Director's Letter of the Month:

November 2023

Dear CU Boulder Community & Supporters of the CHA,

I love teaching, and this semester I’ve got an incredible group of students who are learning and talking together about art and critical race theory. The book we just finished reading, Ross Gay’s Inciting Joy: Essays, elicited a lively conversation about the counternarrative that Gay’s work creates about Black experiences, as well as the various types of “joys” that he recounts. For Gay and for so many of us, joy comes when we share, with others, our full human selves, and joy and sorrow exist in relationship to one another—we cannot know joy if we do not also feel sorrow. And joy is what I feel when I am in community with learners of all ages.

Whether you’ve been a student, teacher, or both, I hope you have had the experience that I’m so grateful for— being in enriching conversations with engaging students who are bright, thoughtful, and deeply intellectually curious. At the CHA, we are fortunate to support graduate students through CHA grants and fellowships to pursue their artistic and scholarly ambitions. One such student, Toma Peiu, shared his story in this video for the CHA of how receiving the CHA grant has been essential in his dissertation work. Please join us in our Fall Fundraising campaign, where your contribution enables students like Toma to continue their vital research. We hope you will consider a gift to the CHA of any amount to strengthen arts and humanities at CU Boulder.

The generosity of CHA gifts extends beyond students, empowering faculty at CU Boulder to fulfill their research and artistic endeavors. Each year we celebrate these accomplishments in a Faculty Celebration Magazine. If you are a faculty member (teaching or tenure ladder) who has produced a major work (book, film, art exhibition, dance performance, theater production, concert, album) in 2023, we hope you will fill out this form so that we can feature you in the 2023 Faculty Celebration Magazine [Deadline is Friday, December 15]: www.colorado.edu/cha/funding/faculty-opportunities/cha-faculty-celebration-major-works-magazine. Join us February 2024 for a celebration hosted by the CHA to congratulate and celebrate the major accomplishments of faculty from 2020-2023 (we are including faculty whose major works came out during the pandemic when we weren’t holding in-person events). We hope you’ll attend as it will be a joyous occasion, since being together as artists and humanists is an act of joy.

Sincerely,
Dr. Jennifer Ho
Director, Center for the Humanities & the Arts