The CHA Annual Report is an overview of what the Center for Humanities & the Arts (CHA) has accomplished and offered throughout July 2021 - July 2022.
At the University of Colorado Boulder, the CHA supports faculty and students in new research, creates collaborations across departments, incubates new forms of graduate teaching and training, and connects to the broader community.
Locate the print version (PDF) file here: 2021 - 2022 CHA Annual Report (Print Version)
Transition. If one word characterized the Center for Humanities & the Arts in 2021-2022, it would be transition. The Center lost all its full-time staff by the end of March 2022, but we were aided by undergraduate and graduate part-time student workers, the faculty steering committee, the community advisory board, and Graduate School staff. Transition may be a word that emblematizes much of arts and humanities since our fields are in states of flux and fluidity, a strength since we never want to feel stale or stagnant. To that end, this new Annual Report model reflects the transition we are making to a leaner and more agile CHA, one that continues to emphasize the vitality of arts and humanities at CU Boulder and beyond!
Sincerely,
Jennifer Ho, CHA Director
Student Support
The CHA provides campus-wide fellowships and highly competitive travel grants for graduate students working in the humanities and the arts. These fellowships and grants are used to recruit incoming students, provide support in completing doctoral dissertations, and aid in scholarly research by providing summer stipends and travel to conferences where they will present a paper or, for those in the arts, perform or display their work.
Faculty Support
CHA Small Grants
The CHA Faculty Steering Committee recommended awarding a total of $69,083 in CHA Small Grants to fund 37 projects across 20 different departments at CU Boulder supporting research, creative work, special events, and virtual presentations by visiting scholars and artists.
Departments Supported: Anthropology, Art and Art History, Center for Asian Studies, Cinema Studies & Moving Image Arts, Composition, Education, English, French & Italian, Geography, Germanic & Slavic Languages & Literatures, History, Journalism, Musicology, Religious Studies, Spanish and Portuguese, Strings, Theatre & Dance, University Libraries, Voice, Women & Gender Studies
CHA Faculty Fellows
CHA’s Faculty Fellowship program offers CU Boulder faculty working in the arts and humanities opportunities to focus on their research through course releases/s. Faculty immerse themselves in projects, often seeing them to completion by the end of their fellowship and attend monthly meetings to connect and share strategies for writing and making work.
CHA Faculty Fellows AY 21-22
Hazel Barnes Flat in London
The Hazel Barnes Flat in the heart of London is a gift to scholars in the humanities and arts made by Hazel Barnes (1915-2008), the much-admired Professor of Philosophy at CU Boulder and founder of the Interdisciplinary Program in the Humanities. Since 2010, the flat has provided opportunities to conduct scholarly research in and around London to CU Boulder faculty and graduate students. Management of the flat has been entrusted to the CHA since its inception.
CHA Events (Summer 2021 - Summer 2022)
6/8/2021
CHA/RIO Fellowship Writing Workshop
This virtual zoom workshop talked about the genre of fellowship writing, especially for faculty interested in applying for fellowships that grant faculty a semester (or more) free of teaching. Panelists included Christine Larson (Journalism) and Julia Staffel (Philosophy).
This virtual panel and screening with video essayist Kevin B. Lee, whose work both demonstrates how one can use the arts, literature, theory, and history to offer an understanding of human experience.
We screened Lee's video essays, including Mourning with Minari and Once Upon a Screen: Explosive Paradox. Afterward, Lee joined Professors Hyaeweol Choi, Jennifer Ho, and Corey Creekmur, and themoderator for the event, Teresa Mangum, to discuss his video essay on Minari and Asian American experience. The panelists considered the relationships among art, politics, and the uses of the video essay form to comment on and engage with current events, including traumatic events.
10/28/2021
Humanities @ Home: Conspiracy Theories
This virtual panel (featuring Alexandra Siegel, Assistant Professor of Political Science; Greg Gondwe, Assistant Professor of Journalism; and Toby Hopp, Associate Professor of Advertising, Public Relations and Media Design) examined the ways in which conspiracy theories have amplified in recent years, particularly since the 2020 election and throughout the course of the COVID-19 pandemic:
- Why are conspiracy theories so wildly popular in the age of social media?
- How do these conspiracy theories affect our lives, our media consumption, and our perceptions of our communities?
11/18/2021 - 11/18/2021
The Dream State of Lenape & the Indigenous Constitution with Dr. Philip Deloria
Does American pluralism also require a single-minded embrace of the idea of the liberal rights-bearing subject, or could we also imagine a pluralism built around political collectivities? It turns out that United States history has resources for considering group-based pluralism, in the form of American Indian nations. An imaginative return to the first formal American treaty points directly to the key elements in what we might read as an Indigenous Constitution, hiding in plain sight within the U.S. Constitution.
11/18/2021 - 11/18/2021
Graduate Student Workshop with Dr. Philip Deloria: The Ethics & Evolution of the Ph.D
Dr. Philip Deloria from Harvard University held a virtual workshop with CU Boulder graduate students to discuss the future of Ph.D programs and the ways in which programs can be renewed/revitalized to fit a changing world of academia.
The Spring 2022 installment of the Difficult Dialogues series seeked to address what it means to make a mistake and then to repair the harm (unintentional or intentional) that happens when we make mistakes with our friends, peers, co-workers, family, or on social media. We sometimes use an expression that may be anti-trans, ableist, racially insensitive, sexist—sometimes without knowing or understanding. We may do things that cause others harm, and we don’t understand what’s happening until we get called out. So what do we do when we get called out? How do we rectify the harm and move forward?
On Friday, January 28th, 2022, we hosted a virtual event connect with Sheila Brennan, Senior Program Officer from National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), to learn about grants offered by the NEH Office of Digital Humanities. This event was held virtually on zoom.
2/9/2022
3 Minute Thesis Watchparty
Friends of the Graduate School and host Dr. Jennifer Ho, Director of the Center for Humanities & the Arts and Professor of Ethnic Studies, held a virtual watch party on Wednesday, February 9th, 2022 at 4pm to cheer on our PhD competitors as they present their thesis in only 180 seconds.
4 - 4:30pm: Opening remarks by Dr. Ho and some insight on her own thesis
4:30 - 6pm: Watch the 3MT presentations together, virtually
6 - 6:30pm: Discussion of presentations
Folks connected with Front Range digital-curious scholars for a followup in-person meetup from our January 28th Virtual NEH Visit.
Folks connected with fellow digital-curious humanities scholars from across the Front Range at this hosted lunch at CU Denver Inwoks Lab in Downtown Denver. Address was Lawrence Court and UC Denver Buildings, 1250 14th St #1300, Denver, CO 80202.
The CHA held the second installment of the Cox Family Process Speaker Series via Zoom Webinar. This event will feature renowned filmmaker and video essayist Kevin B. Lee and his work “Transformers: the Premake.”
The Cox Family Process Speaker Series annual programming seeks to bring renowned artists and scholars to CU Boulder each spring to speak about work that made them well-known in their fields of study and research.
Thank you to everyone who joined us at Colorado Chautauqua for this in-person event showcasing resiliency through the creation of art as a response to gun violence in our local community. One Year Later: Reflections and Resiliency took place on Sunday, April 10th and featured the CHA's Humanities @ Home competition winners and community members.
