Research

Reading the past, engineering the future

Julie Chiron — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 22:34:31 +0000

Reading the past, engineering the future Julie Chiron Mon, 12/22/2025 - 15:34

Julie Chiron

�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder geobiologist Lizzy Trower received a Simons Foundation Pivot Fellowship, allowing her to acquire new tools and redirect her deep-time expertise toward urgent environmental challenges

For most of her career, Lizzy Trower has been a time traveler.

The associate professor of geological sciences at the �鶹��Ѱ�� studies rocks that are hundreds of millions of years old to decode how microbial life first shaped our planet, such as oxygenating our atmosphere and paving the way for animal life.

But as a field researcher, Trower has found herself increasingly aware of the present and yearning to look toward the future. In the field, she witnessed pristine microbial mounds in Great Salt Lake frequently exposed and stressed by megadrought, and hurricane scars etched across fragile ecosystems in the Turks and Caicos. Those experiences reshaped her scientific priorities.

�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder scientist Lizzy Trower

"The more time I spend in modern environments, the harder it is to ignore the challenges that are happening now related to climate," says Trower. "The questions I work on in Earth’s history are really interesting, but sometimes they don’t feel quite as relevant or urgent."

The features at Great Salt Lake have thrived underwater for more than 10,000 years. Long fascinating to geoscientists as a way to understand what they might see in rocks, these windows into the past are now under threat. Trower worries that some of these systems may simply disappear, no longer available for study or teaching.

"It's shocking to be in a moment where these things that have been around for thousands of years and have been useful and cool for generations of scientists might not be there much longer,” she says.

Increasingly, conversations in the field have shifted from how these systems grow to how they degrade when exposed for long periods above the lake’s surface. "The destruction and degradation weren’t something we talked about when I was a grad student," Trower says.

Unbounded exploration leads to breakthroughs

As a newly named 2025 Simons Foundation Pivot Fellow, Trower is undertaking a bold research shift and acquiring new skills to apply her deep knowledge of geobiology to help address today’s urgent environmental challenges.

The highly competitive Pivot Fellowship supports midcareer scientists who are seeking to "pivot" into a new discipline, offering a year of immersive mentorship, training and resources for scholars to acquire entirely new skills. The program celebrates the idea that breakthroughs often emerge when researchers cross disciplinary boundaries, a principle that resonates with the College of Arts and Sciences emphasis on interdisciplinary exploration.

"I love experimentation, but I’m at a point where my ideas exceed my toolset. I want to culture microbes, design experiments and teach students how to work with them," says Trower. "It's rare to get dedicated time to develop new skills. I want my work to feel urgent, impactful, relevant — and this helps me move toward that."

Microbes in a headwind

Trower’s pivot centers on euendoliths—microbes that bore microscopic cavities into calcium carbonate minerals. In doing so, they generate alkalinity, a chemical process that raises pH and could counteract ocean acidification, one of the most pressing threats to marine ecosystems.

"What’s fascinating about these microbes is that they dissolve minerals to create tiny tunnel systems," says Trower. "But here’s what’s wild: they do this in places where dissolving these minerals should be thermodynamically unfavorable."

"In those environments, these minerals should be forming—not dissolving," says Trower. "So, I imagine these microbes like hikers walking into the headwind, stubbornly using a lot of energy to carve out tunnels even though the environment is against them."

If scientists can understand and harness this ability, the implications are far-reaching: targeted mitigation of ocean acidification, enhanced carbon removal strategies, improved wastewater treatment and even innovations in engineered living building materials.

A year outside the comfort zone

The science is still in its infancy. Only one euendolith has ever been isolated in pure culture, a cyanobacterium discovered on a Puerto Rican beach. Trower’s fellowship year will focus on building the toolkit to change that. Alongside microbial ecologist John Spear in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Colorado School of Mines, she will learn to culture environmental microbes, apply genomic tools and characterize the diversity and behavior of these organisms.

Beyond the lab, Trower’s pivot reflects a philosophical shift from basic science grounded in the past to applied research aimed at solutions. "My goal is to prepare students for impactful careers beyond academia," she says. Research shows that today’s undergraduates value altruistic motivators, helping people and the environment, when choosing STEM careers. Trower’s new direction aligns with those ideals, offering students opportunities to address climate challenges through innovative science.

The Simons Foundation announced the 2025 Pivot Fellows on Nov. 13, highlighting researchers who pursue bold, interdisciplinary ideas and acquire new tools that can open entirely new avenues of discovery. For Trower, the fellowship is more than a career milestone, it’s a chance to honor the memory of a close �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder colleague whose expertise she hoped to draw on. The loss of her friend and esteemed researcher inspired her to gain new expertise to continue the work herself.

For a geobiologist who has spent her career translating the planet’s oldest stories, the pivot is less a departure than a continuation, carrying the lessons from billions of years ago into a future that urgently needs them.

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Research charts the pathway from thought to emotion

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 15 Dec 2025 22:00:35 +0000

Research charts the pathway from thought to emotion Rachel Sauer Mon, 12/15/2025 - 15:00

Alexandra Phelps

�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder scientist Roselinde Kaiser and research colleagues seek to understand the connection between executive functioning and mood problems

You’ve just missed your test. Thoughts about how you missed it keep circling around in your head and won’t stop. These thoughts begin to disrupt your everyday life by changing the way you approach tasks. You can’t shake the blame you’re putting on yourself for missing this test, and now your mood has dropped.

This pattern is just one of the pathways that Roselinde Kaiser, a �鶹��Ѱ�� associate professor of psychology and neuroscience, and research colleagues Quynh Nguyen and Hannah Snyder at Brandeis University tested in research recently published in the journal Anxiety, Stress & Coping.

In this study, led by graduate student Nguyen, researchers aimed to understand the pathway between executive functioning (EF) and mood problems, and found that poor EF creates risk for developing depression and mood problems. EF is an umbrella term that refers to an individual’s ability to pursue goals and adapt to change. The discovery that this pathway is what links EF and mood problems is significant because it creates a foundation for researchers and mental health professionals to develop interventions that can help treat people.

�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder scientist Roselinde Kaiser and her research colleagues aim to understand the pathway between executive functioning and mood problems.

Nguyen, Kaiser and Snyder’s data show that problems in EF can contribute to mood problems through a chain reaction: problems in EF predict dependent stress, which predicts repetitive negative thinking (RNT) and then lower mood. Dependent stressors are stressors that are generated by, at least partially, an individual’s behaviors. The stress that stems from these dependent stressors leads to RNT, which functions like a “washing machine, where the same negative self-oriented thoughts circle in your mind over and over again,” Kaiser says.

Kaiser, who is the director of the �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder Center for Healthy Mind and Mood, and who leads the Research on Affective Disorders and Development (RADD) Lab, first became interested in psychology when she was an adolescent and had questions about human suffering. Her research centers around finding ways to support people during periods of suffering, boost individuals’ resilience, foster their recovery or even stop their suffering.

Kaiser, who received a combined PhD in clinical psychology and neuroscience from �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder in 2013, is drawn to clinical psychology as “a corner of psychology that seems to be poised for the highest impact for the most people,” she says. Through her research she seeks to understand the mechanisms that cause mood problems and that could be potential targets for clinical prevention, especially among younger populations.

“My jam is working with adolescents and young adults, in part because it is this really potent period of risk, and it's also a period in which if we do deliver effective interventions, we can have a lifelong impact.”

Executive functioning and mood problems

Kaiser and her Brandeis colleagues began their recently published research from the previously established connection between EF and mood problems. “We know that EF is associated with mood problems,” Kaiser notes. “We see that within a number of different studies within our research group. How does that happen for individual people?”

EF is an essential part of being able to complete tasks. “College students are a really interesting sub-population because they are navigating a lot of stressors on their own, for the first time. The demands on EF are especially high for college students because they transitioned from—usually—living with adults and caregivers who help them with things like getting them to school on time, homework, laundry, getting their car checked out at the mechanic, grocery shopping, all of the kinds of things that we need to do on the daily, and that we need EF to do all of those things.”

Balancing higher-level academics and more extensive everyday tasks can become even more challenging if EF becomes negatively impacted. “If you look at the age of onset distribution,” she says, “what you’ll see is that more than 50% of the people who experience depression in their lifetime will say it started before the age of 23.”

The researchers’ study took place over a six-week period during the COVID-19 pandemic. Through online surveys every two weeks, their participant pool of 154 Brandeis University undergraduate students logged their answers to questions that focused on the pathways the researchers were looking at. Participants’ ages ranged between 18-23, a span intentionally chosen because Kaiser and her colleagues were interested in understanding neurocognitive mechanisms of risk that are targets for intervention.

“We know that EF is associated with mood problems. We see that within a number of different studies within our research group. How does that happen for individual people?” says �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder researcher Roselinde Kaiser.

Their research aimed to determine which, if either, of the pathways they designed based on the previously determined connection between EF and mood would provide a structure of how EF leads to mood problems.

In the first pathway, the scientists predicted that executive dysfunction has an indirect effect, or a mediation path, on depression. The concept is that executive dysfunction causes stress generation, which in turn causes RNT. That results in an individual's mood sinking, leading to depression. Kaiser and her colleagues hypothesized that poorer EF would prospectively predict higher RNT levels, and RNT in turn would predict higher depression levels.

In the second model, Kaiser and her colleagues substituted a dependent stressor for perceived uncontrollability of stressors. Perceived uncontrollability means that an individual believes that they lack the ability to change a stressful situation. This pathway looked at proving that if someone struggles with EF, then they have trouble keeping their actions and thoughts directed toward goals. This then causes an individual to feel that they have less control over stressors, in turn causing RNT and their mood to sink. For model two, the researchers hypothesized that poorer EF would predict lower perceived control over stress, and higher levels of RNT would subsequently predict higher depression levels.

“One of the reasons we’re interested in breaking down these pathways is it gives us better insight and more ideas into how we can help people by delivering effective clinical interventions, preventions or preventative programs,” Kaiser explains. “It’s hard to change executive functionability, but we can help buffer people against the dependent stressors by giving them skills and tools so that those types of stressors are less likely to happen.

“From where I sit as a clinical psychologist as well as a neuroscientist, that’s a good reason that we want to understand who is at risk, and how that risk happens.”

Kaiser and her colleagues found through the data they collected that the first pathway was supported but the second was not. There were a number of factors that could have resulted in the second pathway not being supported.

“One totally reasonable explanation is that we were just wrong—that it is not a pathway that is consistently observed among people with EF,” she says. Another possible explanation could be “that the era in which we were measuring these variables—during the COVID pandemic—everyone kind of had heightened uncontrollability in their world. What that might mean is that because everyone was generally feeling like the world was out of control, we weren’t able to pick up on just the people who are more likely to perceive stress as uncontrollable even in the absence of a global pandemic"

She adds that a third reason could be “the timing is just different if you perceive control or not. Maybe … uncontrollable perceptions happen on a slower time scale (their research was measured every two weeks) meaning that it may take longer for perceived uncontrollability to build up and then push your mood around. Or the opposite, it could happen more quickly. (Overall), we don’t know if any of those things could be true, and it certainly merits more exploration.”

“My jam is working with adolescents and young adults, in part because it is this really potent period of risk, and it's also a period in which if we do deliver effective interventions, we can have a lifelong impact.”

Getting mood snapshots

Neuroimaging, neurocognitive testing (computer testing, psychophysical testing, interviewing and self-reporting are all methods that can be used to collect information from participants. However, since Kaiser, Nguyen and Snyder completed their project, there have been wide strides in the development of new data-collection methods. Kaiser and her research groups are now implementing these new methods alongside others to further their research.

“Each of these modalities has pros and cons in terms of what they can tell us about the underlying constructs that we’re interested in measuring,” Kaiser says. “EF, for example, we can measure that through a neurological assessment or a computer-based assessment. I can also tap into that by asking people about their abilities out in the world; but there are key differences in what we’re getting at.”

These different kinds of assessments are that they give complementing information, but do not duplicate what researchers receive from the surveys. “More recent research from my research group and also my collaborators and colleagues indicates that we’re getting two complementary sources of evidence, but it’s not the same evidence. So, the kind of information from computer-based testing or from the brain is not necessarily the same information we get when we ask people.” These two sources of evidence are only weakly related. Since Kaiser and her colleagues completed the project, they have developed a way to collect information without having participants fill out surveys.

“What we’ve been working with are mobile applications that perform something called digital phenotyping, which effectively means using the information your phone is already collecting about you to understand your actions out in the real world and to get little snapshots on your mood and your stress level in daily life,” Kaiser says, adding, “They can see things like numbers of calls, screen time and other factors that allow them to better understand the individuals.”

Now, researching alongside various experts and students on a number of different projects, Kaiser says she hopes to “make these interventions accessible to everyone at the touch of a finger on their smartphone in the real world. We want people to be able to access this information when they need it.”

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�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder scientist Roselinde Kaiser and research colleagues seek to understand the connection between executive functioning and mood problems.

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Murder and the microbiome

Rachel Sauer — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 14:40:00 +0000

Murder and the microbiome Rachel Sauer Thu, 12/11/2025 - 07:40

Daniel Long

A paper co-authored by �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder researcher Christopher Lowry draws upon the infamous ‘Twinkie defense’ to explore the relationship between ultraprocessed foods and human behavior

On November 27, 1978, in the heart of San Francisco, former City Supervisor Dan White climbed through a window into City Hall, pulled out a gun and fatally shot Mayor George Moscone and City Supervisor Harvey Milk. He then turned himself in to the police, saying, “Why do we do things . . . I don’t know . . . I just shot [Moscone], I don’t know.”

In the trial that followed, People v. White, which ran from May 1-21, 1979, White’s defense argued not that White was innocent—he’d confessed, after all—but that, when he committed the murders, he’d been suffering from “diminished capacity” and was therefore incapable of premeditation, a key requirement of first-degree murder charges.

One revealing piece of evidence, the defense claimed, was White’s diet. For days leading up to the shootings, White had been gorging himself on junk food, an abnormal behavior for the typically health-conscious former police officer, firefighter and Army veteran.

�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder scientist Christopher Lowry and his research colleagues suggest a link between ultraprocessed foods and human behavior.

It was a risky legal tack—journalists at the time mockingly dubbed it the “Twinkie defense”—but it worked. White was charged with voluntary manslaughter, a lesser charge than first-degree murder, and received a prison sentence of just under eight years, of which he ended up serving only five.

A fierce backlash followed the ruling. Many took to the streets to express their outrage, most notably with the White Night Riots, while others took to the media.

“There is no question that a travesty of justice occurred in the trial of Dan White,” wrote psychiatrist Thomas Szasz. “In the trial of Dan White, the defense, aided and abetted by the prosecution, had the power to hand the case over to the psychiatrists, and the psychiatrists had the power to redefine a political crime as an ordinary crime, and an ordinary crime as a psychiatric problem.”

Yet in a paper published in the journal NeuroSci, �鶹��Ѱ�� Professor of Integrative Physiology Christopher Lowry, along with several co-authors, suggests that the White case might have been ahead of its time in assuming a link between ultraprocessed foods and human behavior.

Gut reactions

It’s unsurprising that so many people found White’s claim of diminished capacity less than persuasive, says Lowry. In 1979, the scientific community hadn’t yet recognized the microbiome, or the commonwealth of bacteria occupying the human gut. The connection between it, one’s diet and one’s behavior therefore seemed flimsy.

“We didn't know that there was a microbiome, and that the microbiome impacts behavior,” Lowry explains. “[White’s defense team] was just basing their conclusions on observations that these types of foods, these ultraprocessed foods, could affect people’s behavior in negative ways. So, it was kind of a crude assessment of this association between what you eat and behavioral outcomes.”

But for the past several decades, scientific research in a field referred to as psychoneuroimmunology, much of it pioneered by Steven F. Maier and Linda R. Watkins of �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder’s Maier Watkins Laboratory, has established a clear relationship between microbes (or their components), the brain and behavior.

A crucial explanatory ingredient in this relationship, says Lowry, is inflammation, or the body’s immune response to what it deems threats.

“There’s a through-line between diet impacting the microbiome and the permeability of the gut barrier, which allows bacteria and bacterial products to get into the body, which can drive systemic inflammation. Systemic inflammation drives neuroinflammation in the brain, and neuroinflammation in the brain alters brain and behavior.”

“Given the growing evidence that ultraprocessed foods lead to multiple negative health outcomes, I think the goal is to shift away, to the extent possible, from ultraprocessed foods toward less processed food,” says �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder researcher Christopher Lowry. (Photo: iStock)

The takeaway, Lowry explains, is that some foods—namely ultraprocessed foods—can negatively affect the microbiome and thus increase risk factors for violent or rash behavior. “It’s clear that inflammation does impact aggressive behavior, does impact impulsivity.” It’s so clear, in fact, that the negative health outcomes of ultraprocessed foods are now at the forefront of public health policy, and San Francisco is suing makers of ultraprocessed foods for creating products that have saddled governments with public health costs.

Yet the news isn’t all bad, Lowry says. Just as ultraprocessed foods can lead to negative mental health outcomes, less-processed foods can lead to positive mental health outcomes.

“What other researchers have found is that, regardless of whether you look at people without a diagnosis of depression or anxiety, or you look at clinical populations—people that have a diagnosis of anxiety disorder or mood disorder—in either case, you can simply change the diet of these individuals [by reducing their intake of ultraprocessed foods] and improve their anxiety and depression symptoms.”

Food or foodlike substances?

Moving away from ultraprocessed foods would mean big changes for many Americans, says Lowry, who points out that more than 50% of the foods purchased in U.S. grocery stores are ultraprocessed.

But what counts as ultraprocessed anyway? Don’t most foods go through some degree of processing before ending up on eaters’ plates?

One useful resource, says Lowry, is the four-level NOVA system developed by Carlos Augusto Monteiro and a team of researchers at the University of São Paulo in Brazil in 2009.

“Level 1 is unprocessed. This would be if you pulled the carrot out of the ground and ate it,” says Lowry. “Level 2 involves more processing,” but it’s processing “that we can do in our kitchen. So, you might take a carrot and combine it with some celery and spices and make a stir-fry that you put on rice.”

Level 3 involves processing that people generally can’t perform in their kitchens. “For example, there’s very few of us that can take salmon and make canned salmon. It’s food—it’s salmon—but it’s been processed in a way with very high heat and pressure to make it sterile so that it has a prolonged shelf life.”

Level 4, on the other hand, is another thing entirely, different from the other three levels not just in degree but in kind.

“Level 4 is not food,” says Lowry. “Level 4 is chemicals that have been put together in a way that makes them highly palatable.” In the words of Michael Pollan, Level 4 processing produces not food but “edible foodlike substances.”

To avoid inflammation—and its attendant behavioral risk factors—Lowry suggests eaters opt for the first three levels and do their best to steer clear of the fourth.

Just as ultraprocessed foods can lead to negative mental health outcomes, less-processed foods can lead to positive mental health outcomes, says �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder scholar Christopher Lowry. (Photo: Jacopo Maiarelli/Unsplash)

“Given the growing evidence that ultraprocessed foods lead to multiple negative health outcomes, I think the goal is to shift away, to the extent possible, from ultraprocessed foods toward less processed food,” he says. “The diets that have benefit are rich in fresh fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, healthy fats like olive oil and occasionally fish.”

Free will on trial

In their paper, Lowry and his co-authors raise questions about the role of free will in criminal law. Specifically, how much responsibility does a person bear for a crime they committed while under the influence of diminished capacity?

A few non-food-related examples bring this question into stark relief.

Shane Tamura, who in July shot four people in a Manhattan office building before killing himself, was revealed in an autopsy to have had low-level chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a disease often associated with contact sports like football and boxing. “[S]tudy my brain please,” he said in his alleged suicide note. “I’m sorry.”

And Charles Whitman, the “Texas Tower Sniper” who in 1966 killed his wife, his mother and 11 people on the University of Texas at Austin campus, likewise requested that he undergo an autopsy following his crimes.

“[L]ately (I can’t recall when it started) I have been a victim of many unusual and irrational thoughts,” the Eagle Scout, scoutmaster and Marine veteran wrote in his confession the night before his crimes. “After my death I wish that an autopsy would be performed on me to see if there is any visible physical disorder. I have had some tremendous headaches in the past and have consumed two large bottles of Excedrin in the past three months.”

During the autopsy, medical examiners discovered a nickel-sized tumor pressing up against Whitman’s amygdala. Since the 1800s, researchers have known that damage to the amygdala can cause emotional and social disturbances.

Whether Tamura’s and Whitman’s brain pathologies directly caused their crimes is unknown and impossible to prove, but if their writings are any indication, they didn’t seem fully committed to perpetrating those crimes. And yet perpetrate them they did. What if something similar happened with Dan White? What if what people eat alters their sense of what they choose to do—their free will?

Of course, some philosophers and scientists don’t believe free will exists at all, perhaps the most popular among them being the neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky, author of Determined: A Science of Life without Free Will.

“When most people think they’re discerning free will, what they mean is somebody intended to do what they did: Something has just happened; somebody pulled the trigger. They understood the consequences and knew that alternative behaviors were available,” Sapolsky says in a New York Times interview.

“But that doesn’t remotely begin to touch it, because you’ve got to ask: Where did that intent come from? That’s what happened a minute before, in the years before, and everything in between.”

For his part, Lowry expresses less certainty than Sapolsky, but he nevertheless believes the issue of free will as it relates to ultraprocessed foods, the brain and human behavior is an important one to consider.

“If you’re born in an inner city with low socioeconomic status, you have very limited access to fresh foods—vegetables, nuts, seeds, healthy foods—and instead you’re raised on ultraprocessed foods, which are very cheap, do you ultimately have free will? Do you have the mental foundation to make decisions based on free will? Or is your free will somehow compromised by these conditions, which, at one level, are imposed by societal factors?

“This is a philosophical question,” Lowry adds. “I don’t claim to have the answer.”

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�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder philosopher building a bridge to Africa

Rachel Sauer — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 22:11:46 +0000

�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder philosopher building a bridge to Africa Rachel Sauer Tue, 12/09/2025 - 15:11

Cody DeBos

Associate Professor Ajume Wingo was recently appointed as a research associate at the Center for Philosophy in Africa at Nelson Mandela University, a recognition of his decades of scholarship

For a young Ajume Wingo growing up in Nso, a northwestern region of Cameroon, philosophy wasn’t a topic relegated to ancient Stoics or the halls of academia.

“Philosophy was not an abstract pursuit. It was a living practice woven in everyday life,” says Wingo, an associate professor of philosophy at the �鶹��Ѱ��. “As a child I was surrounded by elders who transmitted their wisdom to me through storytelling, through rituals, through symbols, through ceremonies. That had deep philosophic meaning.”

That early foundation shaped not just how Wingo views philosophy today, but also how he practices it. He values using lived experience as a starting point and working toward the abstract, rather than the other way around.

Ajume Wingo, a �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder associate professor of philosophy, was recently appointed as a research associate at the Center for Philosophy in Africa at Nelson Mandela University.

“I start from life, and then I go up. That’s the way I think about philosophy as a living practice. As life,” he explains.

Looking beyond our circles

Recently, Wingo’s philosophical journey has taken a major step forward.

In October, he was appointed as a research associate at the Center for Philosophy in Africa at Nelson Mandela University in South Africa. The role recognizes his decades of scholarship and offers a new platform for expanding international research collaborations between African and Western thinkers.

“At a personal level, it’s a recognition many years in the making. It gives me the opportunity to work collaboratively at the international level, to act like a bridge between Western philosophy and African philosophy,” Wingo says.

His appointment is the result of a personal connection with Nelson Mandela University that has grown over many years. Wingo had previously delivered lectures across South Africa, but his keynote speech in April 2024 at Nelson Mandela University titled “In the Shade of Power” sparked something more.

“Many of the students from the university came up to me after. They wanted to exchange numbers and work with me and all that,” Wingo recalls.

During that same visit, he also participated in many broader conversations around ethics and justice in business alongside thinkers and industry leaders from across Africa.

Wingo’s research draws on both his formal training and his cultural roots in Cameroon. That dual grounding allows him to explore concepts through multiple lenses, he says, from Western theories of justice to African communal models of governance.

“Philosophy reflects the lived experience of the people that philosophers are dealing with,” he says. “And that already gives us some kind of differentiation.”

For Wingo and the kind of political philosophy he practices, Nelson Mandela University is a natural home.

“The Nelson Mandela University is named after Nelson Mandela, who was a victim of apartheid and who came out with a lot of compassion and reconciliation,” he says.

Take the concept of freedom.

In Western political philosophy, Wingo says, freedom is often defined as the absence of interference or constraint. But he says that idea doesn’t translate well into many African contexts.

“The African perspective on freedom is the presence of the right kind of associations. The presence of the community, of belonging. The more you belong, the more you are associated with people, the more freedom you have,” Wingo explains.

He says this contrast extends to views on politics, citizenship and even the role of blood and kinship in shaping identity. Where Western models may emphasize choice, contract and individual rights, African perspectives tend to view community as organic and identity as inherited.

“Politics from the African perspective has always been about … these bounded people in this place with a story, real or imagined, deciding for themselves how they should live,” Wingo says.

By bringing these frameworks into the conversation, he hopes to “humanize” politics and offer new ways of asking questions that might help us understand global and regional challenges. However, he warns that conversation can only happen when philosophers are willing to look outward.

“Philosophy itself is a kind of death when it is inward looking,” Wingo says. “Some of the time I worry that philosophy is becoming like a ghetto … a bunch of people sitting around talking among themselves about themselves.”

“You miss a lot when you’re inward looking, when you keep asking the same thing over and over again. And you gain a lot when you open up to the rest of the world.”

He believes true philosophical vitality comes when thinkers “communicate across the mighty mountains and across the vast oceans,” adding, “That’s philosophy at its best.”

Becoming a bridge

For now, Wingo hopes his appointment at Nelson Mandela University can serve as a bridge, both for his own work and for the �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder community. He’s already planning faculty and student exchanges between the two institutions as well as an international symposium and conferences in both Colorado and South Africa.

“Even just the idea of me being there is exciting. Many people will learn about �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder because of me and will get to hear a new perspective on philosophy,” he says.

That kind of cross-cultural exchange is good for the discipline, helping to shape the ideas born of those who practice it.

“To learn about your culture, you should make it foreign to you by learning about the cultures of other people,” Wingo says, paraphrasing Aristotle. “And in that way, you learn about your culture, not just the cultures of other people.”

In a world facing increasingly global challenges, Wingo believes that philosophers must rise to the moment. He says asking bold questions, ones that defy norms and societal comforts, is the only way we can overcome today’s biggest obstacles.

“You miss a lot when you’re inward looking, when you keep asking the same thing over and over again,” he says, “And you gain a lot when you open up to the rest of the world.”

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Associate Professor Ajume Wingo was recently appointed as a research associate at the Center for Philosophy in Africa at Nelson Mandela University, a recognition of his decades of scholarship.

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Wally the Wollemi finds a new home

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 01 Dec 2025 14:30:00 +0000

Wally the Wollemi finds a new home Rachel Sauer Mon, 12/01/2025 - 07:30

Rachel Sauer

�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder alumni Judy and Rod McKeever donate a tree once considered extinct to the EBIO greenhouse, giving students a living example of modern conservation

Wally probably doesn’t know he’s a dinosaur.

He’s just living his best life in a bright spot—but not directly sunny, he doesn’t like that—in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology greenhouse on 30th Street.

This guy! Talk about charisma. People have certain stereotypes and expectations for what he should be, and he defies them. For starters, he’s here and not, after all, extinct.

Yes, Wally the Wollemi is something special—a Cretaceous Period pine tree thought to have gone extinct 2 million years ago, rediscovered in a secluded Australian canyon in 1994 and, with a few steps in between, recently donated to the greenhouse.

. “Where we are right now with climate change, we’re losing plants and animal species and insect diversity at an extremely rapid rate, so as scientists and horticulturists and curators it’s our job to maintain the diversity of the world in collections, and Wally is an important part of that," says Malinda Barberio, EBIO greenhouse manager.

“The Wollemi pine is an interesting story about paleobotany as well as conservation,” explains Malinda Barberio, greenhouse manager. “Where we are right now with climate change, we’re losing plants and animal species and insect diversity at an extremely rapid rate, so as scientists and horticulturists and curators it’s our job to maintain the diversity of the world in collections, and Wally is an important part of that.”

Back from extinction

How Wally came to live in a quiet spot in the 30th Street greenhouse is a story that started in the Cretaceous. Scientists theorized that herbivorous dinosaurs living then dined on Wollemi pines, which belong to a 200-million-year-old plant family and are abundantly represented in the fossil record dating as far back as 91 million years.

Where they weren’t abundantly represented was in the living world. They were theorized to have gone extinct, living only in stone impressions.

However, in 1994, New South Wales (Australia) National Parks ranger David Noble was rappelling in a remote canyon about five hours west of Sydney when he happened upon a stand of pine trees unlike anything he’d seen before. They had fern-like foliage, distinctive bumpy bark and a dense, rounded crown. They towered over other trees in the canyon.

“Typically, you think of pines as Christmas tree-shaped, fairly triangular, so that dense top crown that’s very rounded is a little odd for pines,” Barberio says. “And you typically expect large, fluffy branches, but the Wollemi’s branches are covered in thicker, flat needles that are in two rows parallel to each other along the sides of branches, which is really distinctive.”

Intense scientific investigation followed Noble’s discovery, including comparison to the fossil record, until it was agreed: This was the Wollemi pine—back from extinction.

The ongoing threat of extinction loomed large, though, because there were fewer than 100 trees in that canyon, whose location remains a closely guarded secret. So, in 2006, and in an unusual partnership between the National Geographic Society, the Floragem plant wholesalers, conservationists, botanists and scientists, 10-inch Wollemi pines were offered for sale in National Geographic’s holiday catalog.

Follow Wally and his friends in the greenhouse at @CUBoulderEBIOGreenhouse on Instagram.

“You are now the owner of a tree that is a survivor from the age of the dinosaurs, a miraculous time traveler and one of the greatest living fossils discovered in the twentieth century,” began the catalog description of the 10-inch saplings selling for $99.95.

That’s what caught Judy McKeever’s attention.

A tree named Wally

“My husband (Rod) does bonsai and loves his bonsai garden, so when I saw the advertisement for National Geographic selling these trees, and it was a love story about finding a dinosaur in an Australian canyon, I thought it would be the perfect addition to his collection,” recalls McKeever (A&S’76). “But he never got bonsaied or really trimmed at all, and just kind of grew out of control.”

The couple named him Wally because it sounds like Wollemi, and he lived in a sheltered, south-facing spot on their Boulder deck in the summer and under a grow light in their basement in the winter. Between seasons, they toted him up and down the stairs—and every year he was bigger.

�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder alumni Judy and Rod McKeever donated Wally the Wollemi pine tree to the EBIO greenhouse in October.

“We didn’t really do anything special, just treated him like every other plant we have,” McKeever says. “He lived a sheltered little life, occasionally got fertilized, and he was very happy. We just let him do whatever he wanted to do; he’s an Australian free spirit.

“We just loved Wally, but he grew a few inches every year and with the soil and pot, he just got to be too heavy to take down to the basement every winter.”

In early autumn, McKeever began looking for places that might be interested in adopting Wally and found the EBIO greenhouse. There was an element of homecoming since both Judy and Rod are 1976 �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder graduates (Rod in chemical engineering); Wally would be staying in the family.

“We are very happy to bring Wally into our collection,” Barberio says. “For the university to have a Wollemi pine is a really special privilege. It allows students to have an example of conservation efforts that are modern and recent in history and shows them that they have the opportunity to participate in these efforts as well.”

Plus, she adds, Wally is a great opportunity for public outreach: People can schedule time to visit him in the greenhouse and see science, conservation and worldwide partnerships at work. And students in future paleobotany classes will be able to see just how close scientists and artists got in visually rendering the Wollemi pine from fossil evidence.

“It’s surprisingly accurate how well they were able to reproduce (Wollemi pines) in theory,” Barberio says. “We have all of these animals and plants that are extinct, and having this living example is a really cool way to show how close we got it.”

A part in plant diversity

As for the care and feeding of Wally, who actually isn’t only male since pines produce both male and female cones, he likes acidic soil and bright but not direct light, given that he’s prone to sunburn. He likes regular watering and doesn’t like his soil to completely dry out, but he also dislikes “wet feet,” or for the bottom layer of soil to be damp.

Because his very few wild relatives live in a protected canyon, it may be implied that Wollemi pines prefer protection from rapid temperature changes, Barberio says, adding that so far, he’s shown no signs of producing cones.

“We would love to have Wally produce cones in the future,” she says, “and of course we would try to plant and grow them.”

Until that time, Wally the Wollemi pine will be a signature plant in the greenhouse collection and an example, Barberio says, “that we can play a part in maintaining the diversity of the plant world.”

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�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder alumni Judy and Rod McKeever donate a tree once considered extinct to the EBIO greenhouse, giving students a living example of modern conservation.

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�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder launches research initiative with Israeli and German partners

Rachel Sauer — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 23:13:49 +0000

�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder launches research initiative with Israeli and German partners Rachel Sauer Tue, 11/18/2025 - 16:13

Collaboration between the Department of History, Open University of Israel and Berlin’s Center for Research on Antisemitism brings scholars and graduate students together in joint research

Scholars in the �鶹��Ѱ�� Department of History recently launched a first-of-its-kind international research initiative to bring U.S., Israeli and German graduate students and scholars together to partner on collaborative research.

The partnership is between �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder, the Open University of Israel (OUI) and the Center for Research on Antisemitism (ZfA) at the Technical University Berlin (TU Berlin), and this semester the three institutions launched a tri-university graduate course on modern German-Jewish ego-documents, or autobiographical writings, team-taught by faculty across all campuses.

The course, which is currently underway, brings together students and professors from the United States, Israel and Germany in a hybrid format that blends synchronous Zoom meetings and asynchronous Canvas Networks coursework with an intensive, eight-day in-person seminar in Berlin that ended last week.

Thomas Pegelow Kaplan (standing, wearing glasses) and students from �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder, Open University of Israel and the TU Berlin work with ego-documents at the archives of the Jewish Museum Berlin last week. (Photo: Thomas Pegelow Kaplan)

The initiative originated in spring 2024 discussions between Thomas Pegelow Kaplan, professor and Louis P. Singer Endowed Chair in Jewish History, and Guy Miron, OUI vice president for academic affairs and faculty member in the Department of History, Philosophy and Judaic Studies. They envisioned creating a research program that would connect U.S. and Israeli students and scholars through collaborative, cross-cultural study, Pegelow Kaplan says.

He adds that OUI, which was founded in 1974 with an open admissions model and a distance-learning structure intended to democratize access to higher education, is an ideal research partner because it serves one of Israel’s most diverse student populations, ranging from ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities to Druze and Israeli Arabs. In the wake of the upheavals following October 7, 2023, he says, this diversity made OUI an especially compelling partner for a project aimed not only at academic cooperation but also at fostering understanding among students from different backgrounds.

The �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder Graduate School and Department of History were early champions of the partnership, Pegelow Kaplan says, and discussions soon expanded a dual partnership between �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder and OUI to include the ZfA at TU Berlin. Established in 1982 and rooted in a university founded in 1770, the ZfA is one of the world’s leading centers for the study of antisemitism. Its recent launch of an interdisciplinary MA program added further momentum to the emerging partnership, Pegelow Kaplan says.

Expanding a research network

A key piece of the initiative is the recently completed in-person seminar in Berlin, which is home to Germany’s largest Jewish community and is a global center for Jewish and Holocaust studies and served “as a living classroom,” Pegelow Kaplan says. Participants worked directly with archives and institutions, including the Jewish Museum Berlin and the New Synagogue Berlin–Centrum Judaicum. Students met with leading scholars, archivists, memory activists, city officials and Jewish community representatives for learning and broad-ranging discussion.

The seminar coincided with Germany’s annual commemoration of the November 1938 anti-Jewish pogroms, also known as Kristallnacht —events that marked a turning point in the Nazi regime’s persecution of Jews. Students served as “participatory observers,” analyzing contemporary memory practices during the commemorations as part of their research.

The �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder Department of History, Graduate School, Research and Innovation Office and Benson Center, as well as several new donors who joined the trip as auditors, contributed to student travel costs for the Berlin seminar.

Pegelow Kaplan emphasizes that the Berlin seminar was the first step of many. Plans are already underway for future course offerings, an international conference in Berlin in June 2026, expanded research trips—including, once conditions allow, to Jerusalem—and broader disciplinary participation extending beyond the humanities and social sciences into fields such as engineering.

The initiative also aims to establish exchange pathways to bring Israeli and German students and faculty to Boulder and to send �鶹��Ѱ��affiliates abroad for both short- and long-term stays. More ambitious possibilities, including joint degree programs, are being explored, Pegelow Kaplan says.

Throughout its development, the project has remained closely aligned with �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder’s mission, he says, to be “a global research and education leader intent on transforming individuals, communities and the entire human experience.”

As this international partnership grows, Pegelow Kaplan says he and his colleagues in Israel and Germany are aiming to make it not only a model of collaborative scholarship but also an avenue for fostering meaningful connections among students navigating a rapidly changing world.

Professor G. Miron (left, gray jacket) of Open University/Yad Vashem introduces students to the most pertinent debates at the House of the Wannsee Conference Memorial in Berlin. (Photo: Thomas Pegelow Kaplan)

Program participants at the Gleis 17 Memorial in Berlin, which commemorates the 50,000 Berlin Jews deported to their death in the East. (Photo: Thomas Pegelow Kaplan)

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Collaboration between the Department of History, Open University of Israel and Berlin’s Center for Research on Antisemitism brings scholars and graduate students together in joint research.

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Top image: �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder MA students working with archival collections at the Centrum Judaicum in Berlin. (Photo: Thomas Pegelow Kaplan)

Meet the scientist who stumbled into the cold—and stayed

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 17 Nov 2025 14:30:00 +0000

Meet the scientist who stumbled into the cold—and stayed Rachel Sauer Mon, 11/17/2025 - 07:30

Clint Talbott

John Cassano, professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences at �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder, lead scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center and fellow at CIRES, recently returned from his 15th research trip to Antarctica

The first time John Cassano flew to Antarctica, he found the 12-hour commercial flight from Los Angeles to Auckland, New Zealand, uncomfortable. Then he boarded a C-130 cargo plane bound for Antarctica.

“Put me on a commercial plane in a middle seat for 12 hours,” he says, chuckling. “I’ll take that over being in a cargo plane any day.”

John Cassano, a �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences and self-described "weather weenie," has been pursuing research in Antarctica since 1994.

That was January 1994. Cassano was 25 and a graduate student who had agreed to work on a project installing weather stations in Greenland and Antarctica. He figured he’d go once, check Antarctica off his list and move on with life. Thirty years later, he’s still going back.

Cassano did not plan to be a polar researcher. Growing up in New York, he imagined a career in architecture—something tangible, predictable. But a freshman weather class at Montana State University changed everything. “I decided architecture wasn’t for me.”

Meteorology seemed a better fit. Montana State didn’t offer meteorology, so Cassano earned an earth science degree and headed to graduate school at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, intending to study storms. Then came an invitation from Charles Stearns, professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences, asking if Cassano would be interested in working on a project in Antarctica.

“I had no real interest in the polar regions,” Cassano admits. “But I wasn’t going to pass up the chance to go to Antarctica once.”

That “once” became a career. After two field seasons with Stearns, Cassano pursued a PhD at the University of Wyoming, focusing on Antarctic meteorology. Today, as a professor in the �鶹��Ѱ��’s Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, he has lived about a year in Antarctica over the course of 15 trips there.

Cassano is also lead scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center and a fellow at �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder’s Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences.

'A weather weenie at heart'

The science keeps him coming back. Cassano’s work explores how the atmosphere behaves in Earth’s most extreme environments—knowledge that underpins climate models and weather forecasts worldwide.

The adventure is also alluring. “I’m a weather weenie at heart,” he says. “I like experiencing extremes—strong winds, big snowstorms, really cold temperatures. Antarctica gives me that.”

He recalls standing in minus 56°F air, frostbite nipping his fingers as he launched drones. “I enjoy experiencing those conditions,” he says. “I wouldn’t want to camp in a tent for months like the early explorers, but I like the challenge.”

John Cassano (right) and then-fellow graduate student Mark Seefeldt (left), now a research scientist in Cassano's group at CIRES, on their first trip to Antarctica in 1994. (Photo: John Cassano)

Cassano’s contributions have helped reshape polar science. In 2009, he led the first U.S.-funded drone research campaign in Antarctica, opening new ways to measure the atmosphere where traditional instruments fall short.

“Drones let us probe the boundary layer—the part of the atmosphere that exchanges heat and moisture with the surface,” he explains. “That’s critical for understanding climate.”

Earlier, as a postdoctoral researcher at Ohio State University, Cassano helped modernize Antarctic weather forecasting. The Antarctic Mesoscale Prediction System, launched in 2001, transformed flight safety.

“When I started going down in the ’90s, forecasters were confident about eight hours out,” he says. “Now it’s five days. That’s huge.”

That’s a big change for several reasons, not the least of which is that an eight-hour forecast could change from the time a plane left Christchurch, New Zealand, and got closer to Antarctica. Planes often had to turn around mid-flight back then, Cassano recalls.

Witnessing dramatic changes

Cassano has witnessed dramatic changes in three decades of research.

Arctic sea ice has declined about 40 percent in recent decades. Antarctic sea ice, once at record highs, now hovers at record lows. Ice shelves are collapsing.

“These changes matter,” he says. “They alter the temperature gradient between the tropics and poles, which drives global weather. Even if you never go to the polar regions, it affects the storms you experience.”

Meanwhile, fieldwork isn’t all adventure. “Emotionally, it’s hard,” Cassano says. “When I was single, I didn’t mind being gone for months. Now, being away from my wife and daughter is tough.”

Comforts are few: shared dorm rooms, institutional food and the knowledge that if something happens at home, he can’t leave. “Once you’re there in August, you’re stuck until October.”

But Cassano treasures the Antarctic community—a self-selecting group of scientists and support staff who thrive in isolation. “You don’t wind up in Antarctica by mistake,” he says.

“Everyone wants to be there. Contractors work six-month stints and spend the rest of the year traveling. It’s like living in a travelogue.”

Kara Hartig (left), CIRES visiting fellow postdoc, and John Cassano (right), in Antarctica during the 2025 research season. (Photo: John Cassano)

He loves the stories: a mechanic who spent his off-season trekking through South America, a cook who had just returned from hiking in Nepal. “You hear all these amazing experiences,” Cassano says. “It’s like living inside a travel magazine.”

Behind every scientific breakthrough lies a vast support system. “I can focus on science because others make sure I have food, water, transportation and a warm place to sleep,” Cassano says. “That infrastructure is critical.”

Cassano worries about the cost of fieldwork and the ripple effects of recent disruptions. “Field projects are expensive,” he says. “COVID and a major McMurdo Station rebuild created a backlog. My project was supposed to be in the field in 2021—we went in 2025. NSF is still catching up.”

Federal priorities are a concern in the current political climate, but Cassano suggests that Antarctic research might be less vulnerable than other kinds of federally sponsored science.

“Antarctic research has always had a geopolitical dimension,” Cassano notes. “The Antarctic Treaty encourages nations to maintain scientific programs. It’s how you keep a seat at the table.”

Constant curiosity

For Cassano, mentoring is particularly rewarding. “I love bringing new people down,” he says. “Seeing Antarctica through their eyes makes me excited again.” On his latest trip, he watched a young researcher, Kara Hartig, CIRES visiting fellow postdoc, as she experienced the ice for the first time. “Her enthusiasm reminded me why I do this.”

That excitement ripples outward. After Cassano shared photos in class, a former student emailed, saying, “I’m on my way to Antarctica to work as a chef at McMurdo,” the largest research station on the continent.

“He just wanted to experience it,” Cassano says. “I think that’s awesome.”

Cassano’s curiosity remains undiminished. On his latest trip, when drones failed to arrive, he improvised with van-mounted sensors, uncovering puzzling temperature swings across the ice shelf.

What might we learn from the data? “It hints at important processes,” he says. “Now we need to go back and figure out why.”

After three decades, Cassano still marvels at the complexity of the atmosphere—and the urgency of understanding it. “Increasing our knowledge is broadly beneficial,” he says. “And for me, it’s just fascinating.”

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Top image: Sunset over the Royal Society Range (background), sea ice in McMurdo Sound (mid-ground) and McMurdo Station from John Cassano's 2025 Antarctic trip. (Photo: John Cassano)

Readers still traveling through the wardrobe to Narnia

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 21:11:45 +0000

Readers still traveling through the wardrobe to Narnia Rachel Sauer Mon, 11/10/2025 - 14:11

Bradley Worrell

Marking its 75th anniversary this autumn, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe has become a cultural touchstone for fantasy and faith, says �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder religious studies Professor Deborah Whitehead

When it was first published in 1950, few could have imagined the lasting impact that The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by author C.S. Lewis would have 75 years later—not only on children’s literature, but also on religious thought and popular culture, says Deborah Whitehead, associate professor and chair of the Department of Religious Studies at the �鶹��Ѱ��, whose focus includes religion and its intersection with media and popular culture.

The book’s broad appeal today is even more impressive considering that when it debuted the initial response was muted, as fairy tales and fantasy at the time were viewed as indulgent and only appropriate for very young readers. At the same time, fellow Oxford scholar and Lord of the Rings author J.R.R. Tolkien, also one of Lewis' best friends, was famously critical of Lewis’s approach to fantasy, Whitehead says.

�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder scholar Deborah Whitehead, associate professor and chair of the Department of Religious Studies, studies religion and its intersection with media and popular culture.

“Tolkien is the consummate world builder. He creates these entire races with their own kinds of distinctive personalities, characteristics and languages and these very detailed backstories in his books,” she notes. In contrast to the detail Tolkien took to differentiate elves, dwarves and hobbits with their own attributes and personalities, the fauns, centaurs and other creatures inhabiting The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe were fairly indistinguishable personality-wise, she says.

Additionally, Lewis didn’t attempt to provide the same level of detail about Narnia’s history as is found about Middle-earth in The Lord of the Rings books.

“I think one of Tolkien’s criticisms of Lewis’s book is there is no backstory,” Whitehead says. “For Tolkien, I think he was a little perplexed at the less exacting nature with which Lewis built his story.”

Book enjoys wide appeal

Still, Lewis’s looser structure may have been precisely what allowed his story about the magical world of Narnia to be more approachable, especially for young readers, Whitehead says, noting that while it’s possible to read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe as a Christian allegory, the story can be appreciated simply as enjoyable fantasy.

“It’s a great example of how a text can mean different things to different audiences, depending upon how it’s framed,” Whitehead says. “The Narnia books, since their publication, have had this broad-based appeal. There is a way to appreciate them as children’s literature and fantasy literature and to enjoy the characters and the story and not take the Christian theological elements as foreground—even though they are there.

“I think that’s exactly how Lewis intended them to be. He said he intended for the books to make it easier for children to accept Christianity when they are older and for the books to provide the ‘seed beds’ for ideas about atonement and faith, which you can see in the figures of Aslan the lion and Lucy, respectively.

“But at the same time, he was not intending for the books to be didactic or only read within a religious context, so they do have that broad appeal,” she adds.

While many Christian readers interpret Narnia as allegory, Lewis himself described it as a “supposal”—a reimagining of what it might look like if Jesus were incarnated in a different world. Whitehead says Aslan, the noble lion, is a clear Christ figure, sacrificing himself for Edmund, one of the four siblings magically transported from World War II Britain to Narnia via a magical wardrobe.

Lewis’s decision to depict Christ as a lion rather than a lamb is significant, Whitehead says, because both are biblical, but the lion conveys majesty, power and triumph in battle—qualities that she says align with Lewis’s vision of Christianity’s victory over the forces of evil, as personified by Aslan’s victory in battle over the evil White Witch.

In the 75 years since it was first published, C.S. Lewis' The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe has had a lasting effect on children’s literature, religious thought and popular culture. (Image: original book cover by illustrator Pauline Baynes)

Lewis in his time—and ours

Starting with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Lewis went on to write six additional books in the series, which came to be known as the Chronicles of Narnia. He also wrote several works of Christian apologetics, perhaps most notably Mere Christianity, which resulted from a series of BBC radio addresses he gave to the British public during World War II in defense of Christianity.

“In those addresses, he’s representing Christianity as this shared cultural and moral heritage that was a bulwark against the forces of evil that, to him, were very active in world during World War II in the form of the Nazis,” Whitehead says. “His radio addresses during the war were very popular, and he sort of became the public face of British Christianity as someone who reinterpreted Christianity for a 20th century audience.”

In his day, Lewis was an exemplar of high-church liberal Anglican Christianity and ecumenism, but Whitehead says the image of Lewis has morphed over time. Evangelical Christians came to embrace the British academic and lay Anglican theologian as a defender of the faith in an increasingly secular world, interpreting his works as tools for spiritual formation and cultural resistance. By the 1970s, his works—including the Narnia series and Mere Christianity—became staples in Christian bookstores, in part contributing to their continued popularity, she says.

Gender and race in Narnia

While The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe has been celebrated for its imaginative storytelling and how it conveys biblical concepts in approachable ways, in more recent years it has also faced scrutiny for its portrayals of gender and race.

One of the most vocal critics of Lewis’s work is Philip Pullman, author of the fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials, who has described the Narnia books as “monumentally disparaging of women.” Whitehead acknowledges the series is largely male-dominated, with female characters often relegated to secondary roles or portrayed in stereotypical ways.

Separately, in the Narnia book The Horse and His Boy, some scholars have taken issue with the depiction of the evil Calormenes as conquest-driven, dark-skinned savages and culturally “other,” possibly reflecting colonialist ideas. In that book, Aslan destroys Narnia rather than allow the Calormenes to conquer it, Whitehead notes.

These critiques potentially complicate Lewis’s legacy. While he was progressive on certain social justice issues within the context of liberal Christianity, Whitehead says his work also reflects the bias of his time—particularly in its idealization of British culture and Christianity as the pinnacle of civilization.

Theatrical adaptions and generational nostalgia

Over the years, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe has been adapted into numerous plays, musicals and films. The book’s association with Christmas, because the White Witch bans the holiday, makes it a seasonal favorite, and the story’s visual richness—with Turkish Delight, talking beavers and epic battles—lends itself well to theatrical production, Whitehead says.

Meanwhile, the 2005 film adaption by Walden Media exemplifies how Lewis’ work has been repackaged for contemporary audiences.

"There’s something just so magical in itself about learning to read, or having your parents read to you, and discovering these fantasy worlds through reading,” says �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder scholar Deborah Whitehead. (Narnia illustration: Galchi/Deviantart)

“There was the mass marketing, which was like, ‘Rediscover the magic of these classic children’s books,’ but then there’s marketing specifically to Christian audiences following the model of the niche religious marketing for The Passion of the Christ,” Whitehead says. That marketing for The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe positioned the film as a safe, faith-affirming alternative to secular films such as the Harry Potter wizard series, which some Christians criticize for its portrayal of witchcraft, she says.

At the same time, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is, at its core, a classic story about good versus evil and about sacrifice and redemption. Those themes are timeless and continue to resonate with readers of all ages and backgrounds, Whitehead says, recalling her own emotional response to the book as a child—mourning Aslan’s death at the hand of the White Witch and marveling at the idea of a magical wardrobe that led to another world.

Whitehead says the book’s status as a children’s classic is reinforced by generational transmission. Parents and grandparents pass it down, creating a shared cultural memory that keeps the story alive.

To her knowledge, no other modern Christian thinker and author has had a similar level of success bridging the gap between Christian literature and children’s fantasy literature. It’s a feat made even more impressive given that Lewis did not have children of his own and was not particularly fond of spending time with young children, which he confessed was something of a defect on his part, Whitehead says.

Will Narnia endure?

During his lifetime, C.S. Lewis published more than 30 books, including fiction, non-fiction and academic texts. While there is nothing to suggest that Lewis primarily set out to be a successful children’s book author, Whitehead says she thinks Lewis would be fine with being primarily remembered that way—with the hope that readers would understand the underlying message he was attempting to convey. She adds that Lewis was a big believer in the idea that “good stories” by definition are those that appeal to children as well as adults.

As for whether children will still be reading The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in another 75 years, Whitehead says, “I hope so. I hope we’re all still reading in 75 years and not having Speechify and ChatGTP do everything for us. There’s something just so magical in itself about learning to read, or having your parents read to you, and discovering these fantasy worlds through reading.”

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Marking its 75th anniversary this autumn, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe has become a cultural touchstone for fantasy and faith, says �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder religious studies Professor Deborah Whitehead.

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Top illustration: Aslan the lion in a scene from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (Illustration: ChrisStarkiller/Deviantart)

Players roll the dice on the healing power of collaborative fantasy

Rachel Sauer — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 22:22:42 +0000

Players roll the dice on the healing power of collaborative fantasy Rachel Sauer Fri, 11/07/2025 - 15:22

Cody DeBos

At the D&D table, says �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder humanities scholar and gaming podcast host Andrew Gilbert, everyone has a voice

You can often find Andrew Gilbert behind a cardboard dungeon master’s screen, scheming up new ways to derail the carefully laid plans of the other players at his Dungeons & Dragons table. The game has been part of his life for decades, and as D&D gains a larger foothold in the mainstream, it has also become a powerful avenue for friends to connect, laugh and heal.

“It’s such a fascinating way to connect people through story. But it’s a story with limitations and rules,” says Gilbert, a teaching assistant professor of humanities, game studies and media at the �鶹��Ѱ�� Department of Cinema Studies and Moving Image Arts.

In September, Wizards of the Coast studios released Heroes of the Borderlands, the game’s most expansive beginner-friendly box set yet. It arrives with the goal of helping a new generation of players roll their first d20s.

Andrew Gilbert is a �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder teaching assistant professor of humanities, game studies and media in the Department of Cinema Studies and Moving Image Arts.

Gilbert and a group of friends have been doing so together since 2018, broadcasting play sessions from their campaigns online via the Goats & Dragons and Helpful Goat Presents podcasts.

“When we created the show, we knew we wanted to play games in a way that centered player experiences and collaborative storytelling,” he says.

The group’s campaign is now approaching the end of a years-long adventure, which has included guests like The Lord of the Rings actor Dominic Monaghan along the way.

The hobby has brought them closer together and created no shortage of memorable moments. But that’s just one facet of Gilbert’s connection to Dungeons & Dragons.

After years of rolling dice and telling stories, he’s come to see the game as something far bigger than fantasy. But why does D&D, a game first published in the 1970s, still captivate us today? How can a tabletop game rooted in imagination compete with video games, AI content, and near-constant digital simulation?

Gilbert has a few ideas.

Still captivating after 50 years

At its heart, D&D is a storytelling engine. Unlike books or movies with fixed narratives, tabletop roleplaying games ask players to improvise solutions, make moral decisions, and stay in character. Players sit around a table (or communicate virtually) and collaborate to tell a story where no one knows how it will end.

“It’s a fascinating form of media where, to a certain extent, the audience are the creators of the media at the same time,” he says. “There’s something wild and magical and fun about giving up control of a story to the group and to chance itself with die rolls.”

Gilbert first encountered D&D through a cousin who taught him to play when he was just 7 years old.

“I was hooked right away,” he recalls.

Years later, as both a scholar of games and a long-time player, Gilbert is fascinated by the emotional and social experiences D&D fosters. No longer seen as just an escapist fantasy game, D&D has become a catalyst for community building.

“There are social and emotional dynamics happening in every game,” he says.

That community is what makes Dungeons & Dragons so special, says �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder scholar Andrew Gilbert; whether players are battling monsters in an imagined fantasy world or conquering their own internal demons, the table becomes a shared space where anything can happen. (Illustration: Wizards of the Coast)

At the same time, D&D is incredibly accessible for newcomers. Today, with an updated rule set and a plethora of digital tools to simplify the experience, that’s truer than ever, Gilbert says.

“Literally, you can know nothing about Dungeons & Dragons, and I can teach you how to play by just doing it. All you have to do is tell me what your character wants to do, and then someone who knows the rules can say, ‘Great, roll this dice, add this number to it.’ You really don’t even need to know the rules before you start playing,” he says.

He believes that’s a big reason why the game has endured for half a century and is still growing.

“A lot of us were worried the growth we saw in 2015 and 2016 was a fad that would sort of fade. But then we got the pandemic, and a lot of people started playing as a way to connect with friends when there was nothing to do but play games at home. And, of course, you have a ton of content creators making content about the game professionally,” he says.

“It’s just a perfect storm of factors that have shot the popularity of D&D through the roof.”

Healing through character

Sometimes, though, the game is about more than enjoyment or even storytelling. For many, D&D and games like it have become tools for healing from past traumas or building crucial social skills in a safe environment, Gilbert says.

“There are so many stories about people using the game to work through trauma, including some really cool research about games and PTSD specifically. You can just not be you for a little bit,” he says. “I’m not always a proponent of pure escapism, but it releases a tension. Whether you’re remembering your character doing something or remembering something that actually happened, your brain goes through the exact same process.”

He adds, “With D&D, you can create all these beneficial, healthy memories of not being the victim of some trauma but the one who solves the problem.”

"There’s so much good. The act of collaboration, of creation, of working through issues in the game. It’s something we talk about in my class a lot. These things are hard to navigate, but it’s incredibly helpful to learn how to navigate them."

Gilbert also acknowledges how roleplaying games like Dungeons & Dragons can be deeply meaningful to people who don’t always find social interaction intuitive.

“The idea of how to just construct scenes and conversations is really, really helpful for individuals on the autism spectrum,” he says.

Part of that comes from the game’s structure. Unlike everyday conversation, which can be unpredictable and overwhelming, D&D provides a clear set of rules and roles.

“There’s an element of learning how to pass the microphone, which on a very basic level is just good practice for conversation,” Gilbert says.

Indeed, research suggests that D&D and similar games can be used therapeutically to build communication skills, reduce stress, and foster a sense of community among people who may struggle to connect.

That community, Gilbert says, is what makes the game so special. Whether players are battling monsters in an imagined fantasy world or conquering their own internal demons, the table becomes a shared space where anything can happen.

“There’s so much good. The act of collaboration, of creation, of working through issues in the game. It’s something we talk about in my class a lot. These things are hard to navigate, but it’s incredibly helpful to learn how to navigate them,” he says.

As new players crack open Heroes of the Borderlands or learn the game from a friend, they become part of a decades-long tradition that values creativity and connection in a world that is too often devoid of these qualities, Gilbert says, adding, “We keep finding new amazing things about this game, and it’s only getting better. The possibilities are just limitless.”

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At the D&D table, says �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder humanities scholar and gaming podcast host Andrew Gilbert, everyone has a voice.

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Voters’ dislike of PAC donations cuts across political lines

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 03 Nov 2025 17:12:52 +0000

Voters’ dislike of PAC donations cuts across political lines Rachel Sauer Mon, 11/03/2025 - 10:12

Bradley Worrell

�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder political scientist Michelangelo Landgrave’s research finds Republicans and independents share Democrats’ concerns over corporate donations in federal elections

In a time when political consensus is difficult to find, one topic that cuts across partisan lines is American voters’ disdain for political action committee (PAC) money in federal elections.

That’s one of the key findings of research recently published in the journal Research and Politics, which was co-authored by Michelangelo Landgrave, a �鶹��Ѱ�� Department of Political Science assistant professor whose research focus includes campaign finance and public opinions on how it can be reformed. The paper was co-authored by Aubree Hardesty, one of Landgrave’s �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder postdoctoral fellows.

Pointing to a 2017 Washington Post story, Landgrave and his co-authors note in their paper that people surveyed for the article said money in politics and wealthy political donors are primary causes of political dysfunction.

�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder political scientist Michelangelo Landgrave and his research colleagues found that Republicans, Democrats and independents all share concerns over corporate donations in federal elections.

“What we found is that it’s not money itself that people oppose,” Landgrave clarifies. “People are fine with small donations—$5 or $10 from an individual. What they oppose are massive contributions from corporations that ordinary citizens simply can’t compete with.”

As the research paper notes, in the 2024 election cycle, PACs contributed about $5.6 billion to presidential and congressional campaigns, representing about 65% of total contributions.

This distinction—between small, individual donations and large, corporate checks—is central to understanding public opinion on campaign finance, Landgrave says, and voters are concerned that PACs have outsized influence with candidates.

Who’s giving the money?

Voters often view PACs as conduits from special interests, allowing corporations, unions and wealthy donors to channel significant funds into the political system. Landgrave says most PAC contributions come from older, wealthier and disproportionately white Americans. Asian Americans are an emerging group in this donor landscape, but Black and Latino communities remain underrepresented in campaign financing, he says.

“That raises equity concerns,” Landgrave says. “It’s not that older white voters shouldn’t have influence—they should—but so should African Americans, Latinos and especially younger voters. It’s not just about race; it’s about age, class and general representation.”

And while some PACs, such as the National Rifle Association or Emily’s List, are notably partisan or ideological, many are more pragmatic than political, Landgrave says. Companies such as Walmart and McDonald’s often contribute to both Republican and Democratic campaigns—hedging their bets to maintain influence regardless of which party wins, he notes.

Public attitudes: a bipartisan dislike

As the researchers surveyed voters, Landgrave says one of the biggest surprises was the lack of a stark partisan divide on the issue of PAC donations.

“Starting this project, we assumed that there was going to be major partisan differences in public opinion. We assumed that Democrats—much more than Republicans—would be much more concerned about the amount of money in American politics,” he says. “But one of our big findings was that Democrats and Republicans, and also independents, want their politicians to not be accepting this PAC money.”

Again, the underlying concern is that PACs have outsized influence with politicians in return for their contributions, because those donations tend to be larger than those of individual donors, Landgrave says. He notes that previous research has found that less than 1% of Americans give more than $200 in political contributions in a given year. (For their part, PACs can contribute up to $3,500 per candidate.)

“How much influence they (PACs) actually get for their contributions is a subject for debate, but the perception by voters is that it really undermines the democratic values that we have,” Landgrave says. “The underlying concern voters have is that everyone should be able to give, but the amount should be constrained enough that, for example, one person making six figures is not able to make much bigger donations than the guy making $40,000 or $20,000 a year.”

"We assumed that Democrats—much more than Republicans—would be much more concerned about the amount of money in American politics. But one of our big findings was that Democrats and Republicans, and also independents, want their politicians to not be accepting this PAC money,” says �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder researcher Michelangelo Landgrave.

The study’s findings suggest that swearing off PAC donations can be a winning strategy for Republicans and independents as well as Democrats, Landgrave says.

“While Republicans at the national level have not embraced this idea, these findings lead me to believe that an enterprising Republican candidate could make their name, especially at the primary level, by keeping their same policy positions, but really presenting themselves as this anti-corporate, populist individual,” he says.

Risks and rewards of swearing off PAC money

In recent U.S. election cycles, some candidates have made headlines by vowing not to accept PAC donations, including U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Massachusetts, who during her 2020 campaign said she “swore off PAC money to make a statement.” She was not the only one.

Landgrave’s notes in his paper that 44 candidates (43 Democrats and one Republican) refused PAC money during the 2020 election cycle.

Landgrave says politicians swearing off PAC contributions is a trend that has gained momentum since the mid-2010s, mirroring earlier political reform efforts dating back to the Progressive Era of the late 1890s to early 1920s, when reformers sought to address political corruption that extended to buying political offices.

Today, candidates such as Bernie Saunders, D-Vermont, have successfully built brand identities around refusing corporate donations, drawing support even from those who may not fully align with their policy platforms, Landgrave says.

His research suggests voters place as much weight on a candidate’s campaign finance stance as they do on hot-button issues such as gun control.

“That’s a big deal,” he says. “Gun control is one of the most polarizing, mobilizing issues in U.S. politics. If a candidate’s position on PAC money can mobilize voters to a similar degree, that’s a serious strategic advantage.”

Show me the (small) money

Still, given how astronomically expensive modern federal election campaigns have become, is swearing off PAC money viable moving forward?

Yes, but with caveats, Landgrave says.

He references an earlier paper by one of his co-authors that found that rejecting PAC money can be a powerful campaign message—especially when it’s clearly communicated to voters. That earlier paper noted that candidates who reject PAC money see a surge in small-dollar donations. While those contributions do not fully replace corporate funds, Landgrave says they often make up 70 to 80% of the shortfall.

“It’s a significant substitution effect,” he says. “You lose $1 million from PACs but you might get $700,000 to $800,000 from small donors instead.”

However, Landgrave says this model may not scale indefinitely.

“Right now, if you are the sort of candidate who swears off big corporate influence money, there’s enough donors that care about that to compensate you to a degree,” he says. “What’s unclear is what happens at scale. If every candidate rejected PAC contributions, would enough people change culturally to make up what they’re losing? If there’s only a few thousand people who care about this and do this, it won’t work if everyone rejects the money.”

What do voters actually know?

A common critique of public opinion surveys is that voters don’t really understand the issues they’re being asked about. But Landgrave’s research challenges that assumption when it comes to campaign financing.

“Right now, if you are the sort of candidate who swears off big corporate influence money, there’s enough donors that care about that to compensate you to a degree.”

“We’ve done follow-up work on public knowledge,” he says. “And while voters don’t ace these quizzes, they perform reasonably well. For instance, many people guess that the maximum federal contribution limit is around $3,000. The correct number is $3,500, so they’re close.

Americans surprisingly know the general rules. Maybe not all of the details, but they know more than we probably think.”

In short, the average voter may not be a political scientist, but they understand enough to form meaningful opinions—and increasingly, those opinions lean toward curbing corporate influence in elections, Landgrave says.

Studying union PACs and cultural change

Landgrave says his research on political action committees and campaign finance are ongoing. His next line of research looks at how voters view union-backed PACs, which are structured similarly but are rooted in worker representation.

Initial findings are surprising, he says.

“Americans seem to be OK with union PACs. And what’s even more surprising—so are Republicans. It’s preliminary, but it suggests people view unions differently, perhaps because they’re perceived as bottom-up organizations, rather than top-down like corporations.”

Meanwhile, looking ahead, Landgrave has another topic he would like to pursue regarding PACs and campaigns.

“In addition to the union angle, I would definitely be interested in seeing young Americans’ attitudes toward money in politics,” he says. “I can tell you that, just talking with my undergrad students, they seem even more skeptical of corporate money in politics than previous generations. They’re not anti-money—they’re fine with small donations—but they’re deeply opposed to corporate influence.”

However, Landgrave is skeptical that Congress might one day pass sweeping reform to limit or eliminate PAC donations.

“I don’t see that happening at the federal level,” he says. “The people who reach Congress are, by and large, products of the existing system.”

Instead, he sees more potential for state-level reforms, through voter pressure and ballot initiatives that limit PAC influence—a strategy that he says echoes earlier populist movements, particularly in the Plains and Rocky Mountain regions.

“Our campaign finance system isn’t set in stone,” Landgrave says. “Other countries do it differently. We could, too—if we decided that’s what we want.”

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�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder political scientist Michelangelo Landgrave’s research finds Republicans and independents share Democrats’ concerns over corporate donations in federal elections.

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