are this year’s Jakob Van Ek Scholar Award recipients:

Ray Anchordoquy: physics
Ben Braun: physics
Carlos Carale: neuroscience
Monique Castaneda: political science/Japanese
Chelsea Elliott: speech, language and hearing sciences
Elizabeth Ervin: dance/integrative physiology
Amelia Gandhi: astrophysics and planetary sciences/geological sciences
Rachel Gaydos: speech, language and hearing sciences
Katherine Grisak: international affairs
Gianna Guido: Spanish/political science
Nadine Huseby: anthropology
PiperJo Jones: biochemistry/anthropology
M Jordan: anthropology
Deven Kukreja: political science/Japanese
Aris Larson: integrative physiology
Shea Musson: speech, language and hearing sciences
Jessica Nesbit: integrative physiology
Emmalyn Nono: neuroscience/linguistics/Chinese
Julia Renz: molecular, cellular and developmental biology/psychology/neuroscience
Soren Rollin: geological sciences/anthropology
Samuel Ruzzene: integrative physiology
Alexander Scholpp: economics, international affairs
Dhruv Seth: neuroscience
Annika Stephan: biochemistry
Piper Tocco: humanities/secondary education
Tvishi Yendamuri: biochemistry
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Twenty-six students receive one of the college’s most prestigious honors, recognized for their exemplary academic achievement and meaningful contributions to the campus and broader community.

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Sometimes you just feel like a mango

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

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

Rachel Sauer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’m the sloppy copy,” she says.

“I contribute ideas,” he says.

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

It just works, they conclude.

A writing partnership is born

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

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

Author event

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

What: Book discussion of Confessions of a Mango

Who: Authors Katheryn Lumsden and Nathan Pieplow

Where: Boulder Bookstore, 1107 Pearl St.

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

Reserve a spot

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Making it realistic and relatable

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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How important is good sleep after a head injury?

Rachel Sauer — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 21:46:46 +0000

How important is good sleep after a head injury? Rachel Sauer Tue, 04/14/2026 - 15:46

Blake Puscher

Research suggests that disrupted or fragmented sleep after a traumatic brain injury not only interferes with the healing process but also has long-term consequences for brain health

Millions of Americans, and far more people worldwide, report sustaining a traumatic brain injury (TBI) each year. While detection and treatment of TBI have improved over time, this has resulted in new challenges, because survivors may face additional health problems over time as a consequence of their injuries. These problems can include cognitive impairment and even neurodegeneration, including Alzheimer’s. Considering this, there is an increased interest in what factors determine how well TBI patients recover.

Rachel Rowe, an assistant professor of integrative physiology at the University of Colorado Boulder, has investigated this question, along with a number of researchers from The Ohio State University and the University of Arizona College of Medicine, in a recent study linking low-quality sleep following traumatic brain injury to cognitive impairment, persistent inflammation and delayed healing.

Rachel Rowe, a 91��ý assistant professor of integrative physiology, collaborated on research linking low-quality sleep following traumatic brain injury to cognitive impairment, persistent inflammation and delayed healing.

The study used mice as a controlled experimental model to examine how sleep fragmentation interacts with traumatic brain injury, following the National Institutes of Health Guidelines for the Care and Use of Laboratory Mice, and with approval from Ohio State’s Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee.

Sleep fragmentation, inflammation and microglia

The study did not look at total sleep loss, but instead at sleep fragmentation, which happens when sleep is repeatedly interrupted. Even brief awakenings can prevent the brain from staying asleep long enough to reach the deeper, more restorative stages of sleep. When sleep is broken up many times throughout the night, people may spend less time in these restorative phases, which are important for physical recovery and brain health. Unfortunately, fragmented sleep is common and can be caused by everyday factors such as noise, hospital monitoring, discomfort or changes in temperature.

“For instance,” Rowe says, if someone is in the hospital for a moderate brain injury, “then there are a lot of people coming in, they’re checking monitors, they’re doing activities that could disrupt the sleep of a person.”

Stress can also affect the quality of sleep. “We have got a lot of things in our society that disrupt our sleep,” Rowe says, and people do not always prioritize restful sleep after an injury. These types of disturbances may influence recovery following brain injury.

One reason for this is inflammation, which is a potential determiner of the long-term results of TBI, particularly whether it will result in neurodegeneration. Brain inflammation is an innate immune response initiated by cells called microglia. Similar to a fever, inflammation does not directly target infections, damaged cells or other threats but rather makes the body inhospitable to them. This allows for a quick response to potentially life-threatening challenges, but it can also damage the body if it goes on for too long. One reason that could happen is if the microglia are primed.

When the brain faces some kind of stress, like from an injury or from sleep fragmentation, the microglia become primed, meaning they respond more strongly to subsequent challenges.

“There is some memory in your immune system,” Rowe explains. “That is how vaccinations work. In the case of a brain injury, if it is mixed with sleep fragmentation, it is what we call a two-hit model.” When both stressors come in short succession, “that can change what the microglia are doing,” potentially resulting in a heightened or prolonged inflammatory response in the brain.

Preparation and testing

The mice were split into four groups. Some mice were given traumatic brain injuries using lateral fluid percussion injury, a well-established experimental model used to study TBI in rodents. Other mice were not given traumatic brain injuries, but were put through the same preparation process, so the only difference was that they went uninjured.

Additionally, some mice experienced sleep fragmentation while others did not. Ultimately, the groups were traumatic brain injury (TBI) with sleep fragmentation (SF), TBI without SF, uninjured with SF, and uninjured without SF. This design allowed the researchers to examine the independent and combined effects of injury and sleep disruption.

Sleep fragmentation was achieved through disturbances that happened automatically every two minutes for five hours per day during the early light phase, when mice normally obtain most of their sleep. All mice experienced a simulated light/dark cycle where each half lasted 12 hours. Sleep fragmentation began an hour before the end of the dark period and ended four hours after the beginning of the light period.

“Mice are nocturnal,” Rowe says, “so the study was designed to fragment their sleep right at the beginning of the light period, which is when mice normally get most of their sleep. In many ways, it’s similar to repeatedly waking a person just as they are trying to fall asleep at night.”

The mice’s sleep, including both when they were asleep and how long they stayed asleep, was measured using specialized piezoelectric sensors. This technology has been popularized recently through its use to generate electricity from people walking on piezoelectric tiles in places with heavy foot traffic in Japan. The sensors from the study work according to the same principle, transforming pressure from the mice’s movements into electrical signals.

“Sleep is a time when the brain can heal, and if that is disrupted, the healing process can be disrupted too,” says 91��ý scientist Rachel Rowe. (Photo: Mart Production/Pexels)

“When a mouse drops into sleep,” Rowe explains, “their breathing gets really rhythmic at 3 hertz.” The frequency of pressure created by that breathing was distinguished from the way mice breathe when they are resting using an algorithm.

Sleep fragmentation continued for 14 days following injury. After this period, mice were allowed to recover with normal sleep conditions, and researchers evaluated behavioral and molecular outcomes. One of the behavioral assessments used was the Morris Water Maze, a common test of spatial learning and memory in rodents. In this task, mice learn to locate a hidden platform in a pool using spatial cues in the environment. Their ability to remember and efficiently navigate to the platform reflects spatial memory performance.

How good sleep improves outcomes

When tested in the Morris water maze, mice with TBIs who also experienced sleep fragmentation used random search strategies, indicating that they did not learn the cues or that they did not remember them. This means that sleep fragmentation after this type of injury could impair spatial learning and memory.

“If there are cognitive deficits, then the mouse is looking at those cues, but it does not know which one is near the platform. It is just searching randomly because it does not know what it is supposed to be doing,” Rowe says.

Researchers also looked at what was happening inside the brains of the mice. They found that when brain injury was combined with disrupted sleep, the brain showed stronger signs of inflammation and less activity in the genes involved in repairing and rebuilding connections between brain cells. These connections, called synapses, allow brain cells to communicate with each other and are important for recovery after injury. In other words, poor sleep after a brain injury appeared to increase inflammation while slowing some of the brain’s natural repair processes. In contrast, mice that had a brain injury but were able to sleep normally showed stronger signs of these repair pathways being activated.

There were 14 days for the mice to recover from sleep fragmentation before these results were measured, and they had 30 days to recover from the injury itself. This indicates that the consequences were long-term or chronic.

“When we are looking at rodents,” Rowe says, “their lifespan is much shorter than humans’.” In mouse studies, researchers often consider about one month after injury to represent a chronic time point. “So, when we see effects at 30 days in a mouse, it suggests that the biological changes are lasting well beyond the immediate injury period.”

While animal models cannot directly predict human timelines, these findings indicate that sleep disruption shortly after a brain injury may have long-term consequences for recovery.

“The chronic time period is when you start thinking about longer-term consequences of brain injury,” Rowe says. If inflammation persists beyond the initial injury phase, even at lower levels, it can create an environment that interferes with normal brain recovery. “You can start to see sustained inflammatory signaling, stress on neurons and changes that may contribute to neurodegenerative diseases over time.”

In summary, when combined with sleep fragmentation, TBI can weaken spatial learning and memory, cause persistent inflammation and prevent proper healing. If this inflammation continues for long enough, it can cause serious, permanent damage to the brain, potentially resulting in long-term neurological consequences or pathology associated with neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s.

“Sleep is a time when the brain can heal,” Rowe says, “and if that is disrupted, the healing process can be disrupted too.” Ultimately, the study shows that “if you are not protecting sleep after a concussion or brain injury, there are some long-term consequences through inflammatory pathways, and that can delay your healing process.”

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Research suggests that disrupted or fragmented sleep after a traumatic brain injury not only interferes with the healing process but also has long-term consequences for brain health.

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Debating America’s power—and peril—in a time of instability

Rachel Sauer — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 16:59:45 +0000

Debating America’s power—and peril—in a time of instability Rachel Sauer Tue, 04/14/2026 - 10:59

Bradley Worrell

Veteran national security advisors John Bolton and Susan Rice sparred over whether America is committing “superpower suicide,” headlining the Conference on World Affairs week

“The United States is not committing superpower suicide,” veteran national security advisor John Bolton told a capacity audience gathered Monday evening in the University of Colorado Boulder’s Glenn Miller Ballroom. He paused, then added a qualifier, “So far.”

Seated a few feet away, veteran national security advisor Susan Rice offered a very different take.

“Sadly and dangerously,” she said, “the United States, under the current administration, is indeed in the process of committing superpower suicide.”

Susan Rice (left) and John Bolton (second from right) with Jennifer Schubert-Akin (second from left), chairman and CEO of The Steamboat Institute, and Chancellor Justin Schwartz (right).

The stark disagreement between the two policy experts set the tone for a wide-ranging debate, during which the pair clashed over the extent to which America’s status as the world’s sole superpower has been damaged. Monday’s debate, sponsored by The Steamboat Institute and the Bruce D. Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization, headlined 91��ý’s 78th Conference on World Affairs week.

While the debate’s title—“Is the United States is in the process of committing superpower suicide?”—was deliberately provocative, what emerged during the roughly two-hour debate was a respectful disagreement on certain subjects and a fair amount of common ground between Bolton, a staunch Republican, and Rice, a lifelong Democrat.

Bolton and Rice both have extensive experience shaping American foreign policy for U.S. administrations. Bolton was a national security advisor during President Trump’s first term in office and was U.S. ambassador to the United Nations from 2005 to 2006. Rice’s previous roles in government include serving as a U.S. national security adviser (2013–17), U.S. ambassador to the United Nations (2009–13) and domestic policy adviser (2021–23).

Opening salvos contrasted views

In her opening remarks, Rice issued a sweeping indictment of the Trump administration. She accused the administration of undermining the “five key pillars” of America’s postwar superpower status: military strength, economic power, alliances, domestic resilience and soft power.

“On each of these five dimensions, we are far weaker today than we were even 18 months ago,” she argued. She specifically accused the administration of politicizing the Pentagon and purging senior officers, implementing an unpredictable tariff policy, damaging the European alliance and openly threatening allies. She also took the administration to task for making cuts to research funding, attacking universities, expressing hostility to public health institutions, dismantling USAID and rolling back environmental protections.

Bolton did not dispute that American foreign policy under Trump—as well as previous administrations—had gone badly wrong. What he rejected was the claim that the damage was fatal.

“We have made multiple mistakes since the end of the Cold War,” he said, arguing that both political parties share responsibility. After the Soviet Union collapsed, Western leaders mistakenly believed history ended and rapidly reduced military spending, he told the audience, adding, “we have never recovered from that mistake.”

Bolton said U.S. leaders misunderstood Russian nationalism and ignored Vladimir Putin’s warnings that he viewed the Soviet collapse as a geopolitical tragedy. Failures to deter Russian aggression in Georgia and Ukraine flowed from that misreading, he said.

John Bolton (left) and Susan Rice (right) discussed whether the United States is committing "superpower suicide" during a Conference on World Affairs event Monday evening.

Meanwhile, China represents another long-running error, Bolton said. American officials assumed economic integration would produce political liberalization, but “we were wrong on both counts,” he said, warning that China today is more autocratic and more aggressive.

Yet Bolton insisted these failures—serious as they are—do not mean America’s greatest days are behind it.

As for President Trump, Bolton said, “We are suffering undeniably by his mistakes, but it is not superpower suicide. He is an aberration and will pass from the scene.”

United on alliances and the UN

Despite their opposing conclusions, Rice and Bolton did find agreement on the importance of alliances.

“NATO is the greatest alliance in human history,” Rice said, emphasizing its deterrent value and reminding the audience that Article 5, which regards an attack on one NATO member as an attack on all, had only been invoked once—following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the United States. Undermining NATO, she warned, benefits Russia and China.

“NATO is the envy of Russia and China, which is why they are trying to subvert it,” she said.

Bolton largely agreed.

“What has provided peace and security in the world since 1945 was American power and the system of alliances that we built,” he said. He dismissed the idea of a “rules-based international order” as a myth, arguing that stability came from American strength.

Their disagreement was on tone and trust. Rice said Trump’s threats regarding his desire to see the U.S. acquire Greenland and annex Canada and his transactional rhetoric have damaged allies’ confidence in America, while Bolton emphasized the long-standing failure of European allies to meet defense commitments, acknowledging that Trump’s confrontational style prompted allies to increase defense spending.

Bolton and Rice also agreed that the United Nations is largely dysfunctional, but disagreed about whether it can be fixed.

“The UN’s main political bodies are broken beyond usefulness,” Bolton said, while acknowledging some of its specialized agencies do valuable work.

“The UN is a mess, but we would be worse off without it,” Rice said. “The challenge is reform—not abandonment.”

As for China and its aspirations to reclaim Taiwan, Bolton argued that the United States should abandon its policy of “strategic ambiguity” regarding the island nation in favor of a stated commitment to defend Taiwan to deter possible Chinese aggression.

“I think if we lose Taiwan, even slowly, to China … all of East Asia and Southeast Asia are in real jeopardy, because our credibility would be shot beyond repair,” he said.

Rice did not offer an opinion as to whether the U.S. should formally commit to defend Taiwan but she said Trump’s foreign policy regarding Asia is distracted.

Susan Rice (left) and John Bolton (right) during Monday night's Conference on World Affairs discussion.

Experts divided on Iran

Iran exposed the deepest philosophical split between the two national security experts.

Bolton argued that a hostile regime bent on acquiring nuclear weapons and supporting terrorist networks ultimately leaves America with only one option: “If a regime that’s hostile to the United States can’t be persuaded or forced to change its behavior, regime change is the only option.”

Rice forcefully disagreed.

Noting that she would welcome regime change in Iran, she added, “Regime change through the barrel of a gun virtually never works … and it definitely never works without a ground invasion.” Preventing Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons was best pursued through diplomacy rather than sustained military escalation, she argued.

Bolton said he believes that, as a result of recent U.S. strikes on Iran’s leadership and military sites, the Iranian regime is at its weakest point since it took power in 1979 and it could experience a “slow-motion collapse” before the end of the year if the U.S. applies sufficient pressure.

Rice countered that by taking out the country’s leadership in a U.S.-Israeli first strike, Iran’s new leaders are now willing to do whatever they believe is necessary to remain in power—which has made Iran more dangerous.

What Bolton and Rice did agree on is that the United States currently has not clearly improved its strategic position against Iran.

“That spirit—open inquiry, civil discourse and the exchange of ideas across differences—is the fundamental role of universities in the United States and exactly what the Conference on World Affairs was created to advance."
Chancellor Justin Schwartz

The U.S. and Iran are now engaged in brinkmanship, waiting to see if their opponent blinks, Rice and Bolton agreed. “If it depends upon Trump’s resilience, we’re screwed,” Bolton said, drawing laughter from the crowd. Trump fired Bolton during the president’s first term due to sharp disagreements over foreign policy.

The Steamboat Institute allowed those in attendance and watching online to take a poll as to whether they believe the United States is committing superpower suicide. Before the night’s debate, 77% of those casting votes said the country is committing superpower suicide, 9% said it is not and 14% were undecided. After the debate, 75% of respondents said the country is committing superpower suicide, 13% said it is not and 12% were unsure.

CWA designed to foster civic debate

Kicking off Monday’s debate, 91��ý Chancellor Justin Schwartz noted that higher education is often criticized for failing to platform diverse political opinions.

“Tonight, we are here and we are pushing back on that perception,” he told the audience, adding,

“That spirit—open inquiry, civil discourse and the exchange of ideas across differences—is the fundamental role of universities in the United States and exactly what the Conference on World Affairs was created to advance. At the University of Colorado Boulder, we believe democracy depends on our willingness to debate hard questions with rigor and with civility. Tonight, that belief is alive and visible.”

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Veteran national security advisors John Bolton and Susan Rice sparred over whether America is committing “superpower suicide,” headlining the Conference on World Affairs week.

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Top image: Susan Rice (left) and John Bolton (right) during Monday night's Conference on World Affairs discussion. (All photos by Glenn Asakawa/91��ý)

Historical novel marks latest chapter for 91��ý alumna

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 20:21:46 +0000

Historical novel marks latest chapter for 91��ý alumna Rachel Sauer Mon, 04/13/2026 - 14:21

Megan Clancy

Author Rebecca Rosenberg’s latest book continues her literary work highlighting the often-overlooked stories of remarkable women

With the release of her newest historical novel, University of Colorado Boulder alumna Rebecca Rosenberg (Engl; Psych'76) is adding another chapter to a writing career focused on uncovering the lives of extraordinary women that history has often overlooked.

The award-winning novelist’s latest work, Silver Echoes, tells the story of Silver Dollar Tabor, the daughter of Elizabeth McCourt Tabor, better known at Baby Doe Tabor. This newest historical novel builds on Rosenberg’s first book, Gold Digger, the rags-to-riches-to-rags story of Baby Doe, who navigated the worlds of wealth, power, politics and scandal in the wild days of western mining.

91��ý alumna Rebecca Rosenberg with her historical novel Silver Echoes, which is based on the story of Colorado's own Silver Dollar Tabor. (Photo: Rebecca Rosenberg)

91��ý laid foundation for writing career

Rosenberg credits growing up in Colorado and her time spent at 91��ý with nourishing her interest in the American West, particularly stories about pioneers in the Centennial State.

“I grew up in Colorado,” says Rosenberg, “and being in Boulder and in Hallett Hall, looking out at the mountains all the time, it was just really inspiring in terms of just living in Colorado and the pioneers and the people that came before us there and their incredible stories.”

Rosenberg was a theater and psychology major while on campus but was drawn to classes in multiple departments.

“I loved my humanities courses. I got a bigger perspective,” she says. “I think that got me excited about the whole world and the stories of the world. And pretty soon I realized that people don't tell stories about women. They tell stories about men. So that's where I got my inkling that I would like to tell those stories.”

After graduation, Rosenberg continued to feel the pull toward story. She eventually found her way to a two-year novel-writing course at Stanford University, where she learned how to combine her interest in storytelling and her background in psychology.

“A novel is always about conflict,” she says. “Every scene is what is the conflict and what does each character want? What do they desire? So yeah, psychology is instrumental in that.”

From her time at Stanford, and the work of 10 years after, came her first book, Gold Digger, which brought to life the story Baby Doe Tabor, a beautiful young woman who married the son of a wealthy miner in 1878 to save her family from poverty. The book won plaudits for its mix of historical detail and fiction, with the Historical Novel Society calling it “a gripping story of female grit and resilience.”

Since then, Rosenberg has gone on to win accolades for her novels The Secret Life of Mrs. London, Champagne Widows and Madame Pommery. Rosenberg and her husband, Gary, are lavender farmers in Sonoma Valley, California, and they are co-authors of the nonfiction pictorial book Lavender Fields of America: A New Crop of Farmers.

In Silver Echoes, 91��ý alumna Rebecca Rosenberg (Engl; Psych'76) continues the Tabor story she began in her novel Gold Digger, based on the rags-to-riches-to-rags story of Baby Doe Tabor.

Telling the overlooked story of Silver Dollar Tabor

In Silver Echoes, her most recent novel and Gold Digger’s sequel, Rosenberg uses her psychology background even more extensively, finding the story she wanted to tell through a discovery about one of history’s most misunderstood women, Silver Dollar Tabor. Silver Echoes is told through a dual timeline, following Silver Dollar, Baby Doe’s daughter, in 1920s Chicago and Baby Doe in 1930s Colorado searching for answers to her daughter’s disappearance.

“It's really an intense novel because I feel like Silver had DID, or dissociative identity disorder, what used to be called split personality,” Rosenberg says. “I found that in my research of the letters between mother and daughter, how dissociated Silver was from several realities. Every time she'd write a letter, she'd write about a whole different reality in her life.”

For her first novel, Rosenberg studied Baby Doe's diaries and the letters between her and Silver Dollar, who was in Chicago in the speakeasies and an actress in movies. She noticed the mother’s worry over Silver and knew there was a story to tell there.

“I was reading these letters and I saw that Silver Dollar was asking her mother to write her a letter under a different name to a different address in Chicago every other week. And so I thought, ‘What is going on there?’” says Rosenberg. “Nobody had really explored that. Everyone was saying that she just fell into being a prostitute. But I didn't see that. I saw that she was telling her mother that she was going to open a flower shop with this girlfriend and that she was working for Marshall Fields. And then she was a hat check girl at a speakeasy and all these different things. And then she would be engaged to one guy and she was going to get married and then you never heard about him again.”

Rosenberg started studying what Freud and Jung wrote about multiple personalities. She noticed that all of Silver’s inconsistencies—paired with a childhood filled with multiple traumas—pointed to DID. With that diagnosis, Rosenberg proceeded to tell the story of Silver Dollar Tabor with new insight and creativity.

“I always do really extensive author's notes, telling exactly what's true and not true and where I'm making a leap,” she says. “No one ever diagnosed Silver Dollar as having DID because they hadn't even identified it then. But throughout the book, I have segments of what Sigmund Freud says during that time and what Jung says about women that sound exactly like her. I made the leap that she had that. And that's definitely a leap. No one has ever said it before.”

It's these deep dives and creative exploration of story that Rosenberg enjoys most about writing historical fiction. Finding the unknown stories and uncovering what’s remained untold until now.

“I will always write about extraordinary women,” she says. “They fascinate me. The research takes me a long time. I have to read a lot of books about their background before I can even start on a project. It's a very fun and very satisfying kind of work if you love to research and telling stories.”

Rosenberg’s newest book, License to Thrill, is set for release this month. Another dual timeline novel, the book tells the story of Lily Bollinger, the “Dame of Champagne,” who refused to surrender to the Nazis during WWII and to other enemies for decades more.

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Author Rebecca Rosenberg’s latest book continues her literary work highlighting the often-overlooked stories of remarkable women.

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