Books

Drawing out the soul of AI

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

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

Tiffany Plate

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

In the summer of 2023, Lee Frankel-Goldwater was heavily immersed in ��ý��’s poetry community. He was also very aware of the waves that ChatGPT was making in the tech world.

"I started doing some experiments and playing with this AI to see what it could do poetically,” says Frankel-Goldwater, an assistant teaching professor of environmental studies at the ��ý��. He was already certain AI was going to change everything, and he wanted to see how it might be used to explore new realms of poetics.

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

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

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

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

Linking art and technology

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The eureka moment

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

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

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

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

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

Embracing collaboration

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

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

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

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

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

Visit the project website to learn more about their work.

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

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Sometimes you just feel like a mango

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

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

Rachel Sauer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’m the sloppy copy,” she says.

“I contribute ideas,” he says.

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

It just works, they conclude.

A writing partnership is born

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

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

Author event

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

What: Book discussion of Confessions of a Mango

Who: Authors Katheryn Lumsden and Nathan Pieplow

Where: ��ý�� Bookstore, 1107 Pearl St.

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

Reserve a spot

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Making it realistic and relatable

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Historical novel marks latest chapter for CU ��ý�� alumna

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

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

Megan Clancy

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

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

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

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

CU ��ý�� laid foundation for writing career

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Telling the overlooked story of Silver Dollar Tabor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Praise the Lord and plan the family

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 17:20:01 +0000

Praise the Lord and plan the family Rachel Sauer Mon, 04/06/2026 - 11:20

Rachel Sauer

In new book God Bless the Pill, CU ��ý�� scholar Samira Mehta delves into the often-forgotten history of how liberal religion helped make birth control broadly available in America

A little more than 100 years ago, the Episcopalian stance on birth control was this: “We utter an emphatic warning against the use of unnatural means for the avoidance of contraception, together with the grave dangers—physical, moral and religious—thereby incurred, and against the evils with which the extension of such use threatens the race.”

Even acknowledging “abnormal cases” in which birth control might be necessary, Episcopalians were just one of many Protestant denominations that, in the early 20th century, “reacted to contraception on a continuum from skeptical to disapproving,” writes Samira Mehta, a ��ý�� associate professor of women and gender studies and director of the Program in Jewish Studies.

This aligns with commonly held ideas about how contraception—specifically the pill, which received FDA approval in May 1960—became broadly available in the United States: that first- and second-wave feminists pushed for accessibility, policy change and social revolution while religious leaders erected roadblocks and preached against it.

CU ��ý�� scholar Samira Mehta's new book, God Bless the Pill, explores how liberal religion helped make birth control broadly available in America.

Except this doesn’t actually tell the whole story.

In her new book God Bless the Pill, scheduled for publication April 14, Mehta details the often-forgotten history of mid-20th-century Protestant, Jewish and Catholic leaders and believers who embraced birth control as part of God’s plan. In fact, many denominations that were “skeptical to disapproving” in the early 20th century came around to supporting and advocating for birth control and family planning.

“In a society that overtly thought of sex as something inside of marriage and that was inappropriate outside of marriage, the way that birth control becomes something that is covered by insurance and a part of respectable medicine lay in reshaping it from a tool for sexual liberation and turning it into a tool for creating properly structured American families,” Mehta says.

“This didn’t happen because (as a society) we care about women but because children have a better start if their mother doesn’t die in childbirth, if their family doesn’t have more children than the parents can provide for. The goal was to create healthier families—to use birth control to create healthier families—not just a healthy mother. And there’s concern that if you have more children than you can afford, you become dependent on the state. This is the United States, where we don’t want you to need a school lunch program, so you can’t have more kids than you can afford to give lunch to.”

The role of liberal religion

The idea to research what became God Bless the Pill, Mehta says, germinated from a desire not to lessen the significant influence that first- and second-wave feminism had on making birth control broadly available to women, but to understand what, if any, influence liberal religion had on the accessibility of birth control.

Book release and Q&A

What: A reading from God Bless the Pill by author Samira Mehta, followed by a Q&A facilitated by Phoebe Young, chair of the CU ��ý�� Department of History

Where: Waldschänke Ciders + Coffee, 4100 Jason St. in Denver

When: 6-8 p.m. Monday, April 13

Who: All are invited to this free event.

Reserve a spot

Mehta was inspired by social historian Elaine Tyler May’s America and the Pill: A History of Promise, Peril, and Liberation, in which May assesses how access to the pill did and didn’t fulfill utopian dreams of liberating women, eradicating global poverty and supporting stable and happy marriages.

Mehta understood that the history of contraception is not simply a feminist history and found herself wondering what “that story would look like if one fully included religion in the narrative? I hoped and assumed that, as in May’s title, the promise and liberation might outweigh the peril. I also saw in May’s narration the assumption that religion was always conservative and opposed to birth control,” she writes in God Bless the Pill.

But what about liberal religious congregations? Where were they in the aftermath of oral contraception becoming broadly available in 1960?

Mehta took that question to the Schlesinger Library at Harvard University, where she found documentation of her childhood minister, the Rev. Al Ciarcia of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Greater Bridgeport in Connecticut, publicly supporting birth control during the Griswold v. Connecticut debate—a landmark 1965 U.S. Supreme Court case in which the court found that a Connecticut statute forbidding contraceptive use violated the right of marital privacy.

This decision came 25 years after the American Birth Control League, formed by Margaret Sanger in 1921 and renamed the Planned Parenthood Federation of America in 1942, assembled a national clergymen’s committee.

“These clergy talk about the importance of sex in a marriage and how a marriage that is sexually dynamic is less likely to result in divorce,” Mehta says. “The rhetoric around sex and marriage starts changing, and clergy members start talking about the sacred nature of a marriage bond and how sex is part of that bond through which two become one—regardless of literally becoming one in the form of a new person.

"The way that birth control becomes something that is covered by insurance and a part of respectable medicine lay in reshaping it from a tool for sexual liberation and turning it into a tool for creating properly structured American families," says Samira Mehta.

“They also advocate for marriages that are economically stable, and more kids can strain the economics of the household.”

Making the moral choice

Though Mehta begins the narrative in God Bless the Pill during World War II, the story of religion and contraception really gathers steam after the war’s end and the Cold War’s beginning. During this time, the value and sanctity of the American family was touted as one of the best weapons against the communist menace.

“There’s talk about Soviet women who have to go out and work in factories and put their kids in daycare,” Mehta says. “But a family that can control how many kids they have—where the mother can stay home and the father’s income is enough to support the family—can control their discretionary income. They can get a KitchenAid stand mixer, they can replace the dishwasher when a new and better model comes out. Limiting the birth rate becomes a way of increasing capitalist consumption.”

Messages highlighting capitalism as a way to defeat communism often occurred in the same breath as messages of moral behavior: “It’s the idea that if you can’t control something, it’s not moral,” Mehta explains. “Nobody wants to argue you should be celibate in marriage, so liberal religion begins framing birth control as a tool that allows us to make moral choices about how to structure our families.

“These clergy members believe that you can lay out the evidence for a compelling moral choice and then everybody will want to make a compelling moral choice. They were arguing that this is an access problem and an education problem, and they thought people would see that the best choices for their families are these choices (the clergy members) are suggesting.”

Mehta notes that even the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. believed that people would make the moral choice if it was presented to them—arguing that big families may be appropriate for the farm, but they work against African Americans’ self-interest in the city. “He laid out the argument that African Americans have a right to these tools as well to lift themselves out of poverty.”

Ultimately, Mehta adds, there was and continues to be backlash on both the right and the left, with the right not anticipating the feminist potential of contraception and the left questioning whether birth control is a tool of liberation rather than of racial and patriarchal oppression.

“And then the center isn’t necessarily super comfortable with prolific non-marital sex,” Mehta explains. “They may be OK with married-like relationships, but they’re generally not OK with an emotionally unencumbered and mutually satisfying one-night stand. And the center wasn’t on board with men needing to pull their weight at home and women being in the workforce and kids being in daycare. We’re still seeing a course correction from the center.”

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In new book God Bless the Pill, CU ��ý�� scholar Samira Mehta delves into the often-forgotten history of how liberal religion helped make birth control broadly available in America.

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What’s that knocking in the trees?

Rachel Sauer — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 21:44:37 +0000

What’s that knocking in the trees? Rachel Sauer Wed, 02/04/2026 - 14:44

Kayleigh Wood

In new book, CU ��ý�� folklorist Jack Daly bridges the gap between academic research and Colorado legend

It was well into the evening when Jack Daly and a small group of legend trippers, organized by the Sasquatch Outpost in Bailey, Colorado, made their descent into the forests just 30 minutes outside of town. Owned and operated by Jim and Daphne Myers, the site hosts numerous Bigfoot events, from meetings to night hikes led by Bigfoot researcher Jim Myers himself.

During these hikes, which occur about once a month, Myers serves as the outpost’s liaison into what the Sasquatch Outpost’s booking website describes as “the realm of the Forest People.” Here, visitors might experience numerous encounters with Bigfoot in the form of vocalizations, footprints, knocking on trees and airborne rocks thrown in the direction of the group.

Folklorist Jack Daly, an instructor in the CU ��ý�� Program for Writing and Rhetoric, explores the supernatural, unexplainable and unnerving in his book Eerie Colorado: Mountain Folklore, Monsters and Tales of the Supernatural.

On that particular hike, deep in the forest, Daly and the group were startled—not by flying rocks or breaking branches, but by what he describes as “a giant silver orb just flying overhead, and we all saw it. We stopped, and it disappeared. There’s no flashing lights. It was not in, like, full orbit.”

This UFO encounter was notably different from the one he experienced in high school, when he and a friend witnessed a glowing blue orb hovering above a meadow, moving from one place to another at random intervals, for several minutes.

Daly shares this experience and more in his recently published book, Eerie Colorado: Mountain Folklore, Monsters and Tales of the Supernatural. Thursday evening, Daly will host an event at the ��ý�� Bookstore, where attendees will have the opportunity to learn more about Colorado’s supernatural folklore through the eyes of an expert.

Eerie Colorado

Jack Daly will speak about and sign his new book, Eerie Colorado: Mountain Folklore, Monsters and Tales of the Supernatural.

Where: ��ý�� Bookstore, 1107 Pearl St.

When: 6:30 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 5.

Learn more

In his book, Daly, a lecturer in the ��ý�� Program for Writing and Rhetoric, explores all things supernatural, unexplainable and unnerving in the Centennial State. Beyond simply organizing these legends in one volume, Daly grapples with the role supernatural folklore plays in the historical and contemporary culture of Colorado. Enmeshing his own personal testimony and the testimonies of the individuals he interviewed on his own with existing scholarly research, he divides his findings into two categories: the corporeal, which he describes in his book as creatures of “‘flesh-and-blood,’” and the incorporeal, referring to the entities that lack physical bodies.

Daly used ethnographic methods in his research, conducting interviews and documenting participant observation, a qualitative research method in which scholars immerse themselves in a setting and attempt to observe as many individuals as possible to draw conclusions about a specific culture. He uses the term “memorate” to classify the personal experience narratives throughout the book, including some of his own, as well as the experiences of his family members. Jim Myers of the Sasquatch Outpost shared a personal Bigfoot encounter for the book—a sighting that Myers dubbed as a Class A experience, which is an encounter at close range, where the viewer can confidently rule out all natural explanations.

Monsters, legends and the supernatural

Beyond the memorates, Daly’s fieldwork has taken him to as many of the sites featured in the book as possible for his research.

As a folklorist, Daly’s research focuses on monsters, legends and the supernatural. In 2023, he received the American Folklore Society’s Warren E. Roberts Prize in Folk Art and Material Culture for his piece “Devil in the Skies, Stars on the Barns: The Snallygaster, Hex Signs, and Barn Stars.” He earned a master’s degree in folklore and is currently pursuing a PhD in American studies at Pennsylvania State University, where he was a recipient of the 2022-23 University Graduate Fellowship.

In his book Eerie Colorado, author Jack Daly grapples with the role supernatural folklore plays in the historical and contemporary culture of Colorado.

Daly explains that his research champions scholarship while validating personal experience, noting that “people’s experiences with the supernatural are much more common than we give them credit for.” As a folklorist and scholar of belief, he says, he takes an “ethnographic, folkloristic [and] anthropological approach,” striving to avoid approaching all things eerie and inconceivable from “a position of disbelief in regards to the supernatural,” which he refers to in Eerie Colorado as a believer-skeptic binary.

In the book’s introduction, Daly makes clear that he is unconcerned with the reality of monsters, unexplainable phenomena and supernatural beings. He approaches his research from a place of neither belief nor disbelief, but with the aim of analyzing how these stories, which trend across time and place, function on a cultural and personal level.

Daly’s UFO encounter in the hills outside Bailey, which occurred only a couple of months ago, reinforces why his research approach for Eerie Colorado is helpful. Quite often, accounts of strange phenomena come from individuals who are skeptical themselves. Daly and the group simultaneously saw a silver orb enter their field of vision before it disappeared altogether; they couldn’t explain or verify it, but they all had the same experience.

Across the folklore field, Daly says, many scholars have begun to approach the supernatural through a similar, experience-based approach championed by David Hufford, a folklorist and ethnologist whose theories Daly draws from in Eerie Colorado. When Daly approaches legends, he says he strives to address them “more literally. As they literally happened,” adding that this approach “was heavily, heavily stigmatized for, you know, over 100 years when the processes of rationalism and empiricism and enlightenment [were] the overriding paradigms in academia and within intellectual culture more broadly.”

Yet the study of folklore appears to be changing, and Daly isn’t the only scholar in the field of belief studies who is interested in how legends function in a larger cultural context. He notes a newfound “openness that scholars are engaging with, in terms of thinking: This person literally did see a UFO. This person literally did see Bigfoot. This person literally did see a ghost, which is, I think, an interesting new movement that I want to keep on pursuing.”

Ready for a legend trip of your own?

Jack Daly uses the term “legend trip” in his book Eerie Colorado, which he describes as a visit to a site associated with a supernatural legend, where individuals often try to interact with a legend through rituals or “tests.” For those who want to get up close and personal with some of the local legends featured in Eerie Colorado, Daly has both visited and recommends these sites:

The Stanley Hotel in Estes Park. For Daly, the Stanley is a prime example of “the transformative effect that the supernatural can have in reality.” Before The Shining, he notes, the site was “in disrepair. It was falling apart. People weren’t really going to Estes Park. Stephen King goes there, he has a supernatural encounter ostensibly. It causes him to write the book… the book turns into a movie… And then that literally transforms the culture surrounding both Estes Park and the Stanley Hotel. It was repaired. It is now a destination. It’s super, super nice.”

The Vampire Grave in Lafayette, where, according to legend, a tree grew from a stake used to kill a vampire. Check out Daly’s viral TikTok at the Vampire Grave at @thefolklord

The Molly Brown House in Denver, which is rumored to be haunted by both Molly and her husband.

The Denver Botanic Gardens October Ghost Tours

Cheeseman Park in Denver, which some consider one of the most haunted sites in Denver as it was built over the Mount Prospect Cemetery, where thousands are still buried.

For those interested in legends they can explore from the comfort of their homes, Daly recommends the Digital Folklore podcast, hosted by Perry Carpenter and Mason Amadeus. Described on their website as a “fusion of audio drama and narrative documentary,” the pair dive into internet legends, monsters and conspiracy theories “through the lens of academic folklore.” Like Daly, they strive to use these legends to draw broader cultural connections, rather than simply collecting and platforming them.

‘I know what I saw’

In the process of writing Eerie Colorado, Daly notes his attempts to balance academic scholarship and theory with folklore in an approachable way. Tapping into existing scholarship and attempting to draw conclusions about the role of the legend in Colorado culture, Eerie Colorado takes on a new perspective—one supported by research.

After reading some of the existing books about Colorado folklore, Daly noticed a trend: “They don’t cite their sources. They are clearly unfamiliar with the broader scholarship that would give them a much deeper level [of understanding].” In Eerie Colorado, Daly describes how many previous publications on Colorado folklore will present a story and let it speak for itself, without attempting to interpret the function these stories might serve to the local people. Daly sought to remedy this gap in the literature with his book, attempting to make meaning out of popular Colorado legends by situating them within a broader cultural context and tracing their developments across time and place.

“There’s one thing you notice with legends: They migrate,” says Daly. He argues that legends, even those that appear specific to Colorado, can often be situated in “a broader legend complex [tied] into other variants that we see across not just the United States, but the entire world.”

For example, the Phantom Jogger of Riverdale Road in Thornton, which Daly covers in Eerie Colorado, closely mimics the more commonly known story of the Vanishing Hitchhiker, which has been well documented by folklorists since the 1940s, Daly notes in his book. According to Thornton legend, a jogger was killed in a hit and run on Riverdale Road and left to haunt the site of the crash.

Daly sets the scene: “You’ll be driving along the road, and you’ll see this jogger, and sometimes they’ll ask you for a ride. They’ll get in the car, and then they’ll disappear. And so that’s a variant of the Vanishing Hitchhiker, but it’s a Colorado version because it’s athletic. It’s a jogger.”

In both cases, the disappearing hitchhikers and Thornton’s jogger often leave behind a mark of their presence. According to the local legends Daly documents in Eerie Colorado, those who are eager to drive down Riverdale Road and are brave enough to pull over may hear footsteps approaching them or fists banging against the sides of their car, or they may find handprints left on the outside of their vehicle.

Daly’s UFO sightings can also be linked back to popular legends of the past. When he was in high school, Daly and a friend “saw a giant blue orb flying over a field.” He details in Eerie Colorado that similar visual experiences are not uncommon and have been well documented across history, often known by a host of different names. “They’ve been connected with fairies,” Daly shares. “They’ve been connected with Bigfoot as well. They’re a common thing that people have described seeing.”

Throughout history and the contemporary era, countless individuals have witnessed strange phenomena in the skies that they cannot explain. Regardless of whether they interpret these sightings as flying saucers, massive fireballs or ships of fairies on the way to Magonia, Daly’s book guides readers through trends in firsthand accounts of the supernatural while tracking them across history. Popular creatures and entities that have taken on legendary status may be known by various names, but like the Vanishing Hitchhiker and the Phantom Jogger, the original legend and its local offspring often retain the same key attributes.

As for where he falls on the spectrum of belief in the supernatural, Daly says, “I do believe, honestly. And part of it has come from my own personal experience.” Recalling the silver orb in the skies near Bailey, he reflects, “I don’t know what it was, but I had that encounter. Like, I know that I know what I saw, and that’s what people say: I know what I saw. My experience was my experience, and that’s what I found in doing my fieldwork as well.”

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In new book, CU ��ý�� folklorist Jack Daly bridges the gap between academic research and Colorado legend.

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Top image: the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado, with illustrative glow (Photo: Carol Highsmith/Wikimedia Commons)

Scholar studies humanity through skin and ink

Rachel Sauer — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 17:51:52 +0000

Scholar studies humanity through skin and ink Rachel Sauer Thu, 01/29/2026 - 10:51

Chris Quirk

In his new book Indigenous Tattoo Traditions, CU ��ý�� alumnus and Tattoo Hunters host Lars Krutak highlights traditional techniques that sometimes date back millennia

Lars Krutak is not the kind of scholar who is content to simply write about his field. Krutak, a 1993 ��ý�� graduate in art history and anthropology, is an internationally recognized researcher of the history and culture of tattoos and has about 40 of them himself. He even went under the knife for his research—a scarification ritual of the Kaningara people of Papua New Guinea, during which an elder made more than 400 incisions in his skin.

CU ��ý�� alumnus Lars Krutak (left) has studied with indigenous artists around the world, including Pius (right), one of the last Makonde tattoo masters of Mozambique. (Photo: Lars Krutak)

“That technique of incision tattooing where they cut you to create a scar and then they rub in the pigment is by far the most painful,” he says. “You're getting cut open like a piece of chicken, and then you're just bleeding all over place. It's hard.”

It’s one of the traditional techniques described in his recent book, Indigenous Tattoo Traditions: Humanity through Skin and Ink, lauded as a best science pick in the journal Nature.

The author of four books on tattooing and host of the Tattoo Hunters series on the Discovery Channel, Krutak became fascinated with the art and custom of tattoos 20 years ago. After completing his bachelor’s degree at CU ��ý��, Krutuk began work on his master’s degree in anthropology and archaeology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. “I moved there in January of 1996,” he says. “When I got off the plane it was minus 55 degrees.”

Krutak was walking across the Fairbanks campus one day and saw a woman with three chin tattoos. “I didn't have any tattoos. I didn't know anything about tattoos. I didn't know indigenous people had tattoos,” Krutak recalls. “I could recognize that she was indigenous, and I got to know her later on, but that moment opened my eyes.”

His scholarly interest piqued, Krutak began digging through the university’s archives and extensive collection of artifacts. “I quickly realized that basically every indigenous society across the circumpolar north, from East Greenland to Siberia and seemingly everywhere in between, had a tattooing tradition at one time or another, but almost all I could find were records from 100 years ago and a few things from the 1950s.”

Krutak resolved to change that. “My main goal when I started doing this research was to preserve a history. No one in academic circles seemed interested in studying indigenous tattooing,” he says. “There were a lot of stigmas attached to tattooing at that time, and there are still some to this day. But I always felt that this was a significant part of the world's cultural heritage, and it was vanishing rapidly around the world, with no one going out there to document it.”

Permanent records

After learning about the tattooing tradition of the Yupik people of St. Lawrence Island in the northern Bering Sea, Krutak wrote to village councils and received permission to visit. What he found was that tattooing was on the wane among the Yupik, with just a small number of women who were in their 80s or 90s sustaining the custom.

In his recent book Indigenous Tattoo Traditions, author and CU ��ý�� alumnus Lars Krutak highlights work from indigenous artists around the world.

But he also found that the tradition went back about 2,000 years. The Yupik had, for two millennia, created anthropomorphic dolls, carved out of walrus ivory, that most likely represented ancestral personages. And the dolls had careful renditions of Yupik tattoos.

The significance of tattoos, for the Yupik people and for other cultures across the globe that Krutak has since visited—more than 40 to date—can be widely varied.

“If there is something that needs to be permanently recorded, tattoos can do that,” he says, adding that a tattoo can function as a record of hunting prowess, tally enemies killed in warfare or identify a person as a member of a particular clan or family. There are tattoos that denote a rite of passage, tattoos that invoke ancestral spirits and tattoos that relate to medicinal purposes, Krutak says.

One important meaning that bearers of tattoos have cited, across many cultures, is to identify the person in the afterlife, he says. In the case of the Yupik people of St. Lawrence Island, there are tattoos to help ancestors recognize the person so they can enter the sanctity of the afterlife. “I've been told, by many elders, that they would not be recognized as a true person from their culture without certain tattoos,” Krutak says. “This is one of the most common beliefs and purposes for tattoos across the indigenous world.”

‘Ancient marks of humanity’

What began with that serendipitous moment in Fairbanks has turned into a lifetime pursuit and a synthesis of two threads of Krutak’s interest that he cultivated at CU ��ý�� as an undergraduate: art history and anthropology. “I had two very formative professors,” he says. “Roland Bernier encouraged me to explore more deeply the connection between anthropology and art history, hence my double major. John Rohner was in charge of the museum studies program and introduced me to what a career in the museum field would look like.”

In some of Krutak’s travels, including his experience with the Yupik, he has encountered some of the last people in the culture who had or could share the history of tattoos in their culture, which increases his sense of urgency. “I firmly feel that indigenous tattooing deserves our attention, because it speaks volumes about what it means to be human,” says Krutak. “I think we can learn a lot about each other by studying and appreciating these ancient marks of humanity.”

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In his new book 'Indigenous Tattoo Traditions,' CU ��ý�� alumnus and 'Tattoo Hunter' host Lars Krutak highlights traditional techniques that sometimes date back millennia.

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Couple capture the wonders of wildlife (and wolverines!)

Rachel Sauer — Tue, 13 Jan 2026 16:50:39 +0000

Couple capture the wonders of wildlife (and wolverines!) Rachel Sauer Tue, 01/13/2026 - 09:50

Clint Talbott

Having stepped away from high-powered careers, alumnus Scot Bealer and his wife, Lea Frye, now focus on what they love, writing about and photographing Rocky Mountain wildlife

Scot Bealer doesn’t think of himself as a writer, but he’s written one book and co-written another. The way he tells it, he just communicates about what he loves: wildlife and nature.

His partner in publishing and in life has, quite literally, the same focus. She’s a photographer.

Together, Bealer and Lea Frye, who are married, have published a new book titled Wildlife Through the Lens: Animal Stories from Montana and the Rocky Mountains, which fuses their lifelong passions for wildlife, photography and storytelling. Last year, they teamed up on Most Trout Don’t Read: Lessons from Time on the Water.

Scot Bealer (left), a 1986 CU ��ý�� biology graduate, and his wife, Lea Frye (right), recently published Wildlife Through the Lens: Animal Stories from Montana and the Rocky Mountains, which fuses their lifelong passions for wildlife, photography and storytelling.

His path from college biology student to author was not exactly linear. Here’s how it happened:

Bealer graduated from the ��ý�� in 1986 with a BA in biology, cum laude, and went on to earn an MBA from Texas McCombs School of Business.

When he came to CU ��ý�� and majored in biology, he was initially baffled about why he had to take non-science courses. One of those courses was philosophy.

There were weekly writing assignments, and the professor returned Bealer’s first essay covered in red ink and bearing a “stunningly low grade.” The professor invited students who didn’t do well to see him during office hours. Bealer did that.

The professor told Bealer that he clearly knew the material and could talk about it, but writing was another story. “This will make a difference in your life, if you take the time to learn how to get your thoughts down on paper,” the professor told Bealer.

By the end of the semester, the professor praised Bealer’s progress, noting, “I hope you see how much you’ve changed in your writing.”

Bealer calls that encouragement “transformational.”

Science, fly fishing and business

At CU ��ý��, he was mentored by biology professors Carl Bock and David Armstrong, who encouraged him to develop critical thinking and communication skills. Armstrong was Bealer’s advisor for his honors thesis.

After graduating from CU ��ý��, Bealer joined a PhD program, thinking he’d go into academe. While in graduate school, though, Bealer took a job with the L.L. Bean fly-fishing school, where he worked with Dave Whitlock, who wrote and illustrated the L.L. Bean Fly-Fishing Handbook. He had such a satisfying time in Maine that he stayed at L.L. Bean and didn’t return to the PhD program.

An American badger featured in Wildlife Through the Lens: Animal Stories from Montana and the Rocky Mountains. (Photo: Lea Frye)

Also at the L.L. Bean Fly-Fishing School, Bealer met Brock Apfel, who would become a great friend and mentor and who encouraged him to go into the business world. Bealer got an MBA and launched a business career that went “pretty well,” he notes.

Bealer eventually rose to vice president of worldwide sales and marketing for Universal Air Travel Plan (UATP), a global payment network and expense management system for corporate air travel. Prior to that, he worked at Continental Airlines in revenue management.

At Continental Airlines, he crunched data to figure out when one person might pay $1,000 for a seat even if the person in the next seat paid $200. “Well, it was all about demand. And I was very good at analyzing statistics to predict demand on future flights,” he notes, adding: “The foundation in statistical work I did at CU is really what drove me to succeed in the realm I did from a business standpoint.”

Bealer found that in many ways working at UATP was that “dream job” with good pay and a chance to travel around the world, “which in one sense was spectacular. I got to do business trips to New Zealand, where I could bring my fly-fishing gear and take a few days” to fish. But constant travel is “not healthy,” and he stepped away from the dream job, eventually returning to work as a fly-fishing guide in Salida, Colorado.

“And I was back to doing what I loved. It was really kind of a fun circle, and it worked for both me and Lea, who also did very well in her business career. … We were kind of spendthrifts, so when we were ready to go do stuff that we loved, we could pay down debt and live on what we made doing jobs that paid less.”

“We’re working 60 to 80 hours a week on our book and photography ... we’re getting about 2% of the income we used to get, but we love everything we do,” notes CU ��ý�� alumnus Scot Bealer of producing Wildlife Through the Lens: Animal Stories from Montana and the Rocky Mountains. (Cover photograph: Lea Frye)

A shared love of the outdoors

Bealer and Frye both grew up loving nature and wildlife, which they continue to explore together:

They met in Texas, but their families are both from Pennsylvania, and both families enjoyed spotting animals in the wild. “Lea’s passion was wildlife photography ... She loved taking pictures of animals with little instamatic cameras.” Over time, those cameras would get bigger and better.

“Her mom and dad both loved taking pictures, and when she was 8 or 9, her dad built a dark room in their basement. She remembers going down and helping him with that archaic technology called developing film.”

One thing that cemented their bond was that Bealer and Frye loved spending time outside. “And if we saw an animal, we were happy to stop and watch it and see what it was doing. We might even wander off trail for miles because what it was doing was interesting, and we stayed with it.”

Bealer notes that many people love animals but are satisfied looking at pictures and getting outside a few times a year. “If they see something, cool; that’s exciting, and it shows up and then it goes away. Lea and I love to spend time watching what the animals do. We think seeing their little neat, quirky behaviors that are part of their life is just wonderful.”

Hitting the jackpot

But seeing and photographing wildlife can require a lot of time waiting and watching. Sometimes, the investment pays off. Last summer, Bealer and Frye were in the Montana wilderness when they spied (and photographed) a wolverine.

Such a sight is extraordinarily rare. Bealer calls it a “once-in-a-lifetime” encounter. He also calls it a “lottery-ticket kind of win.” (The wolverine photos are in Wildlife Through the Lens.)

“But our time in the field buys us a lot of lottery tickets. We still got lucky. I know people who have lived here all their lives; they’re serious outdoors people like I am. They still haven’t seen one.”

Then there are badgers, which few people see. Frye has photos of them, too. They spend a lot of time in prairie-dog colonies (because prairie dogs are a favorite food) but are less visible than prairie dogs. Bealer noted that Frye has an eagle eye for things like plumes of dirt rising from prairie-dog towns.

For instance, as they were driving, they noticed a puff of dirt flying into the air. “Most people would not have seen that or cared if they did because it was windy and there were lots of little dust plumes.”

But Bealer and Frye stopped the car. “Five plumes later a badger pops his head up. If you didn't stop when you saw that first plume, you wouldn’t have seen it.”

Bird lovers and ‘birders’

Bealer and Frye love to see birds, and Wildlife Through the Lens includes arresting images of birds. Still, they pause when they’re asked if they are “birders.”

Bealer puts it this way: Those who call themselves birders can be focused on completing “life lists” of birds they’ve seen and on traveling great distances to find an individual species. Meanwhile, “we don’t find as much excitement in seeing 10 new birds. We find the excitement in finding one bird and then watching it do something really cool.”

Nonetheless, Frye is keen to photograph the dance-on-water moves of the western grebe. Bealer says they’ve seen the grebes dancing on water. “We just didn’t get the pictures yet.” They’re planning to return to that same place next spring to try again, so one might call them “birder-adjacent.”

Among the wildlife that Scot Bealer and Lea Frye document are bighorn sheep. (Photo: Lea Frye)

Among the many other species they chronicle and display in their book are bighorn sheep. Bighorn males are known for butting heads (literally) in the rutting season. They’re less known for another contest of wills: kicking each other in the, um, privates.

In the book, Bealer notes that Frye was hesitant to publish the images. “But over time I convinced her that I couldn’t be the only adult in the world that still had the sense of humor of a 13-year-old.”

As soon as she printed the first one, he adds, “it became a hit.”

Bealer notes that he and Frye are a synergistic team.

“We can spend hours watching stuff without saying a whole lot,” he says, noting that they are both skilled at finding animals. “Lea is just hell on wheels finding nests. She can hear in a range that I can’t. And if we’re hiking and she hears baby birds, it’s like she’ll just stop and look up like there’s a nest and I haven’t heard a thing.”

When they make such a find, they’ll back away and make a note of where the nest was. They want to see the parents and watch the young grow.

Their previous book, Most Trout Don’t Read, reflects Bealer’s philosophy that fishing should be fun.

The book’s title “was a one-liner I used when teaching beginners about fly fishing,” he says, adding: “It doesn’t have to be complicated. You can take six fly patterns and fish a whole lifetime and catch lots of fish. You don’t need to be a master caster.”

Lifelong learning and reflection

From his career in business, Bealer saw the value of a broad education and critical thinking, especially in leadership roles:

“People coming out of school with technical degrees fill immediate needs, but for advanced roles, you need people who can think creatively and solve problems,” he says. “I became a huge fan of looking for people with a liberal arts education.”

Now retired, Scot and Lea continue to pursue their passions with enthusiasm and humility: “We’re working 60 to 80 hours a week on our book and photography ... we’re getting about 2% of the income we used to get, but we love everything we do.”

Even the writing.

“I would not go so far as to say that I’m a writer,” Bealer says, adding: “I translate oral stories into reasonable texts that hopefully people understand.”

Black bear

Northern pygmy owl

Mountain goats

Grizzly bear

Photos by Lea Frye

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Having stepped away from high-powered careers, alumnus Scot Bealer and his wife, Lea Frye, now focus on what they love, writing about and photographing Rocky Mountain wildlife.

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Top image: wolverine on a riverbank (Photo: Lea Frye)

Flashpoint: Taiwan

Rachel Sauer — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 22:19:40 +0000

Flashpoint: Taiwan Rachel Sauer Fri, 01/09/2026 - 15:19

Bradley Worrell

In new book, CU ��ý�� political scientist Steve Chan highlights the dangers of a Sino-U.S. war over Taiwan and why the Chinese believe time is on their side in their goal for reunification

Just 110 miles off China’s coast lies Taiwan, an island described by some political pundits as “the most dangerous place in the world”—and the place most likely to ignite a war between China and the United States.

“Taiwan is the single greatest flashpoint for a possible conflict between the U.S. and China—and yet most Americans likely could not locate the island on a map,” muses Steve Chan, professor of distinction emeritus with the CU ��ý�� Department of Political Science, whose research focus is on Sino-American relations. “Nevertheless, the island’s significance is very real to both sides.”

Taiwan, which was ruled for a time by Japan as a colony, was returned to China after World War II. Following Japan’s surrender, China’s long-simmering civil war between the Nationalists and Communists broke out anew, resulting in a Communist victory in 1949 that forced the Nationalists to retreat to the island refuge, which they called the Republic of China on Taiwan.

Steve Chan, professor of distinction emeritus with the CU ��ý�� Department of Political Science, researches Sino-American relations and recently published the book Taiwan and the Danger of a Sino-American War.

Technically, the two sides are still at war.

Since President Richard Nixon visited Beijing in 1972, the United States had signed several communiques with China acknowledging that there is only one China—and that Taiwan is part of China. However, Washington continues to bolster Taiwan’s defense, stating that it wants to see the impasse between the two sides of the Taiwan Strait resolved peacefully.

For its part, Beijing has never renounced its goal to reunify Taiwan, by force, if necessary, claiming this goal involves its “core interest.” At the same time, continued U.S. support for Taiwan’s de facto independence fuels fears of an armed clash between it and China.

Chan explores these tensions in his book Taiwan and the Danger of a Sino-American War. Recently, Chan spoke with Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine to get his thoughts on why China so badly wants to reclaim Taiwan, what’s at stake for both sides and what the future for reunification might look like. His responses have been condensed and edited for clarity.

Question: Why does China want Taiwan so badly, and why does America want Taiwan to remain independent?

Chan: I return your question with another question, which is: Why does Abraham Lincoln have such an exalted place in American history? Because he resisted the Confederacy’s secession and preserved the Union. That’s how Chinese think about Taiwan.

One of my quibbles with conventional reasoning is that people forget about their own history. They do not ask: What if the shoe is on the other foot? Therefore, the question is: How did the United States settle its own civil war? By bullets—not by ballots—in a very brutal civil war.

Taiwan is a flashpoint. The domestic political climate in neither the United States nor China is currently conducive to reasoned discourse. When it comes to national sovereignty and unity, these highly emotion-laden values do not yield to compromise.

It is abundantly clear, however, that should war break out over Taiwan’s status, it would be to the great detriment of all sides—China, Taiwan and the U.S., should it decide to intervene. It would be a disaster for the world to have the most powerful countries—the two leading countries in the world—to come to blows.

"Taiwan is important to the U.S. for strategic reasons. Washington cares about Taiwan because of its strategic position. It’s the linchpin—the pivot of the so-called ‘first island chain’ to contain China," says CU ��ý�� scholar Steve Chan. (Photo: Pixaby)

Question: You say in your book that U.S. backing for Taiwan is sometimes framed by policymakers as supporting democracy and human rights. You don’t agree?

Steve Chan: Not to make too fine a point, but U.S. invocations of human rights and democracy are, frankly, full of hot air, because the U.S. support for Taiwan was strongest under the Kuomintang (the Nationalists, in the 1950s and 1960s), when it was a single-party authoritarian government that ruled the island by martial law.

Taiwan is important to the U.S. for strategic reasons. Washington cares about Taiwan because of its strategic position. It’s the linchpin—the pivot of the so-called ‘first island chain’ to contain China. The first island chain seeks to box in China’s navy, preventing its access to the open Pacific.

The U.S. military is able to use Taiwan as a choke point, because Chinese ships—submarines especially—cannot transit to the open Pacific without going through some very narrow channels where the United States can monitor the Chinese ships’ movements.

If China were to conquer Taiwan, to control Taiwan, it would have broken through the first island chain, which goes from the Aleutian Islands, through Japan, Okinawa and Taiwan on to the Philippines. So, I see it more as a military contest rather than promotion of democracy and human rights. The U.S. containment policy continues today, and that’s how the Chinese see it.

Question: In your book you say that if China conquered Taiwan today it would be a Pyrrhic victory. Why is that?

Chan: In an invasion, Taiwan’s society would be shattered, and its economy would be destroyed. Also, the Chinese would lose the hearts and minds of the Taiwanese people. It would be a tough job for them to rule over a discontented, disaffected, angry populace. What do they have to gain by that?

As I say, Chinese leaders feel reasonably optimistic about the future, so why force your hand? Timing is everything. To paraphrase Otto von Bismark, Prussia’s chancellor, wise leaders try to hold on to God’s coattail to capitalize on an opportunity. The Chinese leaders have waited for over 75 years to reunify with Taiwan. They are patient, and they expect that ongoing trends would further increase their economic and military leverage over both Taiwan and the United States.

Question: You say that China is playing a ‘long game’ in Taiwan. What do you mean by that?

If war breaks out over Taiwan’s status, it would be to the great detriment of all sides—China, Taiwan and the U.S., should it decide to intervene, notes CU ��ý�� researcher Steve Chan.

Chan: As a country, your international standing depends on your international power, which in turn is based on your domestic economic strength. It’s your domestic economic growth and health that is the foundation for international power. Of course, domestic elite cohesion and elite-mass unity also matter for undertaking effective foreign policy.

In the U.S., we’ve been eating our seed corn—mortgaging our future and piling on debt. In effect, we are shifting the burden of paying back this debt to future generations of Americans—those who have not been born or who are not yet old enough to vote. In effect, current voters are borrowing from future generations.

For their part, the Chinese are betting on not only their own increasing strength but also the Americans’ own self-destructive behavior. Will the U.S. become disillusioned and distracted, as with its hasty withdrawal from Vietnam and Afghanistan, or become entangled in another part of the world such as Venezuela, Iran and Ukraine?

Meanwhile, Taiwan is still next door to China, and the Taiwanese realize that the Chinese will continue to be their neighbor, their largest trade partner and the destination of most of their foreign direct investment. Americans, in contrast, always have the option of “going home.” These are the thoughts on the Taiwanese people’s mind, and that’s what the Chinese are betting on.

Question: The U.S. has a policy called ‘strategic ambiguity’ as it relates to Taiwan. What is that exactly, and how does it help or hurt U.S. interests?

Chan: First of all, the United States itself does not recognize Taiwan as an independent country. Period. Unlike Ukraine, which is recognized by nearly all the countries in the world as an independent, sovereign country. The United States has agreed in several communiques with China that there’s only one China—and that Taiwan is part of China.

The United States has an interest in opposing China attacking Taiwan militarily and it is also opposed to Taiwan declaring its formal independence. So, in effect, the U.S. policy is to maintain the status quo, to sustain Taiwan’s de facto separation from China.

In his new book Taiwan and the Danger of a Sino-American War, CU ��ý�� scholar Steve Chan explores the tension between China's goal to reunify Taiwan—by force, if necessary—and continued U.S. support for Taiwan’s de facto independence, fueling fears of an armed clash between it and China.

The strategic ambiguity policy, in short, is something like this: We would decide later on whether or not we would fight, depending on the circumstances. In the meantime, we declare that we are opposed to China’s use of military force against Taiwan and, at the same time, any move by Taiwan to declare de jure independence. So, we’re keeping our policy ambiguous.

In that context, think of it like this: If someone threatens my daughter or my wife, people expect me to say, ‘I would definitely pummel you if you were to (attack) my daughter or wife,’ right? I would not say, ‘I may fight to you. I will keep my position ambiguous, so that I may fight you.’

People do not see that position as credible.

Recently, some former U.S. officials have promoted the idea of ‘strategic clarity’—to commit the U.S. definitely and publicly to Taiwan’s defense—a policy that is also fraught with many dangers.

Question: You say in your book that you could foresee a situation where the U.S. doesn’t fight for Taiwan if China invades. Given that the U.S. has supported Taiwan for seven decades and counting, how likely is that outcome?

Chan: The latest 2024 survey conducted by the Chicago Council of Global Affairs says that 65% of the American people are opposed to any military intervention on the part of the United States to fight for Taiwan. The majority are opposed to intervention; 35% are in support.

Now, there is usually a bump in public support for an administration's policy—whatever policy any administration adopts—at the onset of a crisis or war. It’s the so-called ‘Rally behind the flag syndrome.’

However, in six months, or in two years, when the conflict is not resolved in favor of the United States, we’ve seen that public support starts to decline precipitously. We’ve seen this with Vietnam and with Iraq and Afghanistan more recently. Some of these episodes have turned out very badly for the United States.

The tragedy of Vietnam and other conflicts stems from our exaggeration of national stake in a foreign conflict and over-estimation of our capability and stamina. We set up a test for ourselves, claiming that our intervention is a test of American will. We heighten the supposed stake we have in these places, and then when the end comes, the damage we have done to our reputation and credibility is all the more severe. We trap ourselves in our own rhetoric and self-defeating policies.

Question: If Taiwan hopes to avoid military clash with China, what might that look like? Perhaps like the former British colony of Hong Kong, which reunited with China in 1997 and which today theoretically operates under the ‘one country, two systems’ approach?

Chan: If they (Taiwan) negotiate with China now, maybe they can still get a reasonable deal. With the passage of time, their relative strength (compared to China) will continue to slip and they may not be able to count on continued U.S. support. Taiwan’s leverage is going to diminish over time.

But as long as Taiwan thinks that the U.S. has its back, they may still skate on very thin ice. Again, as some scholars have put it, it’s a matter of time—and China is playing the long game. The Chinese are betting that Americans will get distracted and tired, going to put out fires elsewhere, looking for other dragons to slay. The Taiwanese are also aware of this possibility.

"The United States has an interest in opposing China attacking Taiwan militarily and it is also opposed to Taiwan declaring its formal independence. So, in effect, the U.S. policy is to maintain the status quo, to sustain Taiwan’s de facto separation from China."

Question: Bottom line: Given the state of the world today, should we be more or less worried about the chance for a U.S.-China conflict over Taiwan?

Chan: So, a few quick points. No. 1: If there should be a war between the United States and China—and that’s a very big if—I believe Taiwan is the only flashpoint, the only reason for them to go to war. There are no other issues that are likely to get them into an armed conflict.

No. 2: I don’t see the Chinese initiating military actions against Taiwan today or in the near future, in the next, say, three, four, five or ten years.

No. 3: With that passage of time, China’s leverage will increase. Taiwan may very well end up succumbing to Chinese pressure—especially if the United States should prove unreliable.

No. 4: If hotheads in either Washington or Beijing come to power, then all bets are off. It very much depends on who will be the next president of the United States and the next president of China. I don’t expect war to break out today or tomorrow, but in the future, it matters who will be in charge. Also, it depends upon internal politics more than external politics, because wars can happen accidentally.

Question: If the president or a high-ranking government official asked you for a few foreign policy recommendations, what would you tell them?

Chan: Three words: Mind the gap. Watch your steps, that is. Avoid self-entrapment and self-inflicted wounds. Know when to place a big bet and when not to. I regret to say that, oftentimes, the United States has placed the wrong bet and backed the wrong horse: the Chinese Nationalists, the Saigon government, the Iraqi government and the government in Kabul, Afghanistan.

Make your domestic economy and domestic politics the priority over foreign policy. Get your house in order, economically and politically. That should be the No. 1 priority.

And understand the long-term and ongoing trends, so that you can go with the wind at your back rather than in your face. Finally, introspection and humility are important virtues in international as well as interpersonal relations.

Those are my simple pieces of advice for a prudent, wise foreign policy.

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In new book, CU ��ý�� political scientist Steve Chan highlights the dangers of a Sino-U.S. war over Taiwan and why the Chinese believe time is on their side in their goal for reunification.

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All the world’s a stage for William Shakespeare

Kylie Clarke — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 21:32:57 +0000

All the world’s a stage for William Shakespeare Kylie Clarke Wed, 11/26/2025 - 14:32

Alexandra Phelps

With the Nov. 26 cinematic release of Hamnet, CU ��ý�� scholars consider what we actually know about the famed playwright and why we’re still reading him four centuries later

Act One: Setting the scene

“Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears.” The legacy and legend of William Shakespeare has expanded well beyond the open-air theaters of Renaissance London. Embedded in classrooms, films and novels, his plays and poetry have become universally known and loved. Before he inspired generations of artists, however, he was inspired by the art around him. Adapting the stories and dramas he observed and experienced, his storytelling has entertained viewers and readers for four centuries.

However, his dramas are mostly what we have left of him.

“The wealth of beautiful and deep feeling poetry and drama that Shakespeare left, contrasted with the poverty of documents that give us a sense of who he is as a person, is very intriguing” explains Dianne Mitchell, a ��ý�� assistant professor of English and Renaissance literature scholar. This poverty has led scholars and writers, including bestselling author Maggie O’Farrell, to imagine what the lives of Shakespeare and his family may have been like.

In her 2020 novel Hamnet, a film adaptation of which will be released in theaters today (Nov. 26), O’Farrell weaves a plot following Shakespeare and his wife – referred to in the novel and film as Agnes – and their children, twins Judith and Hamnet and their older sister Susanna, creating a domestic view of their lives in Stratford. Based on the sparse information about Shakespeare available through legal documents, O’Farrell spins a fictional tale of loss, love and the family of one of the world’s most influential playwrights.

Paul Mescal as William Shakespeare in Hamnet. Image provided by Focus Features

Meet the Shakespeare scholars

Scene One: Finding a love

Enter Dianne Mitchell, Katherine Eggert, Kevin Rich, Heidi Schmidt, & Amanda Giguere

At CU ��ý��, Shakespeare’s work is integral both in English classrooms and on stages. Scholars of literature and theater, as well as organizers of the Colorado Shakespeare Festival (CSF), found a love for Shakespeare’s work which now guides their professional careers.

Katherine Eggert

Katherine Eggert, a professor of English and vice chancellor and senior vice provost for academic planning and assessment, remembers, “I was going to study Victorian literature in graduate school, but then I took a class from Stephen Greenblatt, who is one of the world’s most famous Shakespeare scholars, and I knew that I could not leave the Renaissance behind.”

Eggert, drawing on her work on Renaissance epistemology – understanding how it is possible we know things and not others – and Renaissance history, explains, “We know a great deal about Shakespeare’s dealings in property, his legal involvements, we know whether he paid his taxes. We know the kinds of records that get kept in life. We do not have his diaries; we do not have his private remarks about what he thought about any given subject. What we do have is his literary work.”

Dianne Mitchell

For Dianne Mitchell, literary work and poetry of the Renaissance in particular spoke to her. “I had some great teachers when I was an undergraduate who really brought the 16th and 17th century literary world to life, especially poetry. I hadn’t realized how sensual and how deep the poetry felt.” Mitchell, among the other classes she teaches, developed an upper-level English course that is cross-listed with women and gender studies called Sex in Shakespeare’s Time. She reflects that students are “often surprised how up front both real women and imaginary women can be about what it is that they can and don’t desire.”

Kevin Rich

The stage is another way people find new ways to look at texts and themselves. For Kevin Rich, associate professor of theater and director of the Applied Shakespeare graduate certificate, theater offered him a place to conquer his fear of speaking. He remembers, “I was at a summer camp junior year of high school and they said do something that scares you, and I said acting scares me. I always wanted to be a teacher and once I found acting, I knew what I wanted to teach.”

Later, he saw a six-person production of Shakespeare’s As You Like It on a basketball court in New York City’s lower east side and “it was magical. It was awesome. Kids who were coming to play basketball saw that a play was happening and sat on their basketballs and watched it,” he recalls.

Heidi Schmidt

For Heidi Schmidt, a director and teacher with the Colorado Shakespeare Festival, it was the connections she made rather than the setting of a theater that drew her in. “I really liked theater people. When I started hanging around theater people there was this relief that I could just be more of myself than I was in the rest of my life.” Now involved in every aspect of the theater, she works alongside Rich and Amanda Giguere, CSF director of outreach, to develop the CSF school program.

Amanda Giguere

Amanda Giguere found theater at a young age at a Shakespeare camp: “It planted the seed and now this is my life’s work.” When she was choosing a graduate school, “I applied to one school, CU ��ý��, sight unseen … because of its connection to the Colorado Shakespeare Festival. Twenty-one years later, I’m still here.” Her book, Shakespeare & Violence Prevention: A Practical Handbook for Educators, allows teachers all over the country to use CSF’s teaching and practices in their classrooms.

In the five years since its publication and adaptation to film, the novel has grown a wider audience interested in imagining who Shakespeare could have been. Although scholars often try – to varying degrees of success – to explain Shakespeare the person, it is often novelists and playwrights like Shakespeare who bring him most to life. Through his plays, Shakespeare has touched audiences by interpreting the world he experienced through his writing.

Many ��ý�� Shakespeare scholars and Colorado Shakespeare Festival (CSF) drama researchers are excited for the film adaptation of Hamnet. This film offers another insight into what Shakespeare could have been, beyond the dramas he created.

Act Two: Teaching Shakespeare

Enter CU ��ý��’s Dianne Mitchell, Katherine Eggert, Kevin Rich, Heidi Schmidt and Amanda Giguere

“Shakespeare’s plays can be a way to think through questions that students themselves are asking, and we don’t only need Shakespeare to help us answer these questions. But it’s funny how much he is wondering about some of the same issues many of my students are wondering about or exploring some of the same problems that beset them,” says Mitchell.

Part of Shakespeare’s brilliance is his ability to reach people at any age. Kevin Rich, an associate professor of Theatre at CU ��ý��, remembers seeing “a 4-year-old perform a Cleopatra monologue (from Antony and Cleopatra). You would think that’s too hard, but at that age, they’re not afraid of words yet – all words are new. This language was not intimidating and she killed it. She was so brave and let the words be as big as they were. That’s when I realized no age is too young to be introduced to these plays, and you’ll always learn more as you get older.”

Eggert emphasizes the importance of reading the text aloud in English courses: “I do ask students to read in class. I think it’s really important to hear Shakespeare and to hear the language coming out of your mouth and not just as a professional. When you read Renaissance literature – not just Shakespeare – and literature of any kind aloud, you understand it in your ear, even if you don’t understand every word on the page.”

Act Three: Favorite plays

Everybody reads Shakespeare differently, allowing for individuals to connect with his works in different ways.

Schmidt, for example, recalls a time at a camp where she was directing Measure for Measure. The play is about a duke who lets the affairs of state slide and instead of handling them, claims he’s going on sabbatical. However, he doesn’t and sticks around in disguise, observing as people get manipulated by his deputy.

“I said, ‘OK, let’s just agree as a group that tricking someone into having sex with someone they don’t want to is bad. Period, the end,’” Schmidt says. “The youngest kid in the class, 13, puts her hand in the air and shouts, ‘Consent is sexy!’ It was one of my proudest teaching moments.”

Giguere recognizes the power in drawing connections between historical events and the situations Shakespeare portrays in his stories.” Tyrant by Stephen Greenblatt is about the tyrants in Shakespeare’s plays. I’m on the section on Richard III, and I’m thinking about how it shows what happens when hate is allowed to grow and fester. It’s crazy that Richard III became king, that’s sort of baffling.”

Rich sees great power in how Shakespeare can capture human conditions in social and emotional situations, recalling, “I’ve had an inmate say to me, ‘Shakespeare had to have done time,’ because he cannot have written the prison scene in Richard II without having spent time in a cell himself. I’ve had veterans say he had to have been in war, because he cannot have possibly written about war like he does without having experienced it. So, maybe that’s true or maybe he was just that empathetic, that able to imagine perspectives other than his own.”

Mitchell reflects, “I’ve started teaching one of Shakespeare’s late plays — by which I mean a play that he wrote at the end of his dramatic career — both at the undergraduate and graduate level. It’s a play called Cymbeline. One of the reasons [I like teaching it] is that students have no expectations about the play and its characters when they come into my class. I like teaching it because you really see a Shakespeare at the end of his career who is so confident in his dramatic abilities that he starts breaking all the rules. It’s really fun to watch him discard habits that he practices in some of his more canonical plays.”

Eggert finds that familiarity can generate new insights. She says, “The play I most like to teach, that’s Hamlet. It’s infinitely rich and even if students have already read it before, there is so much to discover on the second, third and 20th reading.” Whether a student is completely new to a play or reading it again, there are so many meaningful ways for them to interact with the text.

Act Four: Hamnet as a novel and a stage play

Giguere and Schmidt both saw the first stage adaptation of Hamnet at the Swan Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon. Prior to seeing it, Giguere read the novel and was pleased that even though the novel takes a lot of liberties with who Shakespeare’s wife was, they are “beautiful liberties.”

O’Farrell’s novel, despite being about Shakespeare, leans more deeply into the lives of Agnes and his children than other novelists and scholars have. Often villainized in history, Agnes in the novel is shown in a new light. There is much speculation about the circumstances around her and William Shakespeare’s marriage, Eggert disputes some scholars’ insinuations that since she was older than he and was pregnant, she trapped him in a marriage that he didn’t want. This has led to a fictional narrative in which the two lived separate lives, and Shakespeare moved to London to escape her.

Eggert emphasizes that there is no evidence that supports this theory. In fact, she says, “just a few months ago, a scholar made a good case that a letter found in an old book that had been owned by an acquaintance of Shakespeare’s, used as part of the binding of this book, was written to Shakespeare’s wife, and the letter was to her in London. While this letter doesn’t indicate the entirety of their relationship dynamic, it displays that their lives weren’t as separate as some scholars would want them to be.”

Mitchell describes the importance of centering a story around women, especially beside a character as large as Shakespeare. Instead of imagining Agnes’ life as small in comparison to Shakespeare’s, “One of the things that I liked about the novel was that it’s not about Shakespeare and his rise to fame and success, but rather about the domestic life of the intelligent and deep-feeling woman he married. We don’t have diaries or letters, so fiction is doing the work (of defining) that (Agnes) wasn’t some small person who wasn’t cared for and who was just kind of caught up in the Shakespeare industry. She has her own important life.”

Mitchell explains that the villainization of Agnes’ character could possibly stem from a thoughtful act William Shakespeare and his wife did. Many scholars use the fact that the couple didn’t get married in the local parish church to diminish her character since this act was violating the religious conventions at the time. However, at the time they got married, Shakespeare’s father, John – a cruel character in the novel – was being pursued for his debts. Instead of getting married in the church, where people would have seen him and tried to collect, William and Agnes married elsewhere as a kindness to William’s father.

Act Five: Hamnet as a film

There are many films that have captured, or attempted to capture, the plays and fictionalized life of Shakespeare. Movies such as Shakespeare in Love offer viewers a way to enter his life, even if it’s heavily fictionalized. Films are often one of the most important tools used by professors, including Eggert. Films about Shakespeare or his plays allow viewers to better understand the content, through observing the choices actors and directors make.

“I show clips from films and theater adaptations; there are resources through the [��ý��’s] libraries where you can see how if something is performed slightly differently, it emphasizes an entirely different meaning to the text,” Eggert says.

Although there are fictionalized elements, the stage adaptation of Hamnet was another way for viewers to understand Shakespeare and England at the time. The stage adaptation included people of various ethnic and racial backgrounds, something Schmidt notes was a larger part of Shakespeare’s London than people often consider.

Colorado Shakespeare Festival remains popular

The Colorado Shakespeare Festival program has reached more than 140,000 Colorado students and continues to be an integral part of English courses in college. For this school cycle, Rich has adapted Hamlet into a digestible 30-minute and 45-minute play, depending on the student audience. Giguere and Schmidt’s work allows for teachers to prep their students on the plots, background and characters in the plays. Similarly to Rich’s opinion that anyone can interact with the material, Giguere states, “I don’t think you need to be a professional actor or violence prevention expert to use Shakespeare’s plays to think about patterns of violence. I think the plays unlock a lot about our own world and help us understand what it means to be human and what it means to live in a society.

“There is a lot of research that exists about how London, in particular, is a lot more diverse than we like to think it was – it was not all white. There were a lot of different people coming from all over the world and living in London and making their lives in London. I think [an all-white version of London] is an outdated and disproven illusion of what life looked like,” Schmidt says.

Rich adds that the landscape in theatre for interpreting Shakespeare has moved beyond a binary system of comedy and tragedy. “When I was first starting out as an actor, auditioning for companies, they would ask for two contrasting monologues – one comedic, one tragic. It seems that many have moved away from that because that creates a two dimensional view of his plays, which in reality are more than just two genres of comedies and tragedies. He finds levity in serious moments and he finds gravity in the funny moments.”

The film version of Hamnet continues to break down these binaries and established structures through its storytelling. The mysticism that Rich sees in Shakespeare’s work is what Giguere recognizes in O’Farrell’s novel. Some film viewers may recognize the mysticism of the novel while also seeing the humanity of Shakespeare and his family.

Some 400 years later, Shakespeare can connect with individuals on a number of levels. Hamnet’s release in theaters offers viewers a fictionalized way to see him as a person and one version of the life he could have led. However, the concrete things people know about Shakespeare’s storytelling and genius are found in his works. Giguere emphasizes that people should read “all of them. Truly, every Shakespeare play collides with you in different ways depending on where you are in life or what the world is doing. I say this in a tongue-and-cheek way, read all of them, watch all of them. Because that’s what baffles me about these works, is that sometimes you’ll collide with a play and it just hits you in the right way where, ‘Oh my goodness, this sheds light on this other aspect of my life.’”

They Exit (the movie theater)

With the Nov. 26 cinematic release of Hamnet, CU ��ý�� scholars consider what we actually know about the famed playwright and why we’re still reading him four centuries later.

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Charting the rise and fall of great sea powers

Rachel Sauer — Thu, 18 Sep 2025 17:29:31 +0000

Charting the rise and fall of great sea powers Rachel Sauer Thu, 09/18/2025 - 11:29

Bradley Worrell

CU alum’s book examines how the fate of the Netherlands, Great Britain and the United States as economic and political powers has been deeply intertwined with their ability to project power via the seas

Colin Flint, a ��ý�� PhD geography graduate and professor of political geography at Utah State University, researches the rise and fall of great world powers.

It’s a topic beyond simple academic interest to Flint, who was born in 1965 and raised in England during a period of seismic change in the country.

“At the time, Britain was still struggling to figure out that it wasn’t the world’s greatest power anymore, so my socialization and political coming of age was in a declined power,” he says. Additionally, Flint says being raised in the busy ferry port of Dover made a powerful impression on him by highlighting the country’s long history as a maritime nation.

Colin Flint, a CU ��ý�� PhD geography graduate, researches the rise and fall of great world powers.

“Dover definitely has influenced me, being so close to the water,” he says. “My high school was on a hill overlooking the harbor, which at the time was the busiest ferry port in the world, with ships going back and forth to France and Belgium. So, the notion was very much rooted in me that Britain drew its power, historically, from the sea.”

At one point, Flint entertained the idea of joining the Royal Navy before setting his career sights on academia. He obtained his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Britain, then pursued his PhD in geography at the ��ý�� thanks to fortuitous connections between his undergrad mentor and CU ��ý�� Department of Geography Professor John O’Loughlin.

“I moved to United States of America in 1990 to attend university, and the literature at the time and discussions were all very declinist. It was very much, ‘America has gone down the tubes,’” he says. “Broadly speaking, I moved from a declined power into a declining power, or so I thought at the time.”

After the fall of the Soviet Union, Flint says the idea of America as a declining power was largely replaced with a triumphalist narrative that saw the U.S. as the world’s only remaining superpower.

Ideas about what makes a country an economic and political superpower—and how a country can lose its status as a hegemonic power—had been percolating in Flint’s brain for years when he recently published his book Near and Far Waters: The Geopolitics of Seapower. The book specifically looks at the Netherlands, Great Britain and the United States for context on how the countries used sea power to project their economic and political influence across the globe.

Flint spoke with Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine about his book, while also offering insights on how current events are shaping the outlook for the United States and the world. His answers have been edited for clarity and condensed.

Question: What is the context for your book’s title: Near and Far Waters?

Flint: There are legal terms about coasts and the exclusive economic zone around the country’s coastlines, but I’m not using it in that way. I’m thinking about an area of ocean in which a country has interest and influence over and off its coastline.

"Near and Far Waters" by CU ��ý�� alumnus Colin Flint focuses on the Netherlands, Great Britain and the United States for context on how the countries used sea power to project their economic and political influence across the globe.

That is an important piece of ocean for a country because there’s resource exploitation, but it’s also a matter of security. If a country wants to protect itself from potential invasion, it needs to control those waters off its coastline—it’s near waters.

Some countries, once they’ve established control of their near waters, have the ability and desire to project beyond that, across the oceans into what would then become its far waters. If you think about Great Britain in the context of the British Empire, once it fought off European threats to its coastline—its near waters—it was then able to develop the sea power to establish its empire. It was in African far waters, it was in Indian far waters, in Middle East far waters and so on.

Another good example of this would be how the United States of America, over the course of history, pushed other countries out of its near waters. The Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico are good examples, where Spanish and British influence were ended over the 1800s and 1900s. And then by establishing control through annexation of Hawaii and the purchase of Alaska, America developed its Pacific near waters, too, which it expanded upon through the course of World War II, pushing the Japanese back and establishing bases in Okinawa, Japan; the Philippines; and Guam, etc.

Question: One of your chapters is titled ‘No Island is an Island.’ What do you mean by that?

Flint: I was talking about how the projection of sea power requires the control of islands. Often, the geopolitical goal and benefit of controlling an island is not the island itself—it’s how it enables projection of power further, or how it hinders other countries’ projection of power by being near sea lines of communication that you can have a base to try and disrupt. For example, when Hawaii became part of the United States, it allowed the U.S. to project power across the Pacific. Again, it’s not the island itself—it’s the projection of power across an ocean.

Projecting sea power is about more than just having a strong navy.

Question: If one country’s far waters extend into the near waters of another country, that would seem to be a recipe for conflict, would it not?

Flint: That is the kicker, of course, that a sea power’s far waters are another country’s near waters. And it has historically led to conflicts and even wars. It’s always involved violence—and not just between great powers and lesser powers, but also violence against the people living on islands or in coastal lands where sea powers are looking to establish dominance and exploit resources.

Question: China has been rapidly expanding its navy in recent years. Is it simply beefing up its sea forces to protect its near waters, or is it looking to supplant the U.S. as the dominant sea power? Or are there other motives at play?

Flint: You often see in newspaper articles written in the United States and maybe other Western countries that China has the biggest navy in the world. This always makes me laugh because, yes, it’s got hundreds and hundreds of tiny little coastal defense vessels, but even now that it has two aircraft carriers, it does not have the ability to project power like the United States of America, which has 11 carrier groups. So, I think that should always be recognized.

The other sort of trope that’s often wielded out there, which I think we need to question, is: The West is worried about China developing a navy, because it will allow China to disrupt trade networks. Well, wait a minute. China is very dependent on imports, especially of fuel or energy. Additionally, it is the world’s largest trading economy, and it’s worried about the robustness of its domestic economy. They cannot maintain their economic growth based purely on their domestic market, so they need to have a global economic presence for markets and for securing inputs into their economy.

Putting those two things together, it makes no sense why China would want to disrupt global trade. In fact, the country’s reaction to President Trump’s sanctions tells us that the last thing China wants is global trade disrupted. They’re very worried about the fragility of their own economy and whether that leads to social unrest, etc. The flip side of that is how the West could really hurt China by blocking those trade routes to prevent energy imports into China and exports.

China is definitely trying to grow its navy. I think what makes it so interesting is its simultaneous attempt to have a navy that can defend its near waters while perhaps preventing the operation of the United States in its far waters. To what extent China is attempting to establish a presence in its far waters is less clear.

"A sea power’s far waters are another country’s near waters. And it has historically led to conflicts and even wars," notes scholar Colin Flint. ("Naval Battle of 1812," Painting, Oil on Canvas; By Rodolfo Claudus; 1962/U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command)

Question: From your book, it seems like you have some serious concerns about the potential for a serious conflict arising from disputes over near and far waters?

Flint: In fact, I’ve never been so concerned or worried in my career, to be honest with you. When I started teaching my class on political geography many moons ago, let’s say in the mid-1990s, I used to start off with some structural model of global political change, which essentially says, we have cycles of war and peace, for the want of a better term.

And I asked my students to try and get them engaged: ‘Picture yourself in 2025. What are you going to be doing?’ It was staggering to me how many of them believed that they would be millionaires and already retired (laughs).

The point of that was that the model I was using predicted another period of global war, starting in 2025. I don’t do that exercise anymore, because it isn’t funny; it’s really quite serious. So yes, the risk of war is high, and I think it could emerge in a number of different places. One focus is on the South China Sea, the near waters of China, as that is clearly a potential flashpoint. Taiwan is the obvious focal point of what that conflict would look like.

I also wonder about potential flashpoints of conflict in Chinese far waters—and that could include the Arctic and the Northern Atlantic, because another factor that has to be considered is global climate change and the increasing possibility of a trade route through the North Pole, which would cut trade times from China into European markets considerably. Those waters represent U.S. near waters, so …

Question: Do you envision any sort of viable alternatives to a conflict between world powers over near and far waters, especially in today’s environment?

Flint: My motivation with the book was with an eye to waving some sort of flag about how to think about peace rather than war. Most of our lenses are national lenses. If we keep on this pattern of a national lens, then I see a strong likelihood to repeat these cycles of near and far water sea powers, which have always involved a period of global war.

We need to change that lens. We need to have a global view as to why countries are always seeking far waters, entering other people’s near waters and why that can lead to conflict.

Today, we’re facing a humanity-scale problem, which is global climate change. Is that the thing that will tell us we need to work together, rather than compete? I’m not saying it is; I’m saying, if I see a glimmer of optimism to your question, that’s it.

Question: Based upon your research, if a country loses its status as a hegemonic power, can it later recover that status? And, in the context of today’s world, what might things look like if the U.S. lost its hegemonic status?

Flint: The short answer is no, based upon past history, a country that loses its hegemonic status has not been able to reclaim it once it’s gone.

But to your second question, it goes back to the question about what China’s intentions are. In American popular culture, where every sports team has to be No. 1, even if they are eighth in some Mickey Mouse conference, there is this obsession that there has to be a singular winner or champion.

What I’m saying is that we shouldn’t just assume that if the United States declines there will be another emergent dominant power in the world. It’s quite possible that if the United States declines, what might emerge would be a multipolar world, although I don’t know what that might look like.

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Top image: A squadron of the Royal Navy running down the Channel and An East Indiaman preparing to sail, by artist Samuel Atkins (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

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