Awards

Historian Henry Lovejoy wins $60,000 NEH fellowship

Rachel Sauer — Thu, 16 Jan 2025 00:41:10 +0000

Historian Henry Lovejoy wins $60,000 NEH fellowship Rachel Sauer Wed, 01/15/2025 - 17:41

NEH funding also was awarded for two other humanities projects at CU �鶹ӰԺ

�鶹ӰԺ Department of History Associate Professor Henry Lovejoy has won a $60,000 fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities to allow him to research and write a book about involuntary African indentured labor between 1800 and 1914.

Lovejoy’s research focuses on the political, economic and cultural history of Africa and the African Diaspora. He also has special expertise in digital humanities and is director of the Digital Slavery Research Lab, which focuses on developing, linking and archiving open-source data and multi-media related to the global phenomenon of slavery and human trafficking.

CU �鶹ӰԺ Department of History Associate Professor Henry Lovejoy has won a $60,000 NEH fellowship to research and write a book about involuntary African indentured labor between 1800 and 1914.

Additionally, Lovejoy spearheaded the creation and update of the website www.liberatedafricans.org, a living memorial to the more than 700,000 men, women and children who were “liberated” but not immediately freed in the British-led campaign to abolish African slave trafficking.

The term “Liberated Africans” coincides with a now-little-remembered part of history following the passage of the Slave Trade Act of 1807 by the United Kingdom’s Parliament, which prohibited the slave trade within the British Empire (although it did not abolish the practice of slavery until 1834).

Around the same time, other countries—including the United States, Portugal, Spain and the Netherlands—passed their own trafficking laws and operated squadrons of ships in the Atlantic and Indian oceans to interdict the slave trade.

However, in a cruel twist of fate, most of those “liberated” people weren’t actually freed—but were instead condemned as property, declared free under anti-slave trade legislation and then subjected to indentures lasting several years.

Lovejoy said the NEH fellowship is allowing him to take leave from work to write his book, focused on lax enforcement of anti-slavery laws, migratory patterns of African laborers, their enslavement and subsequent use as indentured laborers around the world from 1800 to 1914.

“I’m deeply grateful for being awarded this opportunity, as the NEH plays such a vital role in supporting the humanities by funding projects that foster our cultural understanding, historical awareness, and intellectual inquiry,” he said.

Meanwhile, Lovejoy said he is also writing a biography about Sarah Forbes Bonetta, a “liberated African” who was apprenticed by Queen Victoria, after conducting research in royal, national and local archives in England, Sierra Leone and Nigeria. Lovejoy also wrote the book Prieto: Yorùbá Kingship in Colonial Cuba During the Age of Revolutions, a biography of an enslaved African who rose through the ranks of Spain’s colonial military and eventually led a socio-religious institution at the root of an African-Cuban religion, commonly known as Santería.

CU �鶹ӰԺ Professor Patrick Greaney (left) won a $60,000 NEH fellowship to research and write a book about German manufacturer Braun; Wilma Doris Loayza (right), teaching assistant professor in the Latin American and Latinx Studies Center, along with co-project directors Joe Bryan, Leila Gomez and Ambrocio Gutierrez Lorenzo, won a two-year, $149,925 grant to develop course modules and educational resources about Quechua and Zapotec language and culture.

Lovejoy’s NEH fellowship was one of three NEH awards to CU �鶹ӰԺ faculty. Other awards granted were:

Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures Professor Patrick Greaney won a $60,000 fellowship to research and write a book about German manufacturer Braun, National Socialism and the creation of West German culture between1933-1975, focusing on Braun from the beginning of the Nazi regime through the 1970s in the Federal Republic of Germany. Greaney’s research focuses on literature, design and modern and contemporary art.

Wilma Doris Loayza, teaching assistant professor at the Latin American and Latinx Studies Center, and affiliated faculty of the Center for Native American and Indigenous Studies, along with co-project directors Joe Bryan, Leila Gomez and Ambrocio Gutierrez Lorenzo, won a two-year, $149,925 grant to develop course modules and educational resources about Quechua and Zapotec language and culture as part of efforts to expand and strengthen the Latin American Indigenous Languages and Cultures program.

The awards to CU �鶹ӰԺ faculty were part of $22.6 million in grants the NEH provided to 219 humanities projects across the country. The awards were announced Tuesday.

“It is my pleasure to announce NEH grant awards to support 219 exemplary projects that will foster discovery, education, and innovative research in the humanities,” said NEH Chair Shelly C. Lowe.

“This funding will strengthen our ability to preserve and share important stories from the past with future generations, and expand opportunities in communities, classrooms, and institutions to engage with the history, ideas, languages, and cultures that shape our world.”

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NEH funding also was awarded for two other humanities projects at CU �鶹ӰԺ.

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American Philosophical Association recognizes Iskra Fileva for op-ed

Rachel Sauer — Fri, 03 Jan 2025 15:31:25 +0000

American Philosophical Association recognizes Iskra Fileva for op-ed Rachel Sauer Fri, 01/03/2025 - 08:31

Fileva, a CU �鶹ӰԺ associate professor of philosophy, won a 2024 Public Philosophy Op-Ed contest

Iskra Fileva, an associate professor in the �鶹ӰԺ Department of Philosophy, has won a 2024 Public Philosophy Op-Ed contest from the American Philosophical Association for her blog “Is It Hubris to Think We Matter?”

Fileva’s article was originally published in 2023 in Psychology Today, for which she is a regular contributor. With her permission, the article was later reposted on the Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine website.

Iskra Fileva, an associate professor in the CU �鶹ӰԺ Department of Philosophy, has won a 2024 Public Philosophy Op-Ed contest from the American Philosophical Association.

Fileva specializes in moral psychology and issues at the intersection of philosophy, psychology and psychiatry. She also studies aesthetics and epistemology. Her work has appeared in a number of journals, including Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Philosophers’ Imprint, Philosophical Studies and Synthese.

In addition to her academic work, Fileva writes for a broad audience, including op-eds for the New York Times. She writes a column in Psychology Today that has addressed a wide variety of topics, including perfectionism, self-sabotage, parents who envy their children, asymmetrical friendships, love without commitment, fear of freedom, death, dreams, despair and many others.

In announcing the award, the American Philosophical Association noted that winning submissions “call public attention, either directly or indirectly, to the value of philosophical thinking” and were judged in terms of sound reasoning and “their success as examples of public philosophy,” as well as their accessibility to the general public on topics of public concern.

Fileva said she’s pleased with the reception the article received and honored to be recognized by the American Philosophical Association.

“Receiving the public philosophy award was a very nice way to end the year,” she said. “It also drew attention to the essay, and I heard from people who read it and who likely would not have found it otherwise. It took me a day or so to re-read it as I don’t, in general, know what I would think of anything I’ve written several months ago, but I did re-read it, and I was happy to discover that I still agreed with what I’d written.”

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Fileva, a CU �鶹ӰԺ associate professor of philosophy, won a 2024 Public Philosophy Op-Ed contest.

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Katherine Stange named 2025-26 Birman Fellow

Rachel Sauer — Tue, 10 Dec 2024 15:41:57 +0000

Katherine Stange named 2025-26 Birman Fellow Rachel Sauer Tue, 12/10/2024 - 08:41

The American Mathematical Society recognition supports mid-career female researchers whose achievements demonstrate potential for further contributions to mathematics

Katherine Stange, a professor in the �鶹ӰԺ Department of Mathematics, has been named the 2025-26 American Mathematical Society (AMS) Joan and Joseph Birman Fellow.

The Joan and Joseph Birman Fellowship for Women Scholars is a mid-career research fellowship that aims “to address the paucity of women at the highest levels of research in mathematics by giving exceptionally talented women extra research support during their mid-career years,” according to the AMS. Fellows are those “whose achievements demonstrate significant potential for further contributions to mathematics.”

Katherine Stange, a CU �鶹ӰԺ professor of mathematics, has been named the 2025-26 American Mathematical Society (AMS) Joan and Joseph Birman Fellow.

“I am both honored and humbled by this award,” Stange says. “As my career has unfolded, I've learned the incredible value of community in mathematics, and I feel a great debt of gratitude to my amazing collaborators and the support of my mathematical community.

“Joan and Joseph Birman's vision, to support the careers of women reconciling the many aspects of work and life, goes beyond these individual awards; and so, I hope to support those around me, just as I have been privileged by the support of so many.”

Fellows can use the $50,000 award in any way that most effectively enables their research, including child care, release time, participation in special research programs and travel support.

Stange, a number theorist, earned her bachelor of mathematics degree at the University of Waterloo and her PhD at Brown University under the mentorship of Joseph H. Silverman. She held postdoctoral positions at Harvard University, Stanford University and the Pacific Institute for Mathematical Sciences at Simon Fraser University and is a fellow of the Association for Women in Mathematics.

Describing her research, Stange says, “I enjoy simple-seeming questions that lead to a richness of structure; and arithmetic questions with geometric and especially visual access points.”

Her areas of interest include elliptic curves, Apollonian circle packings, Kleinian groups, algebraic divisibility sequences, Diophantine approximation, continued fractions, quaternion algebras and quadratic and Hermitian forms. Stange is especially interested in cryptography, including elliptic-curve and isogeny-based cryptography, as well as quantum algorithms, “in part for the surprising way mathematical structures can have an outsize influence on human affairs,” she notes. “I enjoy problems that involve experimental, algorithmic and especially visual mathematics, using a computer and other tools.

“There’s a great deal of hidden beauty in number theoretical problems waiting to be illustrated.”

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The American Mathematical Society recognition supports mid-career female researchers whose achievements demonstrate potential for further contributions to mathematics.

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Loriliai Biernacki wins American Academy of Religion Book Award

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 11 Nov 2024 20:46:32 +0000

Loriliai Biernacki wins American Academy of Religion Book Award Rachel Sauer Mon, 11/11/2024 - 13:46

The award jury called Biernacki’s 2023 book, The Matter of Wonder: Abhinavagupta's Panentheism and the New Materialism, ‘both striking and original’

Loriliai Biernacki, professor of religious studies at the �鶹ӰԺ, is one of this year’s winners of the American Academy of Religion Book Award (AAR).

The group’s annual award “recognizes new scholarly publications that make significant contributions to the study of religion,” according to the award announcement. Biernacki’s book, The Matter of Wonder: Abhinavagupta's Panentheism and the New Materialism, published by Oxford University Press, won in the category of constructive-reflective studies, beating out five other finalists.

“Loriliai Biernacki makes a fascinating case for the contemporary relevance of Abhinavagupta’s 11th-century Indian philosophy,” the AAR jury said. “By analyzing wonder (camatkāra) as rooted in the material rather than in a cognitive faculty, The Matter of Wonder is both striking and original in its approach. The links she draws with viruses and AI in particular make this work pertinent and fresh.”

A faculty member at CU �鶹ӰԺ since 2000, Biernacki researches Hinduism, gender, New Materialism and the religion-science interface. She’s published dozens of book chapters and journal articles, as well as two other books: God's Body: Panentheism across the World's Religious Traditions and Renowned Goddess of Desire: Women, Sex and Speech in Tantra, the latter of which won the Kayden Award in 2008.

"As I was working on this book, reading these medieval Sanskrit authors, I found myself continually marveling at how prescient and cogent these medieval Indian thinkers were, so it felt very important to be able to connect us today to the thought of these writers so many centuries ago," Biernacki says. "Also, feel fortunate to be at the University of Colorado, which has been supportive of my work here."

Biernacki’s fellow recipients this year include Sinem Arcak Casale, Elizabeth O’Brien, Molly Farneth, Carlos Eire, Mbaye Lo and Carl W. Ernst.

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The award jury called Biernacki’s 2023 book, The Matter of Wonder: Abhinavagupta's Panentheism and the New Materialism, ‘both striking and original.’

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William Wei is again named Colorado’s state historian

Anonymous — Wed, 23 Oct 2024 14:43:11 +0000

William Wei is again named Colorado’s state historian Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 10/23/2024 - 08:43

Adamari Ruelas

CU �鶹ӰԺ historian serving second term in position, focusing on an accurate and comprehensive portrayal of Colorado’s history

William Wei, a �鶹ӰԺ professor of history and faculty affliate in the Center for Asian Studies, has been named state historian by History Colorado, his second time receiving the honor.

William Wei, CU �鶹ӰԺ professor of history and Colorado state historian, is the author of Asians in Colorado: A History of Persecution and Perseverance in the Centennial State.

Wei was one of the five founders of History Colorado’s State Historian’s Council, which “reaches across the state to aid in the interpretation of the history of Colorado and the West, providing opportunities to expand the understanding of the historical perspectives, cultures and places of Colorado.”

The State Historian’s Council was founded in 2018 and comprises five interdisciplinary scholars who provide complementary perspectives and rotate the state historian position every year on Aug.1, Colorado Day. Wei’s first term as state historian was from 2019-2020.

"It is a great honor to be appointed the Colorado state historian again,” Wei says. “I remain committed to ensuring that Coloradans receive an accurate and comprehensive portrayal of the Centennial State's history. This commitment naturally extends to Colorado's marginalized communities, whose stories have often been neglected, overlooked and forgotten.”

Wei was named the 2022 Asian American Hero of Colorado and is the author of Asians in Colorado: A History of Persecution and Perseverance in the Centennial State. He also was a founding editor-in-chief of History Colorado’s Colorado Encyclopedia and a lead advisor for the organization’s Zoom In: The Centennial State in 100 Objects.

“William brings a broad global perspective alongside an encyclopedic interest in Colorado to the role of State Historian,” notes Jason Hanson, chief creative officer and director of interpretation and research at History Colorado, in announcing Wei’s second term. “He is passionate about how historical perspective can help us see the present more clearly and in ways that can truly improve people’s lives. I am excited for him to share his knowledge and passion with the people of Colorado as the state historian once again.”

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CU �鶹ӰԺ historian serving second term in position, focusing on an accurate and comprehensive portrayal of Colorado’s history.

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Andrés Montoya-Castillo earns 2024 Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering

Anonymous — Tue, 22 Oct 2024 13:43:24 +0000

Andrés Montoya-Castillo earns 2024 Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 10/22/2024 - 07:43

CU �鶹ӰԺ chemist will use the five-year support to study tailoring cycles affecting energy flow in solar energy conversion

Andrés Montoya-Castillo, an assistant professor in the �鶹ӰԺ Department of Chemistry, has been awarded a 2024 Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering.

The fellowships, given by the David and Lucille Packard Foundation, are awarded to innovative early-career scientists and engineers, who receive $875,000 over five years to pursue their research.

“These scientists and engineers are the architects of tomorrow, leading innovation with bold ideas and unyielding determination,” said Nancy Lindborg, president and chief executive officer of the Packard Foundation, in announcing the 2024 awards. “Their work today will be the foundation for the breakthroughs of the future, inspiring the next wave of discovery and invention.”

Montoya-Castillo is a theoretical chemist who leads a lab that encompasses multidisciplinary skills spanning physical chemistry, condensed matter physics and quantum information science.

Explaining his research that the fellowship will support, Montoya-Castillo notes, “The world’s growing population faces looming food shortages and the pressing need for cheap and sustainable energy sources. Reliable conversion of sunlight–our most abundant energy source–into fuel can address these threats. However, reliable energy conversion requires knowing how to tailor, at an atomic level, photoprotection cycles limiting food production and energy flow in solar cells that convert sunlight into fuel.”

He adds that he “will harness the power of generalized master equations to develop efficient, atomically resolved theories and analysis tools that cut the cost of experiments needed to reveal how to employ chemical modifications to manipulate photoprotection cycles in plants and the photocatalytic activity of metal oxides. Our developments will offer transformative insights into fundamental excitation dynamics in complex materials, enabling the boosting of photosynthetic crop production and optimization of environmentally friendly semiconductors that split water into clean fuels.”

Last year, Montoya-Castillo was named a U.S. Department of Energy Early Career Research Program scientist and earlier this year received the CU �鶹ӰԺ Marinus Smith Award, which recognizes faculty and staff members who have had a particularly positive impact on students. He received his BA in chemistry and literature from Macaulay Honors College, CUNY, and his PhD in chemical physics from Columbia University.

“I’m honored and thrilled to be part of the Packard Fellows class of 2024!” Montoya-Castillo says. “With the help of the Packard Foundation's funding, I look forward to finding new ways to measure and control nonequilibrium energy flow for human use.”

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CU �鶹ӰԺ chemist will use the five-year support to study tailoring cycles affecting energy flow in solar energy conversion.

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Samuel Ramsey receives the prestigious Lowell Thomas Award

Anonymous — Tue, 17 Sep 2024 19:26:37 +0000

Samuel Ramsey receives the prestigious Lowell Thomas Award Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 09/17/2024 - 13:26

Once frightened of insects, Ramsey has become a leader in the field of entomology

Samuel Ramsey, assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the �鶹ӰԺ, is one of this year’s recipients of the Lowell Thomas Award.

The Lowell Thomas Award, named after broadcast journalist and explorer Lowell Thomas and given by The Explorers Club, recognizes “excellence in domains or fields of exploration,” according to the award announcement. In particular, the award celebrates “individuals who have grit, tenacity, are undaunted by failure, and endure all obstacles, finding a way forward to discovery and results that expand the limits of knowledge.”

Samuel Ramsey (left) working with the chieftain of a hill tribe village in Thailand to sample domesticated bees for parasites. (Photo: Shin Arunrugstichai/Syzgy Media Co.)

Ramsey, also known as “your friendly neighborhood entomologist,” didn’t always like insects. They used to terrify him. But in the second grade he conquered his fears by learning about insects at his local library.

Now, more than 25 years later, Ramsey is one of the most innovative and distinguished thinkers in the field of entomology. His research has won him numerous awards, including first place in the International Three-Minute Thesis Competition, the American Bee Research Conference’s Award for Distinguished Research and the Acarological Society of America’s Highest Award for Advances in Acarology Research.

Ramsey—a member of the Explorers Club 50, class of 2024—also runs a nonprofit, the Ramsey Research Foundation, which seeks to protect pollinator diversity.

Ramsey’s fellow awardees this year are zoologist Carole Baldwin, ocean conservationist Ellen Pikitch and geothermal scientist Andrés Ruzo. Past recipients include Kathy Sullivan, E. O. Wilson, Kris Tompkins, Isaac Asimov, Sir Edmund Hillary and Carl Sagan.

The 2024 Lowell Thomas Awards Dinner takes place in Austin on Nov. 1.

Top image: Samuel Ramsey researching bee biodiversity in Thailand. (Photo: Shin Arunrugstichai/Syzgy Media Co.)

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Once frightened of insects, Ramsey has become a leader in the field of entomology.

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Stephen Graham Jones slashes his way into Texas literary history

Anonymous — Fri, 06 Sep 2024 19:34:25 +0000

Stephen Graham Jones slashes his way into Texas literary history Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 09/06/2024 - 13:34

The CU �鶹ӰԺ Ineva Baldwin Professor of English is part of a Texas Literary Hall of Fame induction class that includes Cormac McCarthy and Molly Ivins

Stephen Graham Jones, author of bestselling horror novels The Angel of Indian Lake and The Only Good Indians, among other award-winning works, has been inducted into the Texas Literary Hall of Fame.

Born in Midland, Texas, Jones relocated to �鶹ӰԺ in 2008, where he continues to serve as the �鶹ӰԺ Ineva Baldwin Professor of English.

CU �鶹ӰԺ Ineva Baldwin Professor of English Stephen Graham Jones has been inducted into the Texas Literary Hall of Fame, a recognition whose previous recipients include Larry McMurtry and Sandra Cisneros.

“When I moved away from Texas for Colorado, I kind of suspected Texas might forget about me, even though a lot of my novels since then have been set there,” he says.

But if Jones’ admission into the state’s Literary Hall of Fame is any indication, Texas didn’t forget about him.

Established in 2004, the Texas Literary Hall of Fame recognizes the literary contributions of the Lone Star State’s most celebrated writers. Inductees are announced every two years by the Texas Christian University (TCU) Mary Couts Burnett Library, the TCU AddRan College of Liberal Arts, the TCU Press and the Center for Texas Studies.

“The Texas Literary Hall of Fame showcases top literary writers across the nation,” Sonja Watson, dean of the AddRan College of Liberal Arts, says on the Texas Literary Hall of Fame website. “This group of inductees follows a long list of others who demonstrate how Texas has shaped the cultural landscape of their writings.”

Joining Jones this year as he enters the Hall of Fame are Sergio Troncoso, Cynthia Leitich Smith, Jan Seale, Molly Ivins, Tracy Daugherty and Cormac McCarthy. Past honorees include Larry McMurtry and Sandra Cisneros.

“Colorado is home now, but Texas will always be where I'm from, and I'm honored and thrilled to be inducted into the Texas Literary Hall of Fame,” says Jones. “My father-in-law’s photo is in the Texas Capitol, which I always thought pretty special. This, to me, is that same kind of special.”

The official induction ceremony will take place on Oct. 29.

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The CU �鶹ӰԺ Ineva Baldwin Professor of English is part of a Texas Literary Hall of Fame induction class that includes Cormac McCarthy and Molly Ivins.

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CU �鶹ӰԺ scholars honored as 2024 Guggenheim Fellows

Anonymous — Thu, 13 Jun 2024 14:52:18 +0000

CU �鶹ӰԺ scholars honored as 2024 Guggenheim Fellows Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 06/13/2024 - 08:52

Rachel Sauer

Researchers Emily Yeh and Brian Catlos are recognized for prior career achievements and exceptional promise

Two �鶹ӰԺ scholars have been named 2024 Guggenheim Fellows, recognizing not only their prior career achievements but also their exceptional promise.

Emily Yeh, a professor of geography and College of Arts and Sciences professor of distinction, and Brian Catlos, a professor of religious studies and director of the CU Mediterranean Studies Group, are among a group of scholars, scientists, artists and writers representing 52 scholarly disciplines and artistic fields, who “are meeting (humanity’s existential) challenges head-on and generating new possibilities and pathways across the broader culture as they do so,” noted Edward Hirsch, award-winning poet and president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, in announcing the fellowships.

The monetary award that accompanies the Guggenheim recognition will support Yeh in writing a book about global geographies of weather modification in the context of climate change adaptation and growing discussions about geoengineering.

Emily Yeh has conducted a significant amount of research in China and Tibet, and first became interested in cloud seeding through a Chinese project called Sky River, or Tian He.

“It’s going to be an expansion of my previous research on cloud seeding,” Yeh explains. “Cloud seeding as a practice has been around since the 1950s, but a lot of people don’t really know that it happens.

“I think it’s really important right now for two reasons: One is climate change and drought, with cloud seeding being seen as a form of climate adaptation which is being adopted by countries around the world. The second is the growing interest in stratospheric aerosol injection, a form of geoengineering, for climate mitigation, and the public conflation of this with cloud seeding.”

Yeh, who has conducted a significant amount of her scholarly research in China and Tibet, first became interested in cloud seeding through a Chinese project called Sky River, or Tian He: “There were a whole bunch of reports about how the Chinese government was going to move water vapor from the Himalayas and channel it over the Tibetan Plateau to the north. I started following that issue, and through that realized that even though that idea of channeling water vapor itself isn’t a reality, some of the ideas behind it are very revealing of certain imaginations of nature that also underpin the Chinese state’s discourse of ‘ecological civilization.’”

She says that in some of the Tibetan villages she’s visited on the border of Sichuan and Gansu provinces, few safety precautions accompany cloud seeding measures, so that rockets can fall without warning on herders’ pastures. They experience cloud seeding as a form of injustice, she explains. At the same time, experiences raise questions about what cloud seeding operations claim versus what effects they have. “Overclaiming of results is leading to conspiracy theories, like the idea that recent flooding in the United Arab Emirates was caused by cloud seeding rather than climate change,” Yeh says.

�鶹ӰԺ, as a national and international center of cloud seeding research and technology, is an ideal place to study not only cloud seeding in the context of drought in the American west, Yeh notes, but also institutional and political economic contexts for cloud seeding research and practice globally.

Reassessing history

For Catlos, the Guggenheim recognition will support him in writing An Age of Convergence: Christians, Muslims and Jews in the Pre-Modern Mediterranean, a culmination of his scholarship to date showing when, how and why members of these three faith communities—which hail from Africa, the Middle East and Europe—together laid the foundations of Western modernity.

“Traditionally, the way we’ve conceived of the West has been this sort of western European, essentially Christian culture that coalesced in the Middle Ages and led to Anglo-European culture and society today,” Catlos explains. “That’s based on a lot of assumptions and perspectives that are rooted in 19th century ideas of how society works—some racist, some colonial, some rooted in notions that the fundamental building block of history is the nation.

Brian Catlos' research centers on Christian-Muslim-Jewish relations and the medieval Mediterranean, and he has authored and co-authored books related to this research.

“These are ideas that became popular in the 19th century, a great age of nationalism, racism and colonialization as well. When we look at data and pull back from presumptions and prejudices, what we see is that what became the modern West—western Anglo-European culture and society—emerged out of a much broader historical background.”

In 650 CE, as Islam began expanding from the area west of the Indus River to the Atlantic Ocean and all the way around the Mediterranean, a common telling of the history of that time holds that the area was uniformly Abrahamic in terms of faith and culture. “There’s this idea that the three religious cultures were divided and oppositional—and they were to certain degree—but they also were deeply enmeshed and influenced each other both through polemic and also through collaboration and shared knowledge.”

Another prevalent myth, Catlos says, is that there were distinct spheres: a Christian sphere, a Muslim sphere, “maybe a Latin-Christian sphere, a Christian and Byzantine sphere, a Christian and Muslim sphere, and they were somehow coherent, homogenous social, cultural and political entities in opposition with each other,” Catlos says.

“That’s not really the case. There were lots and lots of Muslims and Jews living in Christian lands and vice versa. The division was not really there except in certain contexts.

“Think about crusade and jihad, about Christianity and Islam, about this clash of civilizations. If we look at the political and economic history of the pre-modern period in the larger Mediterranean world, we see that both of these spheres are broken into a whole range of different kingdoms, city states, etc. that in fact are in competition with each other, for number of reasons, not the least of which is geography and how it impacted the way that resources appear and are accessed.”

Rather than a united front of Muslim states vs. Christian states, Catlos says, “we see competition between Muslim states with each other, Christian states with each other, Muslims and Christian principalities seeking alliances with each other against rivals of their own faith. Much of the history of the West that we are taught is distorted and needs to be reassessed.”

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Researchers Emily Yeh and Brian Catlos are recognized for prior career achievements and exceptional promise.

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Honors student produces prize-winning research on loneliness

Anonymous — Tue, 04 Jun 2024 17:54:19 +0000

Honors student produces prize-winning research on loneliness Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 06/04/2024 - 11:54

Daniel Long

In her honors thesis, recent graduate Amber Duffy describes how loneliness influences a person’s ability to respond to stress

Amber Duffy, who graduated last semester magna cum laude, didn’t always plan to write an honor’s thesis.

She came to the �鶹ӰԺ on a pre-med track, studying neuroscience, but an introductory psychology class knocked her off that path and inspired her to change her major.

“I really liked the behavioral aspect of psychology,” she says.

She liked psychology so much, in fact, that she wasn’t content simply to study it. She wanted to contribute to it. “If I’m not going to do medical school anymore,” she remembers thinking, “I should delve into research.”

Recent psychology and neuroscience graduate Amber Duffy won the the Outstanding Poster Presentation Talk award at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology’s Annual Convention in San Diego, recognizing her research on loneliness.

She contacted Erik Knight, a CU �鶹ӰԺ assistant professor of psychology and neuroscience, with whom she’d taken a class her sophomore year, and he invited her to join his lab. She ended up working there for two years, during which time she decided to write an honor’s thesis.

The topic? Loneliness and its effect on young adults’ stress responses.

Why loneliness?

Duffy’s interest in loneliness isn’t purely academic. Many of her friends and family have struggled with it for years, even before the pandemic, she says. And she herself, the daughter of a Taiwanese mother and a Pennsylvanian father, has often felt its sting.

“Growing up in a multicultural family in my predominantly white town”—Castle Rock, Colorado—“it was hard for me to connect with people sometimes,” she says. “I would learn about my mom’s culture at home and then go to school or talk with friends, and they just didn’t understand how I lived.”

Her concerns over loneliness only increased when she learned of Surgeon General Dr. Vivek H. Murthy’s warning that the United States is suffering from a loneliness epidemic.

“The mortality impact of being socially disconnected is similar to that caused by smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day,” Murthy states.

Hearing this spurred Duffy to action. She wanted to contribute to the fight against loneliness and its potentially negative consequences.

“If we expand our knowledge of loneliness,” she says, “maybe there’s a way we can come up with a more substantial treatment.”

More gas, less brakes

For her honors experiment, Duffy gathered 51 CU �鶹ӰԺ undergraduates between the ages of 18 and 34 and divided them randomly into a control condition and an experimental condition. Those in the former provided a low-stress comparison to those in the latter, who were put through the wringer.

First, the subjects in the experimental condition had to interview for a high-stakes job Duffy and Knight had concocted specifically for the study.

“We told them, in the moment, ‘You have five minutes to prepare a five-minute speech on why you’re the perfect applicant,’” says Duffy.

Immediately following that, subjects had to solve subtraction problems for five minutes, out loud, perfectly, starting at 6,233 and going down from there in increments of 13. “If they made a mistake,” says Duffy, “they had to start over.”

While the subjects ran these gauntlets, Duffy monitored their heart-rate variability (HRV), or the change in interval between heartbeats, and their pre-ejection period (PEP), or the time it takes for a heart to prepare to push blood to the rest of the body. Both serve as indicators of how a person’s stress-response system is functioning, Duffy explains.

Finally, when the stress tests were done, the subjects completed the UCLA Loneliness Scale Version 3 questionnaire, which research has found to be a reliable means of measuring loneliness.

Duffy had hypothesized that lonelier subjects would have more pronounced stress responses than less lonely subjects, and indeed that’s what her data revealed.

Lonelier subjects had higher heartrates, stronger responses from their sympathetic nervous systems (SNS) and weaker responses from their parasympathetic nervous systems (PNS). Duffy likens the SNS, which controls the fight-or-flight response, to a car’s gas pedal and the PNS, which counterbalances the SNS, to a car’s brakes.

When met with stressful situations, then, lonelier individuals had more gas and less brakes, which Duffy says could have long-term health implications.

Yet she is also quick to point out that more research needs to be done, preferably with more subjects.

If we expand our knowledge of loneliness, maybe there’s a way we can come up with a more substantial treatment.”

“We only had 51 people. An increase in sample size would help with more reliable data,” she says. “It’s also important to look at more clinical and diverse populations because there are other factors that could affect loneliness levels.”

Posters, prizes and professorships

Duffy submitted an abstract of her research to The Society for Personality and Social Psychology’s Annual Convention in San Diego, where she hoped to present a poster, thinking this would be a nice, low-key way of getting some conference experience under her belt.

Her abstract was accepted. But then a conference organizer asked her if, in addition to presenting a poster, she could also give a fifteen-minute talk. She would be the only undergraduate at the conference to do so.

Duffy balked. The thought of speaking to a roomful of PhDs intimidated her. “Most of my life I’ve heard how cutthroat academia is,” she says. But she ultimately agreed, and she was glad she did.

Her talk and poster presentation went so well that not only did she receive interest and encouragement from several doctoral programs, but she also won an award that she didn’t even know existed: the Outstanding Poster Presentation Talk award.

“In the middle of my poster presentation, a woman came up to me—I didn’t know who she was—and said, ‘I have a check here for you for $500.’ I didn’t know that was supposed to happen, but it was great!”

Now graduated, Duffy isn’t 100% sure what her next steps will be, but she’s leaning toward one day pursuing a PhD.

“When you get a PhD, you get to do research and also work with students,” she says. “I think it would be fun to be a professor and give back in that way.”

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In her honors thesis, recent graduate Amber Duffy describes how loneliness influences a person’s ability to respond to stress.

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