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Building a digital home for Arapaho, one sentence at a time

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 15:54:34 +0000

Building a digital home for Arapaho, one sentence at a time Rachel Sauer Mon, 10/13/2025 - 09:54

Cody DeBos

CU Boulder linguistics scholar Andrew Cowell helps Arapaho stories find new life online

The Arapaho words beteen, meaning “sacred,” and beteneyooo, “one’s body,” have a special connection for those who speak the language. Their linguistic similarity isn’t a coincidence.

Andrew Cowell, a ��Ƶ18 professor of linguistics and faculty director of the Center for Native American and Indigenous Studies (CNAIS), says the Arapaho see it as a lesson encoded in the language. “It indicates that the body is sacred and therefore we have to protect it,” he says.

Such examples of cultural knowledge don’t always survive translation. That’s exactly why Cowell’s belief in the importance of preserving Indigenous languages led him to redirect the entire trajectory of his career.

CU Boulder linguist Andrew Cowell, faculty director of the Center for Native American and Indigenous Studies (CNAIS), has partnered with a host of collaborators including CU students, community partners and native speakers to build digital tools to protect and revitalize the Arapaho language.

It’s also why, for the past two decades, he and a host of collaborators including CU Boulder students, community partners and native speakers, have been building digital tools to protect and revitalize the Arapaho language.

Cowell didn’t originally come to CU Boulder to work on Arapaho, but he has long been curious about Indigenous languages, in part thanks to his personal connection to Native Hawaiian culture through his wife.

“Arapaho was the native language of Boulder, so when I got hired at CU I decided, well, I’ll look into Arapaho,” he recalls. “I started looking into Arapaho more and more and doing more work on the side and eventually decided to switch departments into linguistics so I could focus all my energy on indigenous languages.”

Two databases, one goal

Today, Cowell’s work on Arapaho takes two forms: one, an online lexical database; the other, an unpublished, in-depth text database of natural language conversation and narratives.

The lexical database, freely accessible online, functions like a living dictionary. With more than 20,000 entries and a searchable interface, it’s often used by learners across the Arapaho-speaking world in place of print dictionaries, according to Cowell.

But a larger effort has quietly been taking shape behind the scenes.

The text database, which is not publicly released, contains more than 100,000 sentences of spoken Arapaho. Among them are natural conversations and stories recorded over decades.

“At this point, I’ve got over a hundred thousand sentences of natural speaking that I have not only recorded, but also transcribed into written Arapaho, translated into English, and then it has linguistic analysis attached as well,” Cowell explains.

The database is the backbone of several major projects, all with the goal of making learning Arapaho more accessible and preserving it for future generations. One effort is a student grammar dictionary that focuses on the most useful and common words.

“We’ve gotten a list of the frequency of all the nouns in the language and all the verbs," Cowell says. "We ranked those, and it allowed us to produce a really small student dictionary where we only included words that occurred around 40 times or more.

“It means (students) don’t have to flip through rare and uncommon words they’re unlikely to be really interested in as initial learners.”

A pathway for new learners

Beyond the student dictionary, Cowell and his team are working on developing a scaled curriculum for teaching Arapaho. It guides learners from basics to more complex concepts across sequential levels based on real-world language use patterns.

Young Arapaho dancers (Photo courtesy the Wind River Casino)

“We’ve developed 44 steps of knowledge, and even within that there's 23a and 23b and so forth,” he says. “It’s all based on looking at the text we've collected and looking at the frequency of certain kinds of grammatical features that occur.”

Unlike French or Spanish, Arapaho wasn’t historically taught in a classroom but passed down through families at home. Cowell’s team has had to build an instructional framework from the ground up.

“With Arapaho, no one’s really ever tried to teach it as a second language. Now we’re trying to learn it and teach it, and the databases have allowed us to really produce that scaled curriculum,” Cowell says.

Generations of trust

Ensuring that his work isn’t just academic has been a priority for Cowell since the start. The database project is built on decades of trust between himself and the Arapaho community.

“The one thing Native American communities have often had problems with in the past is someone comes in, does their research, then disappears. Then the community is left wondering what they are getting out of it. In some cases, nothing,” Cowell says. “I worked hard to establish that I really want to learn the language and ensure my work is something that will feed back into the community and help out.”

That commitment has led to rich partnerships, sometimes spanning generations.

“We’re close to having 100 different native speakers represented in our data. At this point we’ve got grandparents and now their kids are working on it,” Cowell says.

A worthy effort

From a linguist’s perspective, Cowell explains, Indigenous languages expand our understanding of what language, and indeed human cognition, can do.

“We’re close to having 100 different native speakers represented in our data. At this point we’ve got grandparents and now their kids are working on it.”

“There are many cases in the history of linguistics where people have made a claim like ‘no language could possibly do this,’ and then someone goes to the Amazon and discovers a language that does it,” he says.

More importantly, the motivating force that has kept Cowell working for over twenty years comes from the Arapaho speakers themselves.

He says, “In my experience, Native American communities are very invested in their language. They see it as really crucial, central to their identity.”

That’s why the full text database hasn’t been released publicly, especially with growing concerns about how the data might be used or exploited by artificial intelligence. Still, Cowell and his team are taking steps toward broader access.

A grant from the National Science Foundation will support the release of 5,000 carefully selected sentences from the text database for public use. The snippets, which have been approved by native Arapaho speakers, will be available online with additional computational linguistic labeling.

As for Cowell, he says that even after 20 years, he never tires of seeing the work evolve. He hopes it shows CU students what’s possible when you follow your curiosity.

“You never know where you’re going to end up and what results are going to come out of something. You just have to trust that research is going to turn out to be interesting. You can’t necessarily predict when or where.”

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CU Boulder linguistics scholar Andrew Cowell helps Arapaho stories find new life online.

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Top image: "Two Riders Leading Horses" by Arapaho artist Frank Henderson, ca. 1882 (Photo: Metropolitan Museum of Art)

2025 Nobel Laureate in physics once served as a graduate student mentor at CU Boulder

Kylie Clarke — Thu, 09 Oct 2025 18:46:26 +0000

2025 Nobel Laureate in physics once served as a graduate student mentor at CU Boulder Kylie Clarke Thu, 10/09/2025 - 12:46

Kirsten Apodaca

Like many rockstar scientists, 2025 physics Nobel Laureate John Martinis spent time in Boulder’s rich scientific ecosystem mentoring graduate students and inspiring others in quantum computing.

In the 1990s, while working as a scientist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Boulder, Martinis also held the position of a physics lecturer at CU Boulder. His university affiliation focused on research collaborations and mentoring graduate students as a research advisor in the Department of Physics.

“It was important to us to build partnerships with NIST scientists, to foster more research collaborations and opportunities for our students,” said John Cumalat, professor of physics and chair of the department at the time of Martinis’ appointment. “John was instrumental in recruiting graduate students to CU Boulder.”

It was important to us to build partnerships with NIST scientists, to foster more research collaborations and opportunities for our students. John [Martinis] was instrumental in recruiting graduate students to CU Boulder.

The Department of Physics history book lists Martinis as a lecturer from 1993 to 1999. He supervised several PhD students, some in partnership with John Price, emeritus professor of physics.

Price fondly recalls his research collaborations with Martinis. When Price was a new faculty member starting out in a related field, Martinis shared his circuit design and building expertise, helped make samples, and provided general guidance and wisdom.

“He was generously helpful with people who had aligned interests and wanted to see everyone do interesting science,” said Price.

While at NIST-Boulder, Martinis worked on fundamental physics and technologies that were critical to the development of quantum devices now used in NIST electronic current and voltage standards.

"John enriched the scientific community not only in quantum computing related electronics, but also in several areas related to low-temperature microelectronics,” said Price.

Much of Martinis’ work at NIST has continued under the leadership of Ray Simmonds (also a physics lecturer) and other group leaders, with physics graduate students continuing to conduct their doctoral research at NIST.

“This is the rich opportunity that our students receive –– it’s not only the classroom instruction, but also the broader scientific community,” said Price.

Among today's quantum information superstars who worked at NIST are Kent Irwin (top left), now at Stanford, who helped to develop highly sensitive single-photon sensors and John Martinis (right). This photo was taken in the 1990s at the NIST-Boulder laboratories. Photo by NIST.

CU’s partnership with NIST has flourished over the years, both through JILA, a joint institute between CU Boulder and NIST, and through the Professional Research Experience Program (CU PREP) which provides research opportunities for students and postdoctoral researchers with scientists at NIST.

Martinis was one of the co-organizers of the inaugural Boulder Summer School for Condensed Matter and Materials Physics with Professor Leo Radzihovsky, which launched in 2000. He has returned to give lectures during the annual school several times since, maintaining connections with colleagues at CU Boulder.

Martinis later became a professor at the University of California Santa Barbara, before working for Google and most recently co-founded a quantum computing startup Qolab.

The Nobel

Martinis shared the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics with John Clarke and Michel Devoret “for the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantization in an electric circuit,” according to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

In the 1980s, Martinis was a graduate student in John Clarke’s lab at UC Berkeley, working alongside postdoctoral researcher Michel Devoret. Their experiments focused on electrical components called Josephson junctions – devices made of two superconductors separated by a thin oxide layer that particles ordinarily can’t cross.

Martinis shared the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics with John Clarke and Michel Devoret for the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantization in an electric circuit.

However, thanks to a quantum effect called tunneling, pairs of electrons can pass through – even though this defies the laws of classical physics.

The idea dates back to 1928, when physicist George Gamow used quantum tunneling to explain why certain materials give off radiation, or alpha decay. Gamow later became a professor of physics at CU Boulder and is the namesake to both the Gamow Tower in the Duane Physics and Astrophysics building and to the George Gamow Memorial Lecture Series.

Superconductors, when cooled to very low temperatures, allow electricity to flow without resistance. In this environment, particles behave as one unified wave, all moving together as if they are one.

Through a series of experiments, the team discovered that these large-scale quantum states acted like individual particles, showing behaviors of quantum mechanics like tunneling and discrete energy levels.

This work created the basis for using superconducting circuits to create qubits, the fundamental unit of quantum computers. It laid the groundwork for many researchers and companies now working to build the first operational quantum computers that have the potential to revolutionize technology in many areas, like drug discovery and cryptography.

Want to learn more? CU Boulder boasts five Nobel laureates, four of them in physics. Professor of Physics Paul Beale is interviewed about the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics at this link.

Get the latest info.

Like many rockstar scientists, 2025 physics Nobel Laureate John Martinis spent time in Boulder’s rich scientific ecosystem mentoring graduate students and inspiring others in quantum computing.

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Lights! Camera! Action! Cherry Yogurt!

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 06 Oct 2025 23:04:09 +0000

Lights! Camera! Action! Cherry Yogurt! Rachel Sauer Mon, 10/06/2025 - 17:04

Bradley Worrell

Aspiring filmmaker and CU Boulder senior Francesca Hiatt’s short film, Cherry Yogurt, relies on subtlety to touch on grief and support, viewed through children’s eyes

Sitting alone on a wooden pew in a quiet church, a 7-year-old boy stirs cherry yogurt in a cup with his spoon. He seems distraught.

Entering the ornate church, a young girl approaches the boy. She asks if he has been crying. He tells her he has a headache, and he points to a pill mixed in the yogurt that he says is for the pain.

Nearby, behind closed doors, adult voices murmur. At one point, a woman can be heard crying softly.

Francesca Hiatt, a CU Boulder film major, received an Office of Public and Community-Engaged Scholarship (PACES) Tier 1 micro grant to make her short film, Cherry Yogurt, which began as an assignment in a screenwriting class.

The scene marks the opening of Cherry Yogurt, a short film written, directed and produced by Francesca Hiatt, a ��Ƶ18 film major. With her short film, Hiatt didn’t set out to create a neatly packaged story. Instead, in just less than seven minutes, she constructed what might be considered an emotional memory, loosely defined and quietly observed.

The idea: kids watching the world

Hiatt began Cherry Yogurt as a script for a screenwriting class in November. However, the kernel of the idea had been forming long before that.

“I like to write films about adult themes put into children’s perspective,” she says. “I work with kids a lot, and I’m the oldest sibling of four. Just seeing what adult scenarios look like through their eyes always intrigued me, so that’s typically what I write about.”

That approach became the foundation for Cherry Yogurt. In the film, the adult world remains mostly off-screen. It’s hinted at—through murmured conversations off camera. The children in the film aren’t unaware, but they don’t fully comprehend, either. That gap in understanding is central to the short film, Hiatt says.

“Subtlety is really important in this piece. Any time you’re writing from the personal perspective of children, you paint the world how they view it,” she explains.

One thing that is clear to the boy and girl is how slowed down time feels as they wait for the adults to emerge from behind closed doors, as children and adults experience time differently, Hiatt notes.

“Maybe it’s only an hour long, but if you’re a child kept waiting it feels like it’s four hours long,” she says.

Making the film was a family affair

As intimate as the short film’s story is, the production of Cherry Yogurt was even more so. Hiatt cast her younger brother, Victor, in the lead role. Her mother, an actress, also played a part, as did her father, despite not being an actor.

“My whole family are actors. My dad is not an actor—but I made him do it anyway,” she says with a laugh. “It was a family effort for sure.”

Get your spoon and enjoy some Cherry Yogurt.

Watch Cherry Yogurt

In that respect, making the short film felt very familiar, as Hiatt previously directed her siblings in several short homemade movies.

“Back in the COVID days, I was making movies with my siblings in our basement. Honestly, they were not great, but they were very funny to me and I learned a lot from making them,” she says. Later, at CU Boulder, Hiatt participated in a number of student filmmaking projects, some of which she had a supporting role in and some that she spearheaded.

“I had previously done a couple of other films at CU Boulder, but Cherry Yogurt was the first film that I made from inception and writing the script all of the way to completion,” she says.

Filming took place over one hectic day, following a prep day that involved doing camera tests for lighting at the ornate Denver church. “It was insane. We only had eight hours to shoot because of a time limit on making use of the location, so we had to just get one solid take and move on,” Hiatt explains.

Despite the rush, Hiatt says the results were effective. She credits her cast—especially the two child actors—for bringing an authentic spirit to the film.

Student filmmaker Francesca Hiatt cast her younger brother, Victor (seated, wearing red hoodie), in the lead role of her short film Cherry Yogurt, which she filmed in one hectic day at a Denver church. (Photo: Francesca Hiatt)

“Flubbing a line is a totally different universe when they’re 7 years old and just laughing,” she says, explaining that laughter and innocence are exactly the point.

The crew and the gear came together

While the film’s cast was largely made up of family members, the crew came from Hiatt’s close circle of collaborators at CU Boulder.

“It’s a group of four of us,” she says, referring to her fellow film students. “We’ve worked on every single one of each other’s films since the first day.”

Hiatt also tapped into Denver’s professional film community, recruiting a professional director of photography with whom she had previously worked. In turn, he brought a few seasoned crew members to elevate the film’s production value, she says.

All of this was made possible by a CU Boulder Office of Public and Community-Engaged Scholarship (PACES) Tier 1 micro grant for $2,000. The funding was awarded to Hiatt’s Action! Film Club, which she created to provide middle school students opportunities to be part of film projects.

“The grant was huge,” Hiatt says. “I honestly don’t think the film would have been made without it.”

The PACES funding covered the location fee, catering for a 20-person shoot and, crucially, a rented gimbal—a stabilizing camera rig that made handheld shots smoother and more professional looking. The grant funding also paid for all of the costumes and props.

The cherry yogurt of it all

The film’s title, Cherry Yogurt, seems whimsical—almost trivial—at first glance. That, too, was intentional.

“It was something youthful and it was a symbolic item throughout the film,” Hiatt says. “You hear ‘cherry yogurt’ and you think of something bright, but it doesn’t hint at how heavy the other parts of the theme are.”

Francesca Hiatt credits her cast—especially the two child actors (above, in a scene from the film)—for bringing an authentic spirit to the film. (Photo: Francesca Hiatt)

Some scenes leave questions unanswered. Is the boy distraught solely because of a headache or are there other reasons? Is the pill in the yogurt simply intended for pain relief or possibly for something else? In a later scene, the girl, wearing several friendship bracelets, gives one to the boy, saying they offer protection. But protection from what, exactly?

Hiatt kept those elements intentionally ambiguous.

As for what the adults are meeting about behind closed doors, Hiatt says she originally specified in the script that they were attending an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. In the final version of the film, the nature of the meeting is left unspecified, but Hiatt says it is made clear through the hushed tones of the adults that it’s something serious.

Post-production offers time for reflection

Final editing of the film wrapped in August, more than a year after Hiatt first wrote the script.

“It’s crazy how long it takes to make even a short film,” she says. “After finding the (PACES) grant funding, I started all of the pre-production work, which includes establishing the timelines, location scouting, producer work, getting a crew together and securing the cast. It takes a lot of planning and a lot of work getting people to respond, and I was doing all of this on top of being a full-time student and working full-time, so it was definitely a big project.”

Even during post-production, Hiatt says she kept learning.

“I look back and think, ‘Wow, I already know so much more now than when I shot this,’” she says. “I’m lucky to have opportunities to learn quickly and it’s hard for my art to keep up with how much I learn—even on a daily basis.”

Hiatt recently screened Cherry Yogurt for cast and crew members. Meanwhile, she has submitted the short to a handful of film festivals in hopes of attracting a larger audience for the production. The short film can be viewed here.

Exit, stage left

Hiatt is graduating a year early and will walk with the class of 2026 in May. She has worked with several Denver and Boulder film production companies already and sees herself continuing freelance video work while aiming for her long-term goal: destination Los Angeles.

However, Hollywood is just one possible path to what is most important to Hiatt: “The big goal for me is to get a job that I’m passionate about—something that makes me happy, drives me creatively and where I can make money. Something that makes me excited to go to work every day.”

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Aspiring filmmaker and CU Boulder senior Francesca Hiatt’s short film, Cherry Yogurt, relies on subtlety to touch on grief and support, viewed through children’s eyes.

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Hindsight may be 20/20, but people feel more strongly about the future

Rachel Sauer — Fri, 03 Oct 2025 21:57:27 +0000

Hindsight may be 20/20, but people feel more strongly about the future Rachel Sauer Fri, 10/03/2025 - 15:57

Blake Puscher

In reviewing psychological studies, CU Boulder researcher Leaf Van Boven and colleagues find that people prioritize thinking about the future over the past

Although time travel has typically been the domain of science fiction, whenever you take a moment to remember the past or imagine the future in detail, you are in a sense travelling through time. In psychology, these processes are called retrospection and prospection. Retrospection is thinking about and creating mental representations of the past, while prospection is the same thing but for the future.

Some work in the field of psychology has suggested that retrospection and prospection are functionally interchangeable, but intuitively, they seem to be very different. After reviewing the research in a recently published paper, Leaf Van Boven, a ��Ƶ18 professor and department chair of psychology and neuroscience, along with research colleagues Eugene Caruso and Sam Maglio, finds that people think about the past and future differently because of several assumptions that people make about the nature of time (referred to as temporal axioms in the paper), and that people prioritize thinking about the future—a conclusion with implications for how psychological research should be conducted going forward.

CU Boulder researcher Leaf Van Boven, department chair of psychology and neuroscience, finds that people prioritize thinking about the future—a conclusion with implications for how psychological research should be conducted going forward.

Temporal axioms

The assumptions people make about time are called temporal axioms because they relate to time (temporal) and are self-evident (the primary definition of an axiom). There are some philosophies of time that disagree with the axioms; for example, block time theory argues that the past, present and future all exist simultaneously, like different places except separated by time instead of space. However, even if such philosophies are true, the axioms remain valid premises because they describe not only people’s perception of time but also their subjective experiences of the world. The authors propose three temporal axioms—one of direction, one of uncertainty and one of control.

The axiom of direction describes the way all things move through time. Specifically, everything moves only from past to future, with the reverse being—as far as humans know—impossible. For example, if you blow up a balloon with air and then open the end, not only will the air always come out, but it will also be impossible to get the air back in; the balloon can be re-inflated, but it won’t revert it to its original state because it will be filled with different air. In physics, this reality is called entropy, a term for the tendency of all things to progress from states of order to disorder (the collected air disperses) or high energy to low energy (the relatively high pressure inside the balloon is relieved). Entropy defines the direction of time.

The axiom of uncertainty details that as uncertain as people may be about the past, there is at least some information about it, whether in the form of memory or history. Meanwhile, to the extent that the future is known at all, it is because of inference based on information from the past. Therefore, even if people could make predictions with 100% certainty, the uncertainty about the future would be at least as great as the uncertainty about the past, and in reality, it is always greater because people cannot make perfect predictions. “There are always different possibilities for any point in the future,” Van Boven explains, “and there are not different possibilities that actually exist in the past. There were many possibilities, but one of them did happen.”

The axiom of control describes how, because time has direction, the future is more uncertain than the past. This uncertainty creates a sense of control—of being able to choose between different possibilities by acting differently. While there are arguments against people having control over the future, people tend to view the future as more controllable than the past because of its relative uncertainty. Relatedly, according to Van Boven, “people don’t think of themselves as having control over their interpretation of the past, which presents its own set of challenges about how we make sense of what has happened in our lives.”

Prioritizing proception

The way that people think about the future and past is often understood in terms of psychological distance, which is just what it sounds like: how removed a person feels from an event, whether it is in the future or past. “There are many theories of psychological distance,” Van Boven says, “and within social psychology, one of the more prominent theories is Construal Level Theory, which is the idea that when things are in the distant future, they are interpreted on a more abstract level, whereas when they are in the very near future, we tend to think of them more concretely.”

This principle is fairly intuitive. For example, when you are given an assignment, it may not even feel real until the due date rolls around. However, although people think more concretely and feel more strongly about an event three days in the future than one three weeks in the future, they don’t necessarily think and feel the same about an event three days in the future as one three days in the past. In fact, Van Boven and his colleagues found in their review that people do not.

People pay more attention to getting ready for events in the future, and as soon as they pass, that attention quickly fades so they can refocus on what is coming next, says CU Boulder researcher Leaf Van Boven.

“When things are in the future,” Van Boven says, “our affective system is highly engaged. As soon as things move into the past, the affective system and our emotional reactions subside.

“A classic example would be, if you have an upcoming presentation, your emotional system will get really jacked up as it’s getting close, and then as soon as it has passed, even if it is still objectively close in time, the affective system down-regulates itself. The same is true with attention.” People pay more attention to getting ready for events in the future, and as soon as they pass, that attention quickly fades so they can refocus on what is coming next.

The underestimation of proception

One question the review raises is why the prioritization of proception isn’t an established psychological principle when research in the field often involves people thinking about real or hypothetical events, which are necessarily either in the future or the past.

“That has to do with research methods,” Van Boven says, referring to the example about the upcoming, stressful presentation: The fact that people feel more strongly about the event when it is in the future and then tend to move on shortly after it happens could be easily demonstrated in a laboratory setting, according to Van Boven. “The problem is getting a scientific understanding of what exactly is changing. There are many confounds in that event moving through time.

“When we have an upcoming presentation, we still don’t know exactly what is going to happen in that presentation. We don’t know what the room is going to be like, we don’t know what the audience is going to be like. There’s a possibility that we might bomb, and that would have negative consequences. What we do experimentally is we try to create these situations where everything is exactly the same, and the only thing that differs is whether you’re thinking of it as something that’s in the future or in the past.” This eliminates all of the temporal axioms except for direction; unlike in real life, in the lab there is no difference in uncertainty or control between past and future.

“This is kind of analogous to an active control placebo in medical research,” Van Boven explains. An active control placebo lacks the active ingredient of the actual medicine being tested but has similar non-treatment effects. This is intended to stop people from subconsciously distinguishing between the placebo and the medicine on the basis of the medicine’s expected side effects. “The carefully controlled study gives you a very precise estimate of how big the effect is for the specific medicine you’re interested in,” Van Boven says, “but that’s not how big the effect is that people experience when they take the medicine in real life, because they’re embracing the placebo effect.”

Changing tense

“People who psychologically prioritize the future are happier and healthier than those who prioritize the past."

This review has a major implication for other research, which has to do with the necessity of taking the difference between prospection and retrospection into account, especially during studies that rely on people imagining different scenarios.

“To a large extent, researchers ignore whether things are in the future versus in the past,” Van Boven says. “It’s just that it has not historically been a dimension that people are really concerned about. So, a very common research approach is to use scenario studies.” Scenario studies involve asking people to imagine different situations, then varying those scenarios to see how it affects people’s responses to them. For example, participants could be asked to imagine two people going on a date, then to say how well it went. The scenario would vary slightly between groups of participants—for example, who paid or how the bill was split may be different in each group’s scenario—and the experiment would measure the effect of this difference on how people viewed the situation.

Often in these kinds of experiments there is an implication as to whether the event already happened or is going to happen, even just based on the verb tense used to describe the scenario, and as Van Boven says, “People have been sort of haphazard in terms of whether they present those kinds of scenarios in the future tense versus the past tense. Part of what our review and framework shows is that there may be ways in which we’re understating the effects of different scenarios when we happen to put them in the past (rather) than when we happen to put them in the future. It may be the case that the tense matters a great deal, and it’s something that we haven’t noticed because we haven’t varied that within our experimental context.”

Changing one’s focus between future and past isn’t just important in the context of research, however. “People who psychologically prioritize the future are happier and healthier than those who prioritize the past,” Van Boven says. Broadly, an orientation towards the future has been associated with positive outcomes in several areas, including financial success, health outcomes and life satisfaction. “So,” Van Boven continues, “the axioms and resulting psychological patterns are not merely oddities or biases; they help people successfully navigate through life.”

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In reviewing psychological studies, CU Boulder researcher Leaf Van Boven and colleagues find that people prioritize thinking about the future over the past.

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What’s all the buzz about?

Rachel Sauer — Thu, 02 Oct 2025 21:23:44 +0000

What’s all the buzz about? Rachel Sauer Thu, 10/02/2025 - 15:23

Bradley Worrell

In a week celebrating both National Coffee Day and International Coffee Day, CU Boulder scholar and “coffee-ologist” Kate Fischer considers a good cup of joe

By her education and training, Kate Fischer is a cultural anthropologist. But she uses an entirely different descriptor to explain her research focus.

“I sometimes tell people I’m a coffee-ologist,” says Fischer, an associate teaching professor at the ��Ƶ18 in the Arts and Sciences Honors Program as well as a seminar instructor in the Miramontes Arts and Sciences Program. While the connection between her chosen career field and area of research might not be clear at first blush, she explains, “My PhD is in cultural anthropology, which allows me to look at coffee from a lot of different angles—from biology and tropical plant science, to agricultural management, to labor conditions on the farms, all of the chemistry and engineering that goes into transforming it (into a beverage), and then the brewing and the baristas in the coffee shops who serve it. So, really it touches everything.”

For those who really, really love their coffee—including Fischer—this week was a special one, as Monday was National Coffee Day in the United States and Wednesday was International Coffee Day.

Kate Fischer, a CU Boulder associate teaching professor and cultural anthropologist, researched coffee in Guatemala and Costa Rica during her PhD studies.

With two days this week devoted to celebrating all things coffee, it seemed like the perfect time for Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine to ask Fischer about her thoughts on what makes for a good cup of java, the appeal of both new specialty coffees and old standards like Folgers and the pros and cons of becoming a coffee connoisseur. Her answers have been lightly edited and condensed for space.

Question: How did you come to be a self-described coffee-ologist?

Fischer: I started as a barista back in the day, and I had so many questions. Some people might have been happy to search online for answers; other people, like me, go and get PhDs to get their questions answered (laughs). And then still have questions.

My initial research was in Guatemala and then later in Costa Rica, where I lived for a year and a half while working on my PhD, looking to get the bigger picture of coffee. I was really fascinated by the idea that you could have this same crop grown in so many places, with some similarities but also many differences.

Question: How is it that coffee has become such a big part of the American experience when it’s not native to this country?

Fischer: Coffee has been a part of the United States for a really long time, but it particularly took off around World War II. Its ubiquity came from the fact that it became a part of soldiers’ rations, so when they came back from the war they were used to it and, as a result, we saw big increases in demand. With modernized packaging and shipping, it became easier to sell on store shelves.

It became this sign of a modern family to have your coffee in the home. Even if they weren’t drinking it as a kid, kids grew up with the smell of it in the parents’ and grandparents’ home. Even people who tell me they don’t enjoy the taste of coffee say they like the smell, because it brings back a lot of memories for them.

Question: Is there any data on how many Americans regularly drink coffee? And how coffee consumption today compares with past years?

Fischer: This year’s National Coffee Association report tells us that 66% of American adults drink coffee daily, which is more than any other beverage, and up nearly 7% compared to 2020. The average coffee drinker drinks three cups a day. While it’s up since 2020, over time our consumption of coffee has dropped, because there is so much more competition now.

Question: There is a perception that young people today don’t like coffee. As someone who teaches young adults, do you believe there is any validity to that idea?

Fischer: Again, I think one of the big things is that today there’s so much more competition in terms of drinks, especially ready-to-go drinks. In the 1980s, your big competition was soda and maybe tea. Today we have kombucha, boba tea, Monster and Celsius energy drinks and so many other choices, so the overall coffee share is probably a bit less.

"I encourage people who are interested in coffee not to get overwhelmed or turned off by some of those gatekeepers who have their opinions of what good coffee tastes like. There are lots of different ways to enjoy coffee," says CU Boulder coffee researcher Kate Fischer.

When I ask my students, especially first-years, how many of them drink coffee every day, it’s just a couple. Many of them have had other caffeinated beverages. But when I ask how many of them drink coffee at some point during the week, then it’s nearly everybody. So, it might not be every day, but they are drinking coffee at some point during the week. With juniors and seniors, there’s a definite increase in caffeine consumption, particularly coffee.

Question: How do you explain the appeal of coffee to people who don’t drink it or who say they don’t like coffee?

Fischer: For people who don’t love the taste of coffee, it is more of a caffeine delivery vessel, and maybe a sugar delivery vessel for people who like the lattes with the crazy syrups and other things in them. They want to hide the taste, but caffeine and sugar are strong appeals. For the people who really get into their coffee, there is the sensory side of it, like the way it’s roasted and ground, and how different preparation methods can make the same coffee taste very different.

I think a lot of people, when they say they don’t like coffee, really it’s bad coffee they don’t like. They don’t like hotel coffee, or dining hall coffee, or really dark roast coffee. There are so many other good alternatives to those types of coffee if they are willing to try them.

Question: What do you think makes for a good cup of coffee? Is it the beans? The grinding? The brewing process? Something else? Are there any commonalities?

Fischer: All of the above. What makes good coffee is a topic I’ve been looking at for a long time, and it has led me down many rabbit holes.

There are a lot of ways that people try to be empirical about what makes good coffee, which, as a cultural anthropologist, I tend to challenge the notion that you can be empirical about something as subjective as taste, but there are objective pieces to it.

The Specialty Coffee Association has come up with a grading system. For a long time, it was a numeric scale, and they said, ‘Here’s how you’re going to prepare this coffee,’ and they had this whole checklist of things like the roast level, the grind size and all these different things. And then there is a specialized tasting, called cupping, where experts look at these different attributes and score them. And people are trained to do this, judging coffees on a straight scale of totally bitter to totally sweet, and anybody who has a trained palate will agree on this. They’ve done all kinds of blind tests on this and they are very consistent in their judgments. Today it has evolved to include more holistic assessments that do a better job of separating out objective qualities from preferences.

But really, the answer is: The best cup of coffee is the one you like the best. Like anything else, it’s a preference.

"For the people who really get into their coffee, there is the sensory side of it, like the way it’s roasted and ground, and how different preparation methods can make the same coffee taste very different," says CU Boulder scholar Kate Fischer.

Question: Do you have thoughts on specialty brands, such as Death Wish Coffee, that are designed to give you a huge jolt of caffeine and basically assault your senses?

Fischer: At that point, is it really any different than drinking a Red Bull or other energy drink? With something like Death Wish, that’s absolutely a branding style and choice of who they’re aiming it at, and I think they are trying to capture the energy drink crowd by giving them a drink that’s more (caffeine) concentrated.

Ultimately, I think that’s about knowing your customer and what the buyer is looking for. So, if you’re trying to sell that customer who wants Death Wish a fruity, really light, delicate coffee, you’re probably not going to do very well.

Question: Alternatively, there are those who just like basic black coffee without any special flavorings or other enhancements. Anything you would say to them to encourage them to broaden their horizons, coffee-wise?

Fischer: There are a lot of people out there who say, ‘I don’t want my coffee to taste like cranberries’ or these other descriptors. They want coffee to taste like coffee, which for them might be something like Folgers. My father, for example, wants a nice, simple, comfort-food version of coffee, and for him, Folgers is comfort food. And for me, it’s just bitter and sad and needs a lot of help to disguise what it is. Which is not what I want in my coffee.

I try not to judge people for liking what they like when it comes to coffee, but developing a palate for coffee does ruin you. I’ve tried not to be a coffee snob, but once you’ve had the really good stuff and you know what it can taste like, it’s hard to go back.

Question: With two major events celebrating coffee this week, will you personally be doing anything to celebrate?

Fischer: I hadn’t planned to, but now I’m thinking I should. I would just encourage people to drink coffee and learn something about where it came from. With coffee, it’s one of those things that can be as complicated or as simple as you want it to be.

Also, I encourage people who are interested in coffee not to get overwhelmed or turned off by some of those gatekeepers who have their opinions of what good coffee tastes like. There are lots of different ways to enjoy coffee.

And it’s OK if coffee is not your thing. I don’t understand it, but it’s OK.

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In a week celebrating both National Coffee Day and International Coffee Day, CU Boulder scholar and “coffee-ologist” Kate Fischer considers a good cup of joe.

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Long live the King in modern music

Rachel Sauer — Wed, 01 Oct 2025 00:51:19 +0000

Long live the King in modern music Rachel Sauer Tue, 09/30/2025 - 18:51

Rachel Sauer

In what would have been B.B. King’s 100^th birthday month, CU Boulder music scholar Shawn O’Neal considers how the legends of blues can be heard in even the fizziest pop of 2025

B.B. King was born to sharecroppers on a cotton plantation in Leflore County, Mississippi, and began his musical career in the church choir, teaching himself to play guitar while listening to the “King Biscuit Time” radio show.

Sabrina Carpenter was born in Quakertown, Pennsylvania, and began posting videos of herself singing Adele and Christina Aguilera songs on YouTube around age 10. As a teenager, she starred in the Disney Channel series “Girl Meets World.”

Culturally and musically, they’re about as different as two artists can be. But if the roots of rock ‘n’ roll and even pop grow from blues—which they do—then it should be possible to hear B.B. King and other legends of blues in the sly pop confections of Sabrina Carpenter.

Shawn O'Neal is a CU Boulder assistant teaching professor of ethnic studies and Center for African and African American Studies executive committee member.

So, Shawn O’Neal, a ��Ƶ18 musicologist and assistant teaching professor of ethnic studies, cues up Carpenter’s song “Manchild,” currently No. 6 on the Billboard Top 100: “Right away, the first thing I hear is that call and response of where she’s singing something and then answering her own question or statement back to herself,” he notes. “Call and response is such a foundation of blues music—whether Sabrina Carpenter knows that or thinks about it, or even has to, she got that from somewhere.”

Further, he asks, who were some of the first to sing about taking care of business—working all day, making a home at night—while a no-good partner is off catting around? The women of blues.

“They were the first to talk about sexuality, to talk about the issues they were having with their partners, even sometimes to talk about the fact that they were having love interests of the same sex,” O’Neal says. “All of those tropes are very defined in (Carpenter’s) music, and then there’s just that drumbeat, that very four-on-the-floor beat that’s a hallmark of blues. I think you could take that Sabrina Carpenter song and turn it into a blues song very easily.”

And it’s not just Carpenter. Even on current Top 40 lists that seem to owe more to computers and electronics than to the sawdust floors of Delta juke joints, blues touchpoints are audible. B.B. King, who died in May 2015 but would have turned 100 this month, and other legends of blues live in the music of 2025.

“B.B. King, Robert Johnson, Ma Rainey—I hear them in all this pop music,” O’Neal says. “I can’t not hear it, because it’s there; it’s in the DNA.”

‘What they call rock ‘n’ roll’

In 1957, a Hearst interviewer asked rock ‘n’ roll pioneer Fats Domino, “Fats, how did this rock ‘n’ roll all get started, anyway?” and Domino replied, “Well, what they call rock ’n’ roll now is rhythm and blues. I’ve been playing it for 15 years in New Orleans.”

It was an acknowledgment that what felt revolutionary and sonically groundbreaking was actually a long time coming—the latest brick in a long- and well-established foundation.

It’s a direct lineage, O’Neal says: Pop grew from rock ‘n’ roll; rock grew from blues, jazz and gospel; which grew from spirituals and field hollers; and those were first-generation descendants of African musical and narrative traditions brought to North America by enslaved people.

“Spirituals were sung in the cotton fields on the plantations,” O’Neal explains. “People were creating this music as subliminal communication, and the enslavement masters didn’t understand what they were talking about. They had to create a new language, and so much of it was speaking to spirituality—save us, help us, let me find some solace. It comes from pain and struggle and being completely removed from who you are, and we can sugarcoat it and syrup it up, but foundationally that’s where American music is coming from.”

Though the roots of American music are twisting and complex—and also woven of European folk and classical traditions—there’s a through line of African American musical tradition, O’Neal says. Gospel evolved from spirituals and give birth to its lyrically secular offspring of blues, which birthed jazz, rock and pop, as well as the direct descendants that are rap and hip-hop.

CU Boulder music scholar Shawn O'Neal notes that blues legends like B.B. King stood on the shoulders of musical giants such as Sister Rosetta Tharpe (pictured above), Lead Belly and Robert Johnson. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

The earliest blues artists began developing a distinctive sound that became known for 12-bar chord progressions—a form based on the I, IV and V chords in a musical key—that are fundamental to the blues genre and are prominent in rock ‘n’ roll, O’Neal says. Classic blues music also followed a pattern of one line being repeated four times in a verse, which 20th-century artists evolved the AAB pattern that became the blues standard: a three-line verse structure in blues music where the first line (A) is repeated, and the third line (B) offers a conclusion or response, often using a "question-question-answer" pattern within a 12-bar blues progression.

Blues legends like B.B. King, who stood on the shoulders of musical giants such as Lead Belly and Robert Johnson and Sister Rosetta Tharpe, experimented with the foundational elements of blues, which also included the “walking bass” rhythms and pitch-flattened “blue notes,” and broadened the sound and scope of the genre. Rock and pop, as well as myriad blues subgenres, were natural progressions, O’Neal says.

Drenched in the blues

Even now, as cross-pollinated and subdivided as music is, O’Neal says, listeners hear the blues regardless of whether they recognize it: “For example, when you think about the foundations of electronic music or EDM, we’re talking about house music, and those DJs were originally playing rhythm and blues records. And in pop, you hear that foundation of disco, and they were also playing soul and rhythm and blues in the clubs.

“None of this music being played today was conjured out of thin air; it’s based on musical traditions that go back 100, 200 years.”

He adds that in hip-hop culture, B.B. King has been sampled from the earliest days of the genre “because those were the records in our parents’ record collections. And obviously it’s never been just Black artists who’ve sampled and built on the blues. If you start at a place like Led Zeppelin, they obviously were heavily influenced by B.B. King and just drenched in blues, Jimmy Page especially. You take songs like ‘Since I’ve Been Loving You’ or ‘The Song Remains the Same’ and slow them down to that really draggy riff—that’s blues.”

When O’Neal has taught students to hear these influences in Reiland Rabaka's Introduction to Hip Hop Studies classes and Critical Survey of African American music, “they come up to me after almost every class saying, ‘I never knew that was in there.’”

The challenge, he says, is respecting the artistic quest for newness and innovation while acknowledging and honoring the foundation on which it lives.

“As an artist, you have to understand that even if you want to think it’s your own original song, it’s still based off things that already happened,” says O’Neal, who also is a renowned DJ and musician. “Taylor Swift? Well, that’s Motown, that’s what she’s doing—three chords, simple progressions, prominent melodies, emotional lyrics. Whether artists now want to acknowledge it or not, the sounds they’re playing started a long time ago.”

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In what would have been B.B. King’s 100th birthday month, CU Boulder music scholar Shawn O’Neal considers how the legends of blues can be heard in even the fizziest pop of 2025.

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Top image: B.B. King playing at the University of Hamburg in November 1971. (Photo: Heinrich Klaffs/Wikimedia Commons)

Fifty years of Fiske, 50 years of hits

Rachel Sauer — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 00:23:24 +0000

Fifty years of Fiske, 50 years of hits Rachel Sauer Mon, 09/29/2025 - 18:23

Alexandra Phelps

Love the music and laser shows at Fiske? They’re the work of a dedicated team of students led by CU Boulder astronomy alumnus Jeremy Osowski

When looking at over 50 years of music hits, how would you narrow down the list to only 15 songs? This difficult question led to the creation of Fiske Planetarium’s 50th anniversary music show, which debuted Friday.

Fiske Planetarium is kicking off its 50th anniversary, and what better way to celebrate than with some historical hits? “Flashback at Fiske,” a music and laser show that combines the iconic music of the previous five decades and space, will leave people walking out with the line between science and art blurred, say its creators.

The man behind the lasers

Jeremy Osowski is a CU Boulder astronomy graduate, Fiske Planetarium music show lead and visual arts specialist.

The man behind the show is Jeremy Osowski, a ��Ƶ18 astronomy graduate, Fiske Planetarium music show lead and visual arts specialist.

Osowski began at CU Boulder in the aerospace engineering program. However, after taking some time to consider his interests, he decided to study astronomy. During his undergraduate studies, he worked at Noodles & Company and was offered the position of assistant general manager. Needing the weekend to consider the offer, he attended a show at Fiske Planetarium and realized that students were the ones running the show.

Equipped with no experience, he walked into the planetarium the next day and asked about a job. Initially, he was told that he could scan tickets and sweep floors. Osowski remembers thinking, “‘That sounds like a good gig to me.’ For the first two years I was an usher, scanning tickets, doing odds-and-ends things. Being a junior, there wasn’t a lot of availability in moving up and navigating and presenting in the planetarium. But what did have an opening was the outreach program.”

Working in the outreach program, he began presenting Fiske’s inflatable planetarium, solar telescope and meteorites lab at area schools. When COVID-19 hit, he was able to work at home with one of the laptops that contained the software the planetarium used to develop the music shows and began to experiment with the visuals and the playlists. During a livestream performance, he consulted on the playlist and performed some of the visuals. Finally, his bosses were beginning to see he knew how to put together a show.

When in-person shows resumed, Osowski got his break. One night the music show navigator was MIA while he was ushering. Despite starting out on the sidelines, he jumped in to save the show. Afterwards, he was hired as a temp worker with a nine-month term limit before a required hiatus. During his break, he worked as a dark skies ranger at Great Basin National Park in Nevada. Thursdays through Saturdays, he guided hikes, led telescope observing sessions and more. He enjoyed this so much he made steps toward a career in teaching, first as a substitute teacher and then considering a master’s in teaching at CU Denver, but life had other plans for him.

Flashback at Fiske

A laser show for the decades, "Flashback at Fiske" is a retrospective of iconic music spanning five decades accompanied by Fiske's legendary artistic laser and liquid sky wizardry. "Flashback at Fiske" will play weekends through May 2026, and the next show is Saturday, Oct. 4, at 10 p.m.

Learn more

Three years ago, he was pulled back into Fiske’s orbit when Director John Keller told him about the new Science through Shadows educational program, which focuses on eclipses, occultations and transits. Osowski applied to manage the program and got the position. Now his job is 75% managing the program and 25% managing the music shows.

One of the shows that Osowski has been working to create is Fiske’s 50th anniversary show, “Flashback at Fiske.”

Five decades of hits

The “Flashback at Fiske” playlist began with five decades of Billboard Hot 100 charts, Rolling Stone magazine and other music charts. Searching for what songs were popular or celebrated was the easiest way to begin planning the playlist. After Osowski had narrowed the list down to around 100 songs, he shared it with the rest of Fiske’s staff. Together, they voted on songs. “It came down to what songs were popular in those decades and what songs flowed together best,” Osowski explains. After the challenging process of debating and voting, Osowski and his colleagues managed to narrow the playlist to 15 songs.

It was hard to only pick a few songs from each decade,” he explains. “But I looked at 1975—the year we opened—and one of the top songs was Pink Floyd’s ‘Welcome to the Machine,’ and I’m a huge Pink Floyd fan, so it’s a nod to all (my) planetarium shows; I have to have a Pink Floyd song.”

There is a lot of personal touch within the playlist, he adds; despite some of the songs being iconic, they still hold a, special place for many of the staff who contributed to the project. “There’s one song from the ’80s that not many people may know, but it’s our director’s favorite song,” he says. “I tried to keep it either songs people will remember listening to or that embody the feeling of the decade or genre it comes from.”

Visually, the song choices played an important role in creating the laser imagery, he says, adding that the artist who created the graphics for the featured Beyoncé song wanted them to mirror the pop sound of the song. If the song is EDM or bass music, for example, there are more beam lasers that shoot over audience members’ heads.

Because it’s a planetarium, the base of all shows is the specialized planetarium software, DigitalSky2. Within the music shows, including the 50th anniversary show, there is the element of being flown through space by the navigator: “I like to say we blend science, nature and art,” Osowski says. “I like to drop science on people without them realizing they’re learning.”

Throughout the fall of 2025 and more dates coming in 2026, different students will run the same show. Although the playlist and lasers will remain the same, the students have full creative freedom to choose what space imagery they want to use. This allows visitors to be flown through different parts of space each performance.

A full roster of shows

While the 50th anniversary music show has been months in the making and is a highlight in commemorating Fiske’s milestone anniversary, the planetarium is maintaining its full calendar of science and other music shows.

All of Fiske Planetarium’s shows are an hour long and the usual schedule is three shows a night on Thursdays through Sundays—one science show followed by two music shows. The music shows used to be designated Laser Sky or Liquid Sky, but among other changes, Osowski is blending the two styles.

One of the most challenging aspects of Fiske’s show, he says, is that they don't change every week like in movie theatres. Osowski considers how once people have seen a show with a certain artist, they may believe they don’t need to see it again because it won’t have changed. He is working to create shows that change from one year to the next, allowing fans to consistently experience something new.

Osowski says he and the team of students and staff are working hard to develop new shows, and that all of Fiske’s shows are either student-made or student-run. He notes Caroline’s Classic Rock Show, which features hits of the 1960s and 1970s and debuted Sept. 19, adding that it sold out by Sept. 16. Another show showcases Ariana Grande’s hits, and Osowski is currently creating a Twenty One Pilots show. Part of the art of putting together this and other shows is featuring an artist’s hit but not making it a “greatest hits show,” he says. Often, creating shows means finding a balance between what Osowski or his colleagues like and what they believe the audience will want to hear.

Fiske Planetarium is more than just a venue for the light shows; it’s a place for learners of all ages. The planetarium hosts K-12 field trips and CU student classes during the day, so Osowski and his colleagues have been creating music shows that cater to those audiences.

A surprise career

When Osowski took an astronomy class in high school, he didn’t believe he could make a career out of it. Working on the MAVEN Mission with spacecraft and model data, he realized that it was the science behind space and not building that he was interested in.

“When I started doing outreach with the planetarium, I realized what I really loved was sharing science with people,” he says. “I would much rather be going to a school or setting up a solar telescope in front of the planetarium and interacting with others than working on a computer by myself.”

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Love the music and laser shows at Fiske? They’re the work of a dedicated team of students led by CU Boulder astronomy alumnus Jeremy Osowski.

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Hope Saska named director of CU Art Museum

Rachel Sauer — Fri, 26 Sep 2025 13:42:53 +0000

Hope Saska named director of CU Art Museum Rachel Sauer Fri, 09/26/2025 - 07:42

In addition to serving as interim director, Saska has served as the museum’s chief curator and director of academic engagement

Hope Saska, CU Art Museum chief curator and director of academic engagement, has been named director of the CU Art Museum after serving as interim director for more than two years.

Saska was named director following an internal search as well as an assessment and advisory report issued last spring on the future mission, structure and goals of the museum.

Hope Saska, CU Art Museum chief curator and director of academic engagement, has been named director of the CU Art Museum after serving as interim director for more than two years.

“I am thrilled and honored to be named director of the CU Art Museum,” Saska says. “With its rich collections and a mission to build community through exhibitions and programming that promote, inspire and generate interdisciplinary scholarship and cultural expression, the museum serves as a vital center for arts and culture on campus and throughout our region. I eagerly look forward to collaborating with museum staff, students, faculty and partners both on and off campus to build on our strengths and uphold our commitment to being an inclusive and welcoming space for all.”

A specialist in works on paper, Saska earned her PhD at Brown University with a dissertation on 18th-century graphic satire and caricature. While serving as the Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Fellow at the Detroit Institute of Art and the Samuel H. Kress Curatorial Fellow at the Lewis Walpole Library, Saska honed her curatorial expertise working on a number of exhibitions and research and digital humanities projects. Saska embarked on her CU Boulder career in 2015, when she accepted a curatorial position at the museum and was promoted to chief curator and director of academic engagement in 2021. At CU Boulder, she has since curated over 30 exhibitions, many in collaboration with faculty and students.

In 2019, Saska co-authored a response paper to the CU Boulder Academic Futures Interdisciplinary Teaching, Research, and Creative Work Report: Is It an Academy? A Proposal to Expand Interdisciplinary Scholarship and Teaching at the CU Art Museum. The previous year, Saska co-authored a white paper for CU's Academic Futures Initiative: Is It An Art? A Case Study of Teaching at the CU Art Museum.

Saska teaches a graduate-level curatorial practicum with the CU Boulder Museum Studies program bi-annually. Deeply committed to the transformative role academic art museums play on college campuses, Saska serves on the board of the national Association of Academic Museums and Galleries as a co-representative for the Mountains-Plains region.

“Hope brings many years of experience in museums nationally and here at CU to this position, and I am excited for her expertise and leadership to drive CU Art Museum towards a sustainable future that is central to student and faculty engagement with the arts on campus,” says John-Michael Rivera, dean of arts and humanities in the College of Arts and Sciences. “I also want to thank Hope for her leadership through her long stint as interim director of the museum. Throughout many difficult transitions and assessments, her stewardship stabilized and positioned the museum for great successes in the future.”

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In addition to serving as interim director, Saska has served as the museum’s chief curator and director of academic engagement.

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We Are Art Buffs building an arts community

Rachel Sauer — Thu, 25 Sep 2025 19:40:21 +0000

We Are Art Buffs building an arts community Rachel Sauer Thu, 09/25/2025 - 13:40

Rachel Sauer

At Sept. 17 gathering, representatives of the arts at CU Boulder, in Boulder and across the Front Range built connections in the nascent We Are Art Buffs initiative

First, the question: What is an art buff?

“There is a journey within this question that speaks to the heart of what we are trying to curate,” said John-Michael Rivera, dean of arts and humanities in the ��Ƶ18 College of Arts and Sciences. “We’re fostering not simply an appreciation of the arts but cultivating a lived and embodied inquiry into the creative. To engage the arts is a trait that all should appreciate in daily life.”

Then the idea: What if CU Boulder was the heart of the arts in Boulder, on the Front Range and in Colorado—a place where every student is supported in creative inquiry; where partnerships are made and strengthened between the university, artists and arts organizations in communities across Colorado and, someday, the nation; where there are infinite paths to the infinite ways of engaging with the arts?

John-Michael Rivera (at podium), dean of arts and humanities, speaks at the Sept. 17 We Are Art Buffs gathering.

So, dozens gathered Sept. 17 in Norlin Library, representing the arts at CU Boulder, in the broader Boulder community and across the Front Range—taking steps and building connections in an initiative called We Are Art Buffs.

“From the very beginning—18 months ago, 19 months ago—we said, ‘Let’s really start talking about the arts at CU and have more pathways and connections with the community around us,’” Rivera said, addressing leaders from organizations including the Museum of Boulder, the Clyfford Still Museum, the City of Boulder Office of Arts and Culture, the Arvada Center, the Dairy Arts Center and many others.

“Right now is a tough time to be an artist, but it’s also a wonderful time to be an artist because the arts are really going to be the place that interprets this world we’re living in right now.”

CU Boulder Chancellor Justin Schwartz noted the importance of the arts in “connecting us as people to one another and to ourselves. The arts not only provide richness to our lives, they provide unique and different types of connection to people. The fact that we are such a vibrant arts community is what makes us such a strong community in general.”

A key outcome of the partnerships that will grow through the We Are Art Buffs initiative is strengthening student success, Schwartz added: “We know successful learning experiences outside the classroom are vital to student success. We talk about student success internally, and we’re also going to be looking to our community to help us advance the success of our students.”

With community partnerships, Rivera said, “we can guarantee that our students find their way or, better yet, create new paths as they walk them; whether in the arts or arts-adjacent fields or any profession, our students will show employers what we already know: that creative inquiry transforms every career, transforms every life.

“We owe students a vision of their future, a future with all of us in it.”

“We know successful learning experiences outside the classroom are vital to student success," said CU Boulder Chancellor Justin Schwartz. "We talk about student success internally, and we’re also going to be looking to our community to help us advance the success of our students.”

We Are Art Buffs, Rivera added, also is about creating venues for coming together to create pathways and break down barriers between the university and the community. For those in attendance Wednesday, that could include many things, from the practical to the philosophical—from clearer information about parking on campus to broader access to venues on and off campus, expanded work-study opportunities for students and interdisciplinary research projects.

“We have space that’s available to rent—it’s kind of small but let us know if that’s something you’d be interested in,” said Tracy Travis with The New Local in Boulder. “Or if you’re interested in getting students involved in seeing how a nonprofit runs, seeing how a gallery runs, seeing how you can get the community involved.”

“We would love to open pathways between our student bodies,” said Erin Hauger, professor and chair of visual arts at CU Denver. “We have a great film program; we have a thriving visual arts program that I think has different majors than CU Boulder and we would love to infoshare and love to create different opportunities for students between downtown Boulder and downtown Denver.”

“We’re a giant building, so we have lots of possibilities for partnerships,” said Jen Clements, deputy director of the Dairy Arts Center. “One of the programs we have is our co-production program, which is a mechanism for early-career artists, for emerging artists to get their foot in a venue without the financial risk that is usually associated with getting your foot in a venue… and we also have ample volunteer opportunities always.”

Erika Randall, interim dean and vice provost of undergraduate education, also emphasized the importance of building connections between students and the arts outside of campus: “I have so many folks who are artists at heart or artists in major or art curious, and they only see it as way to extend the time to graduation and a way to disappoint their parents. We need help changing that story, and we need all of you to help in that because we know that the soft skills are not soft, they are hard-won and they are hard-fought.”

While the We Are Art Buffs initiative is in its nascent days, Rivera said that a foundational element is already in place, which is creating venues for coming together “in very perilous times. What is it we want to be as a collective? What is it we want to do for the arts? How are we going to create pathways and break down barriers between the university and the community? I hope this is the beginning of all of us getting together and thinking what we want for the future of Boulder, the future of Colorado, and then becoming a national model.”

Cindy Sepucha (holding microphone), artists and venues program manager for the City of Boulder Office of Arts and Culture.

Collin Parson (laughing), Arvada Center director of galleries and curator, talks with Chris Taylor, executive director of Museum of Boulder.

Jim Walker, CU Boulder Norlin Scholars teaching faculty member

A participant takes notes at the We Are Art Buffs gathering Sept. 17.

Attendees at the Sept. 17 We Are Art Buffs gathering responded to the question "What can we learn from your career experience about how to affect students?"

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At Sept. 17 gathering, representatives of the arts at CU Boulder, in Boulder and across the Front Range built connections in the nascent We Are Art Buffs initiative.

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Sometimes ‘building back better’ doesn’t include everyone

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 23:14:40 +0000

Sometimes ‘building back better’ doesn’t include everyone Rachel Sauer Mon, 09/22/2025 - 17:14

Cody DeBos

CU Boulder researcher Mary Angelica Painter finds that in post-disaster recovery, equity isn’t guaranteed

In the mountains of Colorado outside Boulder, a tight-knit community once made up of mobile homes and modest living has all but disappeared. Now, visitors will find the hills dominated by sprawling new homes and residents of a different tax bracket.

“We were driving through, and it was all these multi-million-dollar homes. A lot of talk about this community having more dogs than people,” Mary Angelica Painter recalls after a recent trip to the town. “It’s a very wealthy, affluent community.”

Painter, a research associate at the ��Ƶ18’s Natural Hazards Center, knows the history of this town from the work of scholars in the hazards and disaster field. It was a place where lower-income, often elderly residents leaned on each other for care and social support. But after a devastating flood in 2013, everything changed.

Mary Angelica Painter, a research associate in the CU Boulder Natural Hazards Center, co-authored a paper defining “hazard gentrification” as the process that unfolds when natural hazards destroy a large portion of a community and residents are displaced by wealthier newcomers during recovery and rebuilding.

“After this event, most of the residents were dispersed and displaced. We saw one area where there was supposedly low-income housing, and we were told rent was ‘only’ $1,800 a month. I was like, ‘Wow.’ I had no other term to define it than hazard gentrification,” Painter says.

It’s a familiar pattern she has seen while studying natural hazards and the subsequent recovery efforts of the affected communities.

In an effort to better describe the trend, she recently co-authored a paper defining “hazard gentrification” as the process that unfolds when natural hazards destroy a large portion of a community and residents are displaced by wealthier newcomers during recovery and rebuilding.

Unlike slower-moving forms of gentrification, such as those related to climate change, Painter says hazard gentrification is more rapid and has devastating repercussions.

Defining a new kind of gentrification

The term coined by Painter and her co-authors builds on years of disaster capitalism research—the idea that public and private entities exploit disasters to consolidate power and wealth.

“We often hear the term ‘build back better,’ which leads to the question of ‘build back better for whom?’” she says.

Sustainability gentrification, a similar but unique concept, has been coined recently as well. However, those takeovers tend to happen gradually.

“Hazard gentrification is much faster than other forms of sustainability gentrification,” Painter explains, “so that’s why we really felt the urge to write this short paper and punctuate this specific type of gentrification.”

She also warns that it isn’t a theoretical concern. From New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina to the aftermath of wildfires in Lahaina, Hawaii, the pattern has played out repeatedly.

“We needed to name this phenomenon as its own thing so we can start identifying solutions,” Painter says.

The forces at play

So, what turns a disaster into a reality-altering event for a local community? Painter says the answer is political as much as environmental.

“Disasters stem from social, economic and political choices that leave people in devastation. So, in my mind, disasters are very political.”

After a natural hazard hits, local governments often face pressure to restore services quickly and begin the rebuilding efforts. Much of that push comes from the loudest and most affluent voices in the community.

Structures and infrastructure in Jamestown, Colorado, were significantly damaged by 2013 floods (Photo: Steve Zumwalt/FEMA)

“There is a huge push to build back faster,” Painter says, “and because of that, there are fewer opportunities to involve local community members in the process of making decisions of how it happens.”

When participation is limited, she points out, redevelopment favors those with more money, time and connections. The dynamic also benefits outside investors and developers who are eager to move in where disaster presents an opportunity.

Who gets left behind

For many long-time, even lifelong, residents, rebuilding after a hazard hits simply isn’t an option.

“These populations that are more socially vulnerable tend to either be underinsured or not insured at all against hazards and disasters. They might be living paycheck to paycheck and don’t have the extra income or time to find secondary housing,” Painter says.

“We actually know from research that white affluent people post natural hazard are actually better off after the disaster. They are able to get large insurance payouts, and if their house needs to be rebuilt or refurbished, the value can go up and they can sell it for a profit,” she adds.

Those benefits aren’t present for people who live in mobile homes or manufactured housing, let alone renters. Painter explains that rental assistance is often insubstantial, and renters do not receive the same high priority as homeowners.

The loss of social safety nets, both formal and informal, compounds the trauma for local residents who rely on them.

“They lose their networks of support. There are just so many factors that come together that make it slower or impossible for them to recover,” Painter says.

As a result, many residents find themselves priced out of the place they called home and are left to watch as the area is redeveloped without them.

How some communities push back

Despite the powerful forces at work, hazard gentrification isn’t inevitable. Painter points to a few examples, including Joplin, Missouri; Coffey Park in California; and Seattle’s Duwamish Valley. Here, early and meaningful community engagement helped limit displacement after natural hazards wreaked devastation.

People evacuate West Glenwood Springs, Colorado, in the face of spreading wildfires in 2002. (Photo: Bryan Dahlberg/FEMA)

She notes that Joplin’s story, one close to home, is especially striking. After an EF5 tornado nearly leveled the town in 2011, local leaders mobilized quickly.

“They really self-organized effectively. They were very engaging with the community in the rebuilding process and prioritized not leaving anyone behind,” Painter says.

“Not every community is able to do that in that way, but it was something that really jumpstarted their recovery into a positive life.”

Painter notes that these engagement efforts helped preserve community bonds and gave residents a sense of ownership over the recovery.

“There seems to be much more cohesion and democratization when it comes to rebuilding like that,” she says. “The idea is that you need to bring communities together and let them share their voices. It’s so important.”

What needs to change

The question going forward, Painter posits, is whether policymakers will make bold choices to prevent displacement before the next hazard strikes.

“You can’t be prioritizing the stuff you’ve been prioritizing. If in the past it was something like economic development at the harm of lower-income and marginalized residents, that can’t be the way you go forward,” she says.

In other words, more equitable recovery efforts must start with a cultural shift in how communities allocate resources. New policies promoting rent control, expanded insurance and better disaster assistance for renters can all help lower the burden in the wake of a hazard.

“People need to understand the idea of sacrifice for their neighbors,” she says.

CU Boulder’s Natural Hazards Center is working to bridge the gap between research and real-world solutions.

“We aren’t just a research apparatus,” Painter says. “We’re also a connecting body. It’s important that we as researchers connect with policymakers and decision makers and are solution oriented.”

As climate change fuels more frequent and intense natural events, hazard gentrification will become more common. Naming the problem is just a first step, but also a necessary one. From there, Painter hopes society collectively adopts an action mindset.

“We need to find ways to be equitable and to provide for and support our communities, and to have plans for if there’s devastation, too. Academics are really good at identifying problems. However, we need to focus on how we actually solve these problems and how we can use our positions to vocalize and advocate for those solutions.”

Justin Stoler, Ethan Sharygin and Sameer Shah also contributed to this paper.

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CU Boulder researcher Mary Angelica Painter finds that in post-disaster recovery, equity isn’t guaranteed.

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Top image: Lahaina, Hawaii, was devastated by August 2023 wildfires. (Photo: State Farm/Wikimedia Commons)

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