Division of Arts and Humanities

Research hears the quiet power of Afro-Italian podcasting

Rachel Sauer — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 13:00:00 +0000

Research hears the quiet power of Afro-Italian podcasting Rachel Sauer Tue, 09/29/2026 - 07:00

“Podcasting offers insight into forms of cultural production that are expanding the possibilities of public discourse in Italy,” says CU �Ǹ�Թ� scholar Michela Ardizzoni. (Photo: ConvertKit/Unsplash)

Cody DeBos

CU �Ǹ�Թ� scholar Michela Ardizzoni describes how podcasting is reshaping Italy’s conversations about race

On an episode of the podcast The Chronicles of a Black Italian Woman, hosted by Benedicta Djumpah, well-known art curator and historian Mistura Allison reflects on growing up in Italy.

The daughter of a Nigerian-born immigrant who had lived in Italy since the age of 14, Allison said during the interview, “I didn’t have to chiedere il permesso di soggiorno, I never had to ask permission to exist.”

While acknowledging the privilege her Italian citizenship offered, and the challenges she faced when briefly moving to another country, Allison goes on to describe how her background helped shape her layered view of identity and why it’s okay to not fit into society’s predefined labels.

Michela Ardizzoni is an associate professor in the CU �Ǹ�Թ� Department of French and Italian.

The episode’s honest vulnerability is part of what drew Michela Ardizzoni, an associate professor of Italian at the �Ǹ�Թ�, into the growing wave of Afro-Italian podcasting.

In her latest research, Ardizzoni examines how shows like Chronicles are reshaping Italy’s cultural conversations about race, identity and belonging.

“Podcasting offers insight into forms of cultural production that are expanding the possibilities of public discourse in Italy,” Ardizzoni says.

Following identity across media

Ardizzoni’s interest in the politics of Italian identity is as personal as it is professional.

“I grew up in Italy, but I never experienced it as a single, uniform place. Different stages of my life took me from northern Italy to Sardinia, and later to different regions in the U.S.,” she says.

“Those experiences made me increasingly interested in the relationship between media, place, and identity, and in the ways cultural narratives shape our understanding of belonging.”

Ardizzoni spent her early years of scholarship examining how Italian television and film help define who “counts” as Italian. Podcasting, she says, is a refreshing departure from more institutional forms of media.

“Podcasts offer a comparatively more open space for experimentation. They are less constrained by editorial conventions and more conducive to conversations that develop on the speakers’ own terms,” she explains.

By giving creators greater freedom of expression, podcasts have opened new lines of dialogue about what it means to be Italian from one’s own perspective.

“Rather than responding to questions framed by mainstream media, they [podcast hosts and guests] establish the agenda themselves, decide what deserves attention and shape the language through which their experiences are understood,” Ardizzoni says.

A conversation without borders

One misconception Ardizzoni often hears from American audiences is that Blackness in Italy is a new phenomenon tied to recent immigration.

“There are now multiple generations of Black Italians who were born and raised in Italy, whose cultural and linguistic lives are deeply rooted in the country,” she explains.

Djumpah’s podcast offers a view that better reflects the real world. Recorded almost entirely in English, the show regularly features guests who discuss their Italian upbringings and their connections to the wider diaspora across Africa, the U.K. and the U.S.

“The decision to record in English is an important part of that vision. English allows the podcast to reach audiences well beyond Italy and creates a common space for dialogue among people connected by diaspora rather than nationality alone,” Ardizzoni says.

The result is conversations that refuse to treat being Italian as disconnected from broader dialogue about race.

“It challenges the tendency to think about Italy as an exceptional or self-contained case and instead places Afro-Italian voices within the wider intellectual and cultural networks of the Black Atlantic and the Black Mediterranean,” Ardizzoni says.

Making space for quiet

To make sense of what Djumpah and her guests are doing, Ardizzoni draws on scholar Kevin Quashie’s concept of “quiet.”

“Quashie's work has been influential because it places Black interiority at the center of how we understand Black life,” Ardizzoni explains.

He encourages a more holistic approach to understanding the human experience, including the emotional, imaginative and reflective dimensions each of us shares.

Ardizzoni adds that these “interior worlds” shouldn’t be relegated to the side stages behind political life. Rather, they are what give us meaning and agency with which to imagine ourselves and our futures.

“Black subjectivity, in this sense, encompasses far more than public resistance. It also resides in the ordinary, intimate and deeply personal aspects of everyday life,” she adds.

This idea of “quiet” also shapes how a show like Chronicles can be understood. It isn’t a platform built to counter racism through acts of resistance or protest but rather by giving guests a space where they are simply allowed to be whole.

That dynamic is evident when listening to an episode.

“[Djumpah’s] conversations move fluidly among family, friendship, artistic practice, spirituality, work, music and memory. Listeners encounter guests as artists, daughters, friends, professionals and thinkers whose lives unfold across many registers at once,” Ardizzoni says.

Look closely, and you’ll see the same thread running through Allison’s reflection on never needing to ask permission to exist. Chronicles doesn’t ask guests to justify their belonging. It gives them a platform to make their voices and experiences heard.

Podcasts offer a comparatively more open space for experimentation. They are less constrained by editorial conventions and more conducive to conversations that develop on the speakers’ own terms."

That act of acceptance, Ardizzoni argues, is what makes the show so radical in a media landscape unaccustomed to letting Black lives simply exist.

Refusing the status quo

Ardizzoni’s latest research is one piece of a much larger exploration of contemporary Afro-Italian women artists across literature, film, photography and digital media.

“This article is part of a broader research project that culminates in my forthcoming book, Archives of Futurity: Afro-Italian Women's Imaginaries and Poetics of Refusal (2027), which will be published by Liverpool University Press in its Transnational Italian Cultures series,” she says.

At the heart of her writing is a concept she calls refusal—not just pushing back against dominant, sometimes harmful narratives, but building something new and better in their place.

“The artists I study refuse inherited ways of seeing and classifying people and identities; instead, they create spaces for different narratives, relationships and ways of belonging,” Ardizzoni says.

That sense of possibility also aligns with Ardizzoni’s hopes for how Italian media will grow in the years ahead.

“I hope we’ll move beyond thinking of diversity as a topic that surfaces only in moments of crisis or political debate,” she says. “The most interesting work being produced today (in scholarship as well as in the arts) is showing that race is a necessary lens through which we can better understand contemporary Italy.”

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CU �Ǹ�Թ� scholar Michela Ardizzoni describes how podcasting is reshaping Italy’s conversations about race.

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Top photo: Luther Yonel/Unsplash

U.S. teachers explore Taiwan with CU �Ǹ�Թ� faculty and outreach program

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 16:04:03 +0000

U.S. teachers explore Taiwan with CU �Ǹ�Թ� faculty and outreach program Rachel Sauer Mon, 09/28/2026 - 10:04

Educators from CU �Ǹ�Թ� and the �Ǹ�Թ� Valley School District at the Lady Linshui Temple in Tainan, Taiwan.

Katherine Alexander and Lynn Kalinauskas

CU �Ǹ�Թ� East Asia scholars partner with �Ǹ�Թ� Valley School District teachers to delve into the history and culture of Taiwan

Summer 2026 saw the �Ǹ�Թ�’s Program for Teaching East Asia (TEA) bring 14 secondary teachers from across the country to Taiwan to learn about the country’s history and culture. Included in the group of teachers was �Ǹ�Թ� Valley School District (BVSD) teacher Vanessa Carroll, who graduated from CU �Ǹ�Թ� with an MA in English in 2002.

Katherine Alexander (center), a CU �Ǹ�Թ� associate professor of Chinese, in front of the Grand Mazu Temple in Tainan, Taiwan.

The two-week program was a collaboration between TEA Director Lynn Kalinauskas and Anne Prescott, director of the Five College Centre for East Asian Studies at Smith College. Both were recipients of a Fulbright International Education Administrator Award to Taiwan, which helped build the ties for this summer study. They were accompanied by Katherine Alexander, associate professor of Chinese in the CU �Ǹ�Թ� Department of Asian Languages and Civilizations, who received a Fulbright Student Grant while in graduate school that supported a year of doctoral dissertation research in Taipei, Taiwan. As the scholar in residence, Alexander shared her knowledge and love of Taiwan with the teachers and provided them with background on Chinese history and culture.

Working with the Fulbright Taiwan team, the CU �Ǹ�Թ� scholars created a program and itinerary aimed at increasing teachers’ knowledge of the island. The goal was to better equip them to teach about the complex history that has forged today’s Taiwan. The group circumnavigated the island by bus, train and boat, stopping at multiple cities along the way. They were introduced to Taiwan’s indigenous cultures and its historical and political past as well as its more recent transition to democracy and modernity fueled by technological innovation.

The group made its way through historical sites and multiple museums. They wandered through streets and night markets, tasting Taiwanese food, including mango shaved ice, beef noodle soup and dumplings. As they circled the island, they also encountered some fascinating Taiwanese people who helped them understand the impact of past and present policies. The teachers saw Taiwan not only as a place impacted by history but as an ever-evolving, vibrant economic and political locus.

Taiwan’s geopolitics are a hot topic in the daily news, so this is often the first thing that we think about when its name is mentioned. In light of this, on the first day of the visit, the program brought the teachers to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Taipei to meet with Liang-Yu Wang, director general of the Department of North American Affairs. Hearing from an official who handles that dossier daily was a wonderful opportunity for teachers who are now better equipped to handle their students’ questions back in the United States.

Educators from CU �Ǹ�Թ� and the �Ǹ�Թ� Valley School District at the Lady Linshui Temple in Tainan, Taiwan.

A fraught history

Taiwan’s modern democratic government owes a debt to the victims of its authoritarian past, and the stay took participants to many places that now commemorate the tragedies of the Kuomintang martial law period, which lasted from 1949-1987. While visiting Jing-Mei White Terror Memorial Park, the group was escorted by Fred Chin, who was wrongfully imprisoned in the facility and as a political prisoner on Green Island for 12 years. He stood in the room where he had been first sentenced to death and in the cell where he was confined before his commutation and transfer to Green Island, sharing stories with the teachers about his case and how he made it through horrible years of torture and persecution.

“We were all deeply moved by his generosity,” said Kalinauskas. “He took the time to walk with us and answer many questions. He accompanied us all the way back to the bus, waving goodbye until we were gone. He understood that these were teachers who would tell his story in their classrooms so that the horrors of the times would not be forgotten.”

As the group traveled south out of the capital, they first stopped in Changhua, where they met Wu Sheng, a poet, environmental activist and advisor to the president on his family farm. Wu Sheng’s love of his land was obvious from the moment he invited the group out of the hot sun and into the shade of his beloved trees. Alexander, who translated for the meeting, was especially touched by this chance to meet him, as she has a personal connection to him through an old friend from college, another Taiwanese environmental activist who had been on the front lines of protests with Wu Sheng to defend their precious ecosystem.

�Ǹ�Թ� Valley School District educator Vanessa Carroll (left) biking in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, with Theresa Illgen (right), a program participant from New Mexico.

“Once he learned this, he welcomed me like a family friend, making me feel right at home again in Taiwan after too many years away,” she reflected. Participating teacher Vanessa Carroll noted after the trip, “Inspired by our day with the Taiwanese poet activist Wu Sheng, I've written a unit called Poetry as Green Activism: Finding Eco-Inspiration in Wu Sheng’s <My Village> which I really look forward to teaching!”

Continuing south, the group spent some time in Tainan, where Alexander guided the group through several places of worship, including two temples established in the 1600s where devotees have worshipped ever since. Alexander remarked, “Teaching teachers about these places was so gratifying because of how excited they were to apply their new knowledge and visit other temples on their own in Tainan the next day and in each new city after that. I can see how they’re always learning, just like their students.”

Exploring Taiwan

Further south in Pingtung County, the group visited the Maya Farm cocoa plantation, where they explored the tree-to-bar process. Cocoa farming is an emerging agricultural field in Taiwan. They tasted the fresh pods, smelled different beans and sipped one of the best cups of hot chocolate they ever had. The teachers learned from the farmers about the land that had been cleared of palm and beetle nut trees to make way for a new industry. They compared this experience with a more traditional farming experience in Maokong, near Taipei, where they visited a tea plantation at which five generations of the same family had worked the land for more than a century.

Caroll used every minute of her free time to explore even more: “I've lived in �Ǹ�Թ� ever since I graduated from CU, so obviously I'm into bikes. In Taiwan, at the end of each day, I'd try to find a bike to explore whatever new city we'd ended up at, and once, in massive and beautiful Kaohsiung in the far south, I was balancing between traffic lights and happened to look over and see an older gentleman wearing a University of Colorado polo shirt. We made eye contact, I gestured to my own chest, and it took him a moment, understandably, to realize I was referencing CU. He told me he went there many years ago; he studied civil engineering, and now he’s an architect. I half-joked, ‘Have you designed any buildings I'd recognize?’ and he immediately gestured broadly and turned around in a half-circle saying, ‘Yes, many here in Kaohsiung,’ as if I could throw a stone and hit one of his designs.

“The fact that I encountered this kind and possibly famous Asian architect wearing a Buffs shirt on a random, busy sidewalk roughly 7,000 flight miles from my home shows that the world can be so wildly small even when you least expect it to be, and that Taiwan really is a fascinating fusion of experiences, cultures, identities, and global interconnectivity.”

While indigenous groups, the original residents of Taiwan—before waves of migration from China began in the 1600s—now make up only 2% of the population, their histories and their contemporary ways of life remain important to building a complete picture of Taiwan’s present. Participants met with tribal elders from the Paiwan and Rukai peoples, who generously shared stories about their personal histories and how their communities continue to practice their traditions today in the face of cultural and economic challenges.

While on Taiwan’s east coast, students also visited the National Museum of Prehistory, which details with vibrant exhibits the many indigenous groups that shaped Taiwan's past and how, through these tribes, Taiwan is connected to Austronesia and global indigenous cultures even in the present.

The trip wasn’t always smooth. A typhoon hit the island while the group was in Tainan, closing most businesses and cultural sites. The ferry to Green Island was stomach-churning. And the heat and humidity were intense. But Taiwan is the birthplace of bubble tea, so there was always a way to hydrate and re-energize for yet another adventure.

As teachers start up a new fall semester, the experiences will make their way into AP world history, geography and many other classrooms where students will become more curious about Taiwan, its history and importance.

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CU �Ǹ�Թ� East Asia scholars partner with �Ǹ�Թ� Valley School District teachers to delve into the history and culture of Taiwan.

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For CU �Ǹ�Թ� alumni, art is a family matter

Rachel Sauer — Fri, 11 Sep 2026 17:42:30 +0000

For CU �Ǹ�Թ� alumni, art is a family matter Rachel Sauer Fri, 09/11/2026 - 11:42

Rachel Sauer

In recent exhibits, renowned Colorado artists Tony Ortega and Daniel Salazar explore themes of Chicano experience, historical erasure, memory, mythology and the bonds of family

Tony Ortega and Daniel Salazar did not know each other growing up in Denver. They did not cross paths at the �Ǹ�Թ�, even though many steps on those paths were similar.

They finally met through Denver’s Chicano Humanities and Arts Council, when the organization invited famed Mexican sculptor Francisco Zúñiga to Denver and Salazar and his wife, Maruca, a CU �Ǹ�Թ� MFA alumna, hosted a reception.

Maruca Salazar (left) and Daniel Salazar (right) in a Museo de las Americas gallery with their recently ended exhibit “Accidentally on Purpose – Pasó lo que tenía que pasar” celebrating 50 years of their activism and art. Maruca is a former director of Museo de las Americas. (Photo: Tony Ortega)

“That was really an era that brought artists together,” Salazar says. “And that was really also part of what we were experiencing and practicing at that time, because we were very much directed toward organizing and creating work and creating community, something that continued from our experiences at CU of organizing, working together, creating opportunities to create work and exhibit work and just making that part of our lifestyle.”

So, Ortega and Salazar met, and in that meeting there was recognition—of the inspiration to create, of activism and organizing, of El Movimiento, of art informed and inspired by history and heritage, culture and identity and, perhaps most especially, family.

Always family—in the making of art, in its display, in bonds of both birth and choice that have woven a creative tapestry across decades and been given form in the recently completed exhibit “Accidentally on Purpose – Pasó lo que tenía que pasar” at Museo de las Americas in Denver, celebrating 50 years of Daniel and Maruca Salazar’s activism and art; and in “Tres Voces, Un Corazón,” currently showing at the �Ǹ�Թ� Museum of Contemporary Art.

“Tres Voces, Un Corazón” highlights the work of Ortega, his wife, Sylvia Montero, and their son, Cipriano Ortega. The exhibit, guest curated by Maruca Salazar, in part explores what is passed between generations and how even in families, identity does not have to mean identical.

And in both exhibits, themes of Chicano experience, Indigenous identity, historical erasure, memory, mythology, community and creating home—themes that in many ways began to find form for Salazar and Ortega as young activists and artists at CU �Ǹ�Թ�.

The path to CU �Ǹ�Թ�

Before they began to flourish as artists and activists in the Chicano cultural renaissance that grew in the 1970s, however, Salazar and Ortega were two kids growing up in Denver—six years apart in age but experiencing similar trajectories.

Let the muse move you

Cipriano Ortega and his band Los Lo Los will perform at the �Ǹ�Թ� Museum of Contemporary Art at 6 p.m. Saturday.

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Salazar was born in Denver in 1952 and Ortega moved to the city as a young child from Pecos, New Mexico, and both were Baby Boomers who navigated their Mexican heritage as American boys who loved to run around and play sports and get up to things in neighborhoods where many of the adults acted as auxiliary parents.

Salazar was in one of the first graduating classes from John F. Kennedy High School and studied at Pamona College in California before losing his financial aid and dropping out to pursue work as a real estate photographer. However, “my brother five years older than I was had attended CU, and I used to go and visit him and marvel at what college life was like there. I was very intrigued by the �Ǹ�Թ� scene in those days.”

Ortega, coming up six years later, remembers touring the CU �Ǹ�Թ� campus as a senior at East High School—inspired, in part, by a fascination with the football team’s lauded running back Bobby Anderson.

Even though Salazar and Ortega studied at CU �Ǹ�Թ� several years apart, they were there in the heady 1970s, when Chicano activism was gaining momentum and intensity on campuses across the United States. Both were involved with United Mexican American Students (UMAS) and the El Diario de la Gente student newspaper, and Salazar was an undergraduate student during the time of Los Seis de �Ǹ�Թ�—when, over the course of 48 hours in May 1974, two car bombs killed six people, five of whom were CU �Ǹ�Թ� students or alumni, who were involved in El Movimiento Chicano social justice movement.

Cipriano Ortega (left), Tony Ortega (center) and Sylvia Montero (right) at their “Tres Voces, Un Corazón” exhibit showing through Sunday at the �Ǹ�Թ� Museum of Contemporary Art. (Photo: �Ǹ�Թ� Museum of Contemporary Art)

Not long after the tragedies of those days, Salazar traveled to Xalapa, the capital of Mexico’s Veracruz state, to study. It was a strange time to be away from �Ǹ�Թ�, Salazar recalls.

“The aftermath of Los Seis and other events made things kind of tense, kind of heightened,” he says. “It was a period of a lot of political protest and activity, a lot of activism and organizing, so it was an interesting time to step away from what was happening in �Ǹ�Թ�.”

Several years later, Ortega also studied in Xalapa, a natural progression of his Latin American studies and, in a way, to “see how Mexican I was,” Ortega recalls. “I think both Daniel and I ended up finding out how American we were.”

While studying Spanish, anthropology, history and other subjects, both lived with local families and “really integrated into Mexican society,” Ortega says, experiences that have informed his and Salazar’s artwork in various ways—from occasional experiences of feeling very Mexican in the United States to not feeling Mexican enough in Mexico, to navigating and claiming their Mexican heritage while exploring their Chicano identities. And in Salazar’s case, the time in Xalapa included meeting Maruca, the woman who became his wife.

‘Let the muse move you’

After graduating CU �Ǹ�Թ�—Salazar in communications and Ortega in business Spanish and Latin American studies—both Salazar and Ortega pursued creative careers. Salazar worked in photography, journalism and filmmaking and Ortega, who earned an associate degree in fine art from the Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design in 1982 and his MFA from CU �Ǹ�Թ� in 1995, became a professor of fine art at Regis University.

And they both married artists and grew their artistic reputations in Denver’s vibrant arts community, so it’s only natural that art has been a language and lineage of family.

As organizers and activists, their art explores themes including immigration, gender roles, historical erasure and identity. And it has never shied away from topics that aren’t easy to face. “Accidentally on Purpose – Pasó lo que tenía que pasar” featured Salazar’s work Grand Poobah and Office Fairy Cut Through Red Tape, a digital photograph mural featuring a 1941 photograph of federal office workers to whom Salazar added a crown and fairy wings.

The piece was controversial enough when it was hung in Denver’s Wellington E. Webb Municipal Office Building that even The Denver Post editorialized against it on behalf of aggrieved government employees.

“Government employees didn’t like it very much,” Salazar recalls, “but I think most people’s experiences are with the red tape and feeling like they can’t do anything about it.”

“It’s meant as satire,” Maruca Salazar says.

And “Tres Voces, Un Corazón” includes Ortega’s work El Grito de Guadalupe, which portrays Our Lady of Guadalupe in a pose reminiscent of Edvard Munch’s The Scream. Beneath her on the floor is a sculpture of baby Jesus in a cage.

“To be meaningful, art should represent and reflect the time we’re in,” Ortega explains, adding that art also is a medium for exploring and understanding identity.

“Tres Voces, Un Corazón” also includes Montero’s series “Gaan”—collages showing different aspects of southwest Native dance and reflecting both her Apache heritage and her training with the Martha Graham Dance Company.

Tony Ortega notes that while each of the three artists in the family work on different levels of their Denver home, and while each has a strong individual artistic identity, the threads of family are woven throughout “Tres Voces, Un Corazón.”

In Cipriano Ortega’s installation Lo Lo House, in which he and his band Los Lo Los will perform at 6 p.m. Saturday, one of his poems scrolls down a wall: “To build a house, to build a home. To build a house. To build a home. Let the muse move you.”

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Maruca Salazar and Daniel Salazar, American Me, 2000, mixed-media installation (folkloric dresses and photography)

Tony Ortega, El Vez, 2019, etching and watercolor

Daniel Salazar (left) and Maruca Salazar (center) with Daniel's work Grand Poobah and Office Fairy Cut Through Red Tape.

Sylvia Montero, They Came by Ships, monotype and collage

Daniel Salazar, Westside Dreams (National Chicano Dance Theater), 1979, print on fabric

(Left to right) Tony Ortega, Anton, 2021, digital photo on papel amate; Tony Ortega, Cipriano, 2024, digital photo on papel amate; Tony Ortega, Cheyenne, 2021, digital photo on papel amate

In recent exhibits, renowned Colorado artists Tony Ortega and Daniel Salazar explore themes of Chicano experience, historical erasure, memory, mythology and the bonds of family.

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Top image: The pieces (left to right) Anton, Cipriano and Cheynne by Tony Ortega

CU historian offers view on how 9/11 changed the Middle East

Brad Worrell — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 17:28:57 +0000

CU historian offers view on how 9/11 changed the Middle East Brad Worrell Wed, 09/09/2026 - 11:28

Bradley Worrell

Twenty-five years after the terrorist attacks, Middle East expert John M. Willis says 9/11 did not fundamentally reinvent U.S. policy in the region but it did remove political constraints and accelerate changes

If there is one misconception about the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that �Ǹ�Թ� historian John M. Willis would like to challenge, it is the idea that those attacks fundamentally reinvented U.S. policy in the Middle East.

Willis, whose research focus is on the modern Middle East, was living in Yemen on a Fullbright fellowship when the 9/11 attacks occurred. He recalls attending a town hall at the U.S. embassy a few days later, where he asked the ambassador if the U.S. would present its evidence for who it saw as being responsible for the attacks and if it would seek to build international community support for any actions it would take. He says the ambassador responded bluntly that the U.S. would not wait to respond.

That idea, as later articulated in more detail by the George W. Bush administration, was that the U.S. could react unilaterally—and preemptively—against any perceived threats, Willis says. Rather than following the established rules-based international order, Bush’s declaration put forth the idea “that the U.S. presented itself as above or beyond international laws,” he adds.

John M. Willis is a CU �Ǹ�Թ� history professor whose expertise is in the Middle East.

Officially, that represented a new policy for the U.S., but Willis says conservative think tanks had been laying the groundwork for such a change for at least two decades prior to the terrorist attacks.

‘Global War on Terror’

The first phase of the American response to the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City and Pentagon in Washington, D.C., focused on Afghanistan, where al-Qaeda had established its base under Taliban protection.

For many Americans, the invasion of Afghanistan appeared to have a clear objective: dismantle the organization responsible for the attacks and prevent future acts of terrorism. But Willis argues that the U.S. government’s response quickly expanded into something much broader.

He says the idea of a “Global War on Terror” evolved beyond al-Qaeda and became a framework for understanding a wide range of international challenges. Terrorism, he explains, became the central lens through which policymakers viewed the Middle East.

Willis says that broader approach helped pave the way for the 2003 invasion of Iraq—even though there was no evidence linking al-Qaeda and the Arab dictatorship.

Long before the 9/11 attacks, Willis says influential neo-conservatives associated with the Project for a New American Century had been advocating for a more muscular U.S. foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East. After the first Gulf War, many prominent neo-cons argued that defeating Saddam Hussein’s regime would create a “massive domino effect in the Middle East that would lead to the emergence of liberal democracy, free market capitalism and so on,” Willis says.

He adds that neo-con ambitions did not end with Iraq, noting that in the months following 9/11 President Bush described America as being in conflict with an “Axis of Evil” that included Iran.

In the days following 9/11, Willis says using language like Axis of Evil and Global War on Terror made it nearly impossible for Americans to challenge the direction in which the country was headed.

How

How have anti-Muslim backlash and stereotypes affected Muslim Americans in the 25 years since 9/11? CU �Ǹ�Թ� researcher Lori Peek asks how a nation of hundreds of millions of people from different backgrounds can live together, understand one another and build a shared future.

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“If you think back to that period, it was really difficult to speak against this idea of the Global War on Terror. It was a really constrained rhetorical and political environment if you were opposed to U.S. military intervention,” he says.

Unintended rise of Iran

Perhaps one of the great ironies of the post-9/11 era, Willis says, is that efforts intended to strengthen American influence in the Middle East by overthrowing the Iraqi government instead helped Iran expand its power in the region.

The removal of Saddam Hussein, a Sunni Muslim, eliminated one of the most important rivals of Iran, a Shia-majority country. In the political vacuum that followed, Shiite parties and movements—many of which had longstanding ties with Iran—gained prominence in Iraq, Willis says.

“By around 2003, when we have the first beginning of a democratic process in Iraq following the U.S. invasion, it was clear to every policy specialist that any new government would be dominated by Shiite political parties,” he says. Unfortunately for the United States, its leaders weren’t listening to what those policy specialists had to say at the time, he adds.

This development, Willis argues, illustrates the difficulty of predicting how major interventions will reshape regional politics.

Meanwhile, for Sunni-led Gulf monarchies such as Saudi Arabia, Iran’s strengthened position was a source of deep concern.

“The 1979 (Iranian) revolution was a popular revolution that unseated a monarch supported by the U.S.,” Willis says. “And in the 1980s, there were a number of local movements within the Gulf regimes’ own Shiite populations inspired by Iran, including Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. For the longest time, Gulf states had seen Iran as an exporter of revolution, so the rise of the Shiite-led government in Iraq made that threat palpable.”

Two key developments

Meanwhile, the U.S. was not the only government taking action in the Middle East following 9/11 in the name of combating terrorism. Willis says many Arab states quickly recognized that by presenting domestic opposition groups as terrorist threats they could justify crackdowns while avoiding international criticism.

“Effectively, it gave the green light to massive waves of repression across the region,” he says. “Gulf states could not only get U.S. support, but also military and financial aid to combat terrorism when it was, in effect, combating domestic enemies. So, it effectively worked against any form of democratic reform or democratic culture.”

The result, Willis contends, was the strengthening of authoritarian governments across the region.

Beyond the optics of standing with Arab governments pledging to fight terrorism, Willis says the U.S. was in no position to criticize those countries because it directly benefited from those relationships. Specifically, some Arab governments like Jordan helped the U.S. infiltrate al-Qaeda while others hosted CIA-operated “black sites” where security services sought to extract intelligence from al-Qaeda prisoners in ways that would have been illegal in the U.S.

Willis says one of the other key developments that indirectly resulted from 9/11 was that, with Iran’s increased influence in the region following the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, the existing relationship between Israel and the Gulf countries was effectively brought out into the open.

“I think the U.S. relationship has stayed roughly the same with the Gulf states, with minor exceptions, but I think it did help cement the relationship with Israel and the Gulf states,” he says.

The ‘Arab Spring’ challenge

If the 2003 Iraq War revealed the unintended consequences of intervention, Willis says the ‘Arab Spring’ that gained momentum in 2011 exposed the limitations of a regional order built primarily on security partnerships.

An Arab Spring protest in Egypt. The movement exposed the limitations of a regional order built primarily on security partnerships, says CU �Ǹ�Թ� scholar John M. Willis. (Photo: MidoSemsem/Shutterstock)

He argues that many U.S. leaders underestimated popular frustration throughout the Middle East. That’s because those leaders, Republicans and Democrats alike, tend to equate a country’s leadership with its citizens, when none of the authoritarian governments in power are popular with their citizenry, he says.

In countries such as Tunisia and Egypt, mass movements demanded political reform, greater accountability and expanded economic opportunities. Protesters demonstrated that public opinion remained a powerful force despite oppression, Willis says.

He says the Obama administration had an opportunity to support the 2011 Egyptian revolution that supplanted Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, a historic ally of the U.S. and Israel, but opted not to. Instead, it tacitly endorsed the military coup in 2013 that removed the Muslim Brotherhood from power.

For Willis, the Arab Spring revealed a fundamental contradiction in U.S. policy.

“Promoting democracy or human rights has never been a priority for the U.S. in the Middle East. It simply hasn’t,” he says bluntly. “If we go to the post-World War II period, when we really see the emergence of the U.S. role in the Middle East, it was about Cold War alliances and concerns; it was the domination of energy resources and military alliances meant to marginalize the allies of the Soviet Union in the region. Post-1967, it was about the strong alliance with Israel more than anything. So, we really don’t see a concerted effort to promote democracy or human rights.”

Willis says he believes U.S. policymakers still have not learned the lesson that security arrangements with Arab governments could prove fragile when the underlying grievances of those countries’ citizens remain unresolved.

A legacy still unfolding

More than two decades after 9/11, Willis believes the consequences of America’s actions after the terrorist attacks continue to shape the Middle East.

He is not confident that the U.S. has learned any lessons from its past military intervention in the region based on the Trump administration’s decision earlier this year to join Israel in launching a sneak attack on Iran, seeking to overthrow the Islamic republic’s government by eliminating its top leadership.

Willis says such an action reflects a mindset that has persisted since 9/11: that American military power alone can successfully manage the Middle East’s most difficult challenges. He warns that, historically, such confidence has often produced outcomes very different from those that policymakers originally intended.

Meanwhile, the idea of a Global War on Terror has not gone away—and the repercussions of that exist far beyond the Middle East, according to Willis.

“I think one thing we have not fully contended with here is we’re seeing the growing surveillance state and much harsher responses to civil disobedience and protest,” he says. “It is something that has grown out of this idea of a Global War on Terror, which becomes existential in a way that a war between countries can’t, because it’s not geographically bounded. Terror can exist everywhere and anywhere. It can exist outside the U.S. and in the most American places in the North American continent. I think that still lives with us in the most unfortunate way.”

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Twenty-five years after the terrorist attacks, Middle East expert John M. Willis says 9/11 did not fundamentally reinvent policy in the region but did remove political constraints and accelerate changes.

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Top photo: U.S. National Archives

Mao still casts a long shadow

Rachel Sauer — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 13:00:42 +0000

Mao still casts a long shadow Rachel Sauer Fri, 09/04/2026 - 07:00

Bradley Worrell

Five decades after his death, Mao Zedong remains the face of modern China, yet CU �Ǹ�Թ� historian William Wei argues his rise to power was never inevitable and neither is the verdict on his legacy

Mao Zedong remains one of the most prominent political figures in modern history. Fifty years after his death, his embalmed body still lies in state in Tiananmen Square, his enormous portrait continues to hang over the Gate of Heavenly Peace, his face appears on the country’s currency and Chinese schoolchildren are still taught that he was the founding leader who reunified and transformed the nation.

Mao’s omnipresence can create the impression that his rise to power was inevitable. However, reflecting on Mao’s legacy today—five decades since his death Sept. 9, 1976, at age 82—his place in history was never assured, argues William Wei, a �Ǹ�Թ� Department of History professor who is an expert on modern China.

“One of the things I teach my students is that nothing is historically inevitable—and that is certainly the case with Mao’s rise to power,” he says. “If you study Chinese history, you see that his rise to leadership within the Chinese Communist Party unfolded over about a decade. It was driven by a combination of strategic skill, organization building, ideological innovation and, quite frankly, intra-party struggles that involved the purging of rivals.”

CU �Ǹ�Թ� historian William Wei studies modern China, including the legacy of Mao Zedong.

Mao’s rise was never guaranteed

In fact, far from being recognized as leader of the communist movement in China initially, Wei says Mao in the early 1930s was sidelined by rivals known as the “28 Bolsheviks”—communist leaders trained in Moscow who adhered more closely to orthodox Marxist-Leninist doctrine of organizing urban workers to create a revolution.

Wei says the turning point came in 1935 following the Long March—one of the defining episodes in Communist Party history. After anti-communist nationalist forces overran the communist base in Jiangxi Province, Mao led his Red Army soldiers on a grueling 6,000-mile retreat over some of China’s most difficult terrain to escape encirclement and destruction.

According to Wei, the march was devastating from a military standpoint, with communists losing roughly seven-eighths of their forces. “But they survived, and for the Chinese communists, survival was a form of victory,” he adds.

Even then, Wei says Mao’s emergence was not the result of a sudden triumph but a long process. After communist forces under other leaders lost battles to the country’s nationalist forces, Wei says Mao’s rivals effectively ceded military leadership to him.

Mao also distinguished himself through ideological innovation, Wei says. While orthodox Marxists emphasized that the urban working class would form the revolutionary vanguard, Mao instead argued that China’s overwhelmingly rural population made the peasantry the natural engine for revolution. Wei says Mao’s emphasis on rural peasants as the agents of change helped establish an ideological identity known as “Maoism” that was distinct from both his domestic rivals like the 28 Bolsheviks as well as Soviet orthodoxy.

War, occupation and revolution

With the start of the Second Sino-Japanese War in July 1937, the nationalists and communists largely halted their fighting to focus on combatting the Japanese invaders. While the nationalists tended to engage in pitched battles with the Japanese, Mao’s communists employed hit-and-run tactics associated with guerrilla warfare.

“This strategy preserved the communist party’s strength, as the nationalists bore the brunt of the fighting,” Wei says. “(Nationalists) fought most of the major battles against the Japanese and consequently suffered most of the defeats as well.”

A propaganda image of Mao Zedong from 1967.

By emphasizing guerrilla warfare, recruiting peasants and expanding the party organization throughout rural China, Wei says Mao transformed a weakened movement into a formidable political and military force. Between 1937 and 1940, Chinese Communist Party membership grew from 40,000 to 800,000.

When Japan’s defeat ended World War II in August 1945, the nationalists and communists renewed their fighting. Here again, Wei argues that Mao’s success was never guaranteed.

The nationalists initially held several advantages. They possessed larger forces, better equipment and support from the United States. But Wei says the nationalists were also weakened by corruption, declining public support and incompetence in administering the country’s economy.

The communists, in contrast, entered the conflict stronger than they had been at any point since the Long March, and by the late 1940s the balance shifted decisively in Mao’s favor, Wei says. In 1949, Mao proclaimed the founding of the People’s Republic of China, with the communist victory marking one of the most remarkable political reversals of the 20th century, Wei says.

Korea and Mao’s emergence as a global leader

Mao’s stature expanded beyond China’s borders almost immediately after the communist victory. The Korean War became the first major international test of the new regime and played a crucial role in shaping’s Mao’s standing at home and abroad, Wei says.

He notes that both Mao and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin were initially reluctant to support North Korean leader Kim Il-sung’s plans to militarily reunify the Korean Peninsula. Kim convinced them that he could strike quickly and that America would not intervene.

However, America did intervene on behalf of South Korea. And once American-led forces under Gen. Douglas MacArthur reversed North Korea’s initial victories and advanced toward the Yalu River—the border separating Korea from China’s industrial heartland in Manchuria—Chinese leaders viewed that as an unacceptable threat, Wei says.

Although Chinese forces were poorly equipped and lacked air support, Wei says that by their sheer numbers (more than 250,000 soldiers) and with the element of surprise, they decimated the U.S. Army contingent and pushed American forces back to the 38th parallel. The war eventually settled into a costly stalemate.

Politically, however, the war produced significant benefits for Mao, Wei says. He argues that Mao’s reputation was enhanced because China managed to fight the strongest post-World War II power to a standstill. The conflict elevated not only Mao’s prestige but also the People’s Republic by demonstrating that it could not be dismissed as a weak or a subordinate power, Wei says.

The war also reshaped China’s Cold War relationships. Wei says Stalin’s view of Mao improved after China’s willingness to confront the United States, while the conflict poisoned the country’s relations with Washington for decades, until rapprochement in the 1970s and the normalization of relations in January 1979.

Building a new China

“Mao left behind a complicated legacy,” says CU �Ǹ�Թ� historian William Wei. “But I stand by my original assertion that he was, to use the Chinese formula, seven parts wrong and only three parts right."

With the victory over the nationalists, Mao was able to impose his stamp on China. Even Wei, who is a critic of Mao, acknowledges his many accomplishments. Mao is remembered for ending what the Chinese call the “Century of Humiliation”—a period during which Western powers and Japan dominated large portions of China. Mao reunified a fragmented country after decades of warlordism, civil conflict and foreign invasion. For millions of Chinese, this achievement alone secured his place in history, Wei says.

The early years of communist rule brought significant social reforms. Perhaps most notably, Wei notes that land redistribution programs transferred land to hundreds of millions of peasants. He also credits the new government with launching a successful industrialization campaign, expanding public health initiatives, increasing access to education and implementing legal reforms designed to improve the status of women. Additionally, the country’s literacy rates improved dramatically, infant mortality declined and new public health programs reached rural communities for the first time.

At the same time, Wei emphasizes that many of these achievements came at an extraordinary human cost. He notes that land reform redistributed property on a massive scale, but at the cost of upwards of a million landlords as well as others targeted as “class enemies.” Meanwhile, industrialization generated rapid economic growth, yet it unfolded within an authoritarian framework that tolerated little dissent.

Twin tragedies

The darkest chapters of Mao’s rule came with the Great Leap Forward starting in 1958 and the Cultural Revolution starting in 1966. Wei describes the Great Leap Forward as a man-made catastrophe, as land collectivization policies, unrealistic farm production quotas and widespread falsification of agricultural data combined to create a disaster that by some estimates resulted in 35 million to 45 million deaths—making it one of the deadliest policy failures in human history.

The Cultural Revolution inflicted a different kind of damage. Initiated after Mao’s standing had been weakened by the failures of the Great Leap Forward, Wei says it was both a political power struggle and an ideological crusade, as Mao sought to eliminate rivals and prevent what he viewed as a drift toward capitalism.

“One of the things Mao believed was in his theory of continuous revolution,” Wei explains. “Permanent revolution believes the revolution never ends, even when you have a seizure of state power, because the party, in this case the Chinese Communist Party, could itself become a new ruling class.”

Wei says the campaign produced persecution and social chaos, as cultural and religious sites were destroyed, schools and universities were shut down and an entire generation lost years of educational opportunity.

For that reason, Wei sharply disagrees with the Chinese Communist Party’s official verdict that Mao was “70% right and 30% wrong.” He reverses that formula, arguing Mao was “70% wrong and 30% right.” While recognizing Mao’s role in reunifying China and advancing certain social reforms, he insists that Mao must be held responsible for the immense anguish caused by his policies.

“Mao left behind a complicated legacy,” Wei says. “But I stand by my original assertion that he was, to use the Chinese formula, seven parts wrong and only three parts right. As a historian, I’m not going to let him escape responsibility for the millions of deaths and all the suffering he caused.”

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Two artists walk into a palazzo…

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 23:07:55 +0000

Two artists walk into a palazzo… Rachel Sauer Mon, 08/31/2026 - 17:07

Rachel Sauer

CU �Ǹ�Թ� alumna Martha Russo and Professor Emeritus George Rivera currently are displaying art pieces in Venice, Italy, in an exhibit organized by the European Cultural Centre

Let’s wander, as the title of Martha Russo’s work might advise, to a bright, airy space in the Palazzo Mora in Venice, Italy.

There, on a short white platform, is “nomos (cube Venezia),” Russo’s three-dimensional piece sculpted from porcelain, paper clay, wood, metal and paper, among other materials. Its title is derived from the Greek root for “nomad” and can be translated as “to wander” and “to wonder.”

There are a lot of things to feel and question while observing this piece—in person or from every angle in photographs. Is it reaching for the viewer? Sending shoots and tendrils toward them? Does a brief glance from the corner of the eye reveal that it’s actually moving? Are its thousands of pieces a living ecosystem?

George Rivera (left) and Martha Russo (right) outside the Palazzo Mora in Venice, Italy, where their works are featured in the Personal Structures – Confluences exhibit on display through Nov. 22.

In a gallery next door, a different experience: 16 two-dimensional, 11x14 pieces tiled on a wall in an array of earth tones that speak of the Amazonian plants from which the inks were made.

And in the images themselves, a journey through the liminal space between consciousness and unconsciousness, shapes and figures whose meaning may depend on the viewer, giving rise to the title “Mutations: Subconscious Reality Imagery.” Artist George Rivera writes, “These images appear as figurations resembling reality but manifest themselves as completely different in form and color.”

Both pieces are featured in the Personal Structures – Confluences exhibit on display through Nov. 22 in Venice, organized by the European Cultural Centre (ECC) and held concurrently with the famed Venice Biennale international art exhibition. And both pieces have long roots that stretch to the �Ǹ�Թ�.

Russo (MFA’95), whose piece has been shortlisted for the ECC Awards that will be announced in November, is an art and art history alumnus who has shown around the world and who also teaches an interdisciplinary CU �Ǹ�Թ� course called Art, Design and Engineering, in which a cohort of upper-level art, environmental design and engineering students learn about sculpture and public installation.

Rivera is a professor emeritus of art and art history—a sociologist by training who pivoted to art and in 1996 became one of the founders, with several CU �Ǹ�Թ� colleagues, of the Artnauts collective, whose more than 220 participating artists, including Russo, have worked across art, activism, social practice, peace building and global issues around the world.

As for how their work came to be in a centuries-old palazzo in Venice, well, the art world is small, and it started with an interview.

Enjoying the physical challenges of art

In 2020, writer Ann Landi interviewed Russo for Sculpture magazine. By that point, Russo had grown an international reputation as an artist—showing around the world, known for large-scale pieces that blend media, particularly ceramics, and incorporate abstract shapes that reference the natural world, animal and human forms and fantastical imagery and imaginings.

"I really enjoy the physical challenges of my work,” Russo told Landi. “I also like the science behind it. I was a developmental biology and psychology major, and I had my eye on going to medical school or becoming a psychologist. I was drawn to the materiality and the chemistry of clay.

"nomos (cube Venezia)” by Martha Russo "explores how the abstraction of form, material and gravity couple with a cacophony of color and texture to generate openings for prolonged investigations and enticing a flood of interpretations," Russo explains. (Photo: Matteo Losurdo)

“I loved the idea that you could make clay do different things because of the molecular structure, and that structure made perfect sense to me because I was looking at molecules and thinking about how things generate in the body. The chemistry behind the glazes was also fascinating. To this day, I am drawn to those mysteries and all the infinite possibilities.”

Part of Russo’s interest in the mechanics of the body, she says, arose from a career-ending injury that took her from 1984 U.S. Olympic field hockey hopeful to a Princeton senior recovering from surgery and increasingly drawn to the physical nature of sculpture and ceramics.

In 1991, she and her husband, Joe Ryan, a CU �Ǹ�Թ� professor of environmental engineering, moved from New Jersey to �Ǹ�Թ�, and several years later Russo began her MFA studies. She taught for 20 years at the Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design, growing her art practice and reputation at the same time and becoming known for her large-scale pieces incorporating hundreds or thousands of pieces that allude to natural forms.

Then came the interview in Sculpture magazine—not her first, but it was the one that caught the eye of ECC curators. They contacted her and asked if she’d be interested in showing in Venice, and they also looked into her colleagues and collaborators, including Rivera.

“Obviously you say yes when you get an invitation like that,” Russo says with a laugh. She immediately began envisioning what she would create for Personal Structures – Confluences.

Celebrate the Artnauts!

The exhibit "Rhizome: Origins" opens with a community celebration Thursday, Sept. 3, and honors 30 years of Artnauts.

Learn more

“I was thinking, ‘I’m going to make a cube, but I want to have four very different experiences on each side,” she explains. “Venice is the most visually stunning place, full of texture, full of color, full of exuberance, so I took all the greatest hits from all past iterations of ‘nomos’ and made a piece that’s very vibrant, colorful, lots of movement with the pieces. I also asked if I could have natural light in the gallery, and they really gave George and me such great spaces.

“They did tell me that outside the (gallery) window I would see a very recently renovated pink and white palazzo and they sent me a picture, so I made a bunch of pink pieces that, when you’re looking at my piece, you see that palazzo. A lot of the time you put up your work and you’re like, ‘I wish I’d done this, I wish I’d done that.’ This is one of the few times I said, ‘I think I just did exactly what I wanted to do,’ and I couldn’t be happier, honestly.”

In “Mutations: Subconscious Reality Imagery” by George Rivera, "images appear as figurations resembling reality but manifest themselves as completely different in form and color," Rivera says.

‘This is reality’

For Rivera, the road to Venice began in Glidden, Texas, where he grew up in poverty with a Mexican mother and a Mexican-American father. He was the first in his family to attend college, where he was able to name and study the disparities and injustices he’d grown up seeing. He pursued sociology, he says, because he wanted to understand racism.

After coming to CU �Ǹ�Թ� as a sociology faculty member, Rivera transferred to the Department of Art and Art History after disagreeing with how department decisions were being made, he says. He had studied Chicano art, but says he truly began to understand art as a force for activism, social practice and peace building when he was immersed in it.

In 1996, Rivera and colleagues Garrison Roots, Beth Krensky, Dennis Dalton and Luis Valdovino founded Artnauts, a collective that evolved over time into an artistic force that brings art into places fractured by violence, disaster or upheaval, Rivera explains. Artnauts shows frequently are comprised of two-dimensional prints that can fit into a suitcase on their way to places like Ukraine, Palestine, Colombia or the demilitarized zone at the North Korea-South Korea border.

“It’s the idea that art can be a language all people speak,” Rivera says.

In fact, the idea for “Mutations: Subconscious Reality Imagery” has as one of its roots an experience Rivera had while in Palestine with Artnauts: “We go to places where there’s been social trauma, where things have happened that represent the inhumanity of man against man. So, I was there staying at The Walled Off Hotel in Bethlehem that is owned by Bansky, and it’s located right next to the Aida Refugee Camp.

“While I was there, Israeli forces shot gas cannisters into the camp, and I was inside the hotel and hotel personnel told me, ‘Don’t go outside because your lungs are going to burn and eyes are going to burn.' So, I went back to my room, and I had olive oil made by Palestinians and wine made by Palestinians, and I always bring some paper and some brushes with me, so I used the wine and olive oil and started making images. That’s when the idea occurred to me, to use something that’s indigenous to the area to paint with.”

So, when he later was in Colombia at El Centro de Memoria, Paz y Reconciliación in Bogotá and met a shaman of the Huitoto tribe who invited him into the Amazon rainforest, he learned about inks made from plants that grow there and since then has created a significant body of work with them.

Rivera’s work in Venice harkens to the Artnauts format of two-dimensional pieces that can easily be carried in a suitcase and is titled “Mutations” because, he says, he sees the pieces “as derived from the subconscious, and the subconscious to me is something that exists between consciousness and the unconscious. Right before consciousness enters in, the subconscious is trying to make sense of what it sees. It’s coming up with these images before it locks in and says, ‘This is reality.’

“To me, when I was in the rainforest that idea occurred to me, I looked at what was happening to the rainforest, and I was seeing these things that are not representations of what was in front of me; I was looking through a subconscious lens. That is when, to me, you turn to the spirituality of an object, of a people, you see the spiritual representations before we tell ourselves what reality is.”

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CU �Ǹ�Թ� alumna Martha Russo and Professor Emeritus George Rivera currently are displaying art pieces in Venice, Italy, in an exhibit organized by the European Cultural Centre.

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Top photo: European Cultural Centre

It’s more than just feeling good or bad

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 21:23:04 +0000

It’s more than just feeling good or bad Rachel Sauer Mon, 08/31/2026 - 15:23

Rachel Sauer

In her recently published book, CU �Ǹ�Թ� scholar Antje Richter explores health and the art of living through illness narratives of early medieval China

In his masterpiece The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons, Chinese monk and court librarian Liu Xie observed, “If we melt away our vital energies and cramp the harmonious flow of our vital breath, then holding the writing tablet will hasten our death, and moistening the brush will hack away at our life.”

This might have been a surprising observation from one of the most eminent writers of his time, but nurturing life has long been central to Chinese thought, says Antje Richter, a �Ǹ�Թ� professor of Chinese in the Department of Asian Languages and Civilizations. In fact, ideas about health and illness significantly shaped the literature and culture of the early Chinese medieval era—about 200 CE to 600 CE. And Liu Xie, who was mainly concerned with writers of literature, may have been the first to present advice about writers’ and knowledge workers’ occupational health.

CU �Ǹ�Թ� scholar Antje Richter is a professor of Chinese whose research focus includes early medieval Chinese literature.

In her recent book Health and the Art of Living: Illness Narratives in Early Medieval Chinese Literature, Richter explores how themes of health and illness are woven through the literature of the era, from informal letters between friends to sacred texts and the highly regarded genre of sickbed poetry.

“We as humans are not either healthy or unhealthy,” Richter says. “We are constantly adapting to new states of our body. This is interesting to me as a challenge that we are all facing in one way or the other. And it's not a binary; it's a graduated scale that's constantly evolving.

“In one of the chapters, I write about Sima Qian, the father of Chinese historiography, who was famously emasculated as corporal punishment but chose not to end his life, as was expected of him, but continued working on The Records of the Historian. He didn’t die of the punitive mutilation he suffered, but he coped. He finished this groundbreaking historical work, and everybody in China knows him and his story because we also have one of the letters he wrote. So, I use his example to say adaptation to new states of health is possible and that in the literature of this time we have a very nuanced understanding of what it means to be healthy or well.”

Discovering narratives of health and illness

Richter, whose research focus is the early medieval era in China, came upon this significant theme in Chinese literature while writing her previous book, Letters and Epistolary Culture in Medieval China.

“We have thousands of letters transmitted from that period, and among those letters there was a good portion that mentioned illness, and I found it quite interesting,” Richter explains. “There’s one celebrated calligrapher, Wang Xizhi, and much of what he wrote was transmitted and not thrown away. Even if he wrote, ‘I have terrible diarrhea,’ that letter was preserved.”

During her time researching that book, Richter collaborated with a longtime friend in �Ǹ�Թ�, Charles “Chip” Chace, who was a Chinese medicine practitioner, to unlock those letters of Wang Xizhi that deal with illness.

Richter’s research of Wang Xizhi’s letters led her, in 2011, to apply for a grant to study for a semester at the Needham Research Institute, which was founded by famed sinologist and historian of Chinese science Joseph Needham.

“This was when I realized, oh, it’s not only letters that have these illness narratives, but also biographies and poetry and religious texts and stories,” Richter says.

“It’s easy to lose sight of the fact that the hallowed writers of old clearly understood themselves as living, thriving, aging and, often enough, also suffering bodies,” says Antje Richter.

Richter points to the painting on the cover of her book to describe her main intentions in writing it. The painting, held in the Smithsonian’s collection, shows the beloved early medieval poet Tao Qian—also known as Tao Yuanming—being carried in a basket because he was suffering from a foot illness and could not walk on his own. This detail of Tao Qian’s life is reported in early biographies, and in later centuries became popular in painting as well.

Richter says that to her mind, this episode shows that illness sits right in the middle of life and in the middle of Chinese literature and culture—and that she wanted to emphasize this fact and to help connect medieval Chinese studies to the global medical humanities.

How to live

Surviving texts of the literature of early medieval China, including letters, indicate that openly discussing topics of health or illness carried little or no taboo in certain genres, such as letters, Richter says, while high-register poetry only alluded to mundane or graphic physical aspects of life.

Further, Richter believes that the growing esteem of the literary genre of sickbed poetry in medieval China was inspired by Buddhism, particularly the Vimalakirti Sutra, a Buddhist text expounding on ideas of emptiness and the appearances of the world as mere illusions.

Several chapters of the Vimalakirti Sutra are set at the sickbed of a lay Buddhist, who feigns illness so people will come to his bedside and he can preach.

“Then, he and the visitors that come to his sickbed have conversations about, oh, this body is like a bit of foam that cannot be grasped, this body is like a cloud which changes and disappears in an instant, and Chinese poets were very inspired by that,” Richter says. “So, we have this genre of sickbed poetry that first only reflects on the joys of sick leave and the company of friends during this time, but later also on illnesses that ravaged the body and the illusion of existence, the temporariness of our existence.”

Richter notes that while a significant body of illness narratives from the early medieval era have survived, they generally are the narratives of wealthy and connected men. Despite these limitations, Richter says, illness narratives wove with common threads of human experience.

She says she hopes that readers will come away from the book with a strong sense of the lived reality in the Chinese Middle Ages. “It’s easy to lose sight of the fact that the hallowed writers of old clearly understood themselves as living, thriving, aging and, often enough, also suffering bodies,” she says.

“We share many of their concerns: how easy it is to overwork ourselves, how there are points in our lives and biographies where health and illness take center stage, how we are looking for a way to accept illness as part of the human condition. Trying to empathize across centuries and cultures is a good way to practice other types of empathy as well.”

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In her recently published book, CU �Ǹ�Թ� scholar Antje Richter explores health and the art of living through illness narratives of early medieval China.

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Top illustration: Scene of poet Tao Qian being carried from scroll "The Lotus Society." (Illustration: Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art)

Rap battles, wrong ravens and Ragnarök

Rachel Sauer — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 16:12:18 +0000

Rap battles, wrong ravens and Ragnarök Rachel Sauer Fri, 08/21/2026 - 10:12

Clay Bonnyman Evans

CU �Ǹ�Թ� scholar Mathias Nordvig publishes new book on Old Norse mythology

Ponding the plethora of introductory texts on Old Norse mythology, Mathias Nordvig had an epiphany.

“There are so many set up like dictionaries of myth, so you can look up (the god) Odin, you look up Asgard,” home of the Norse gods, says Nordvig, associate teaching professor in the Department of Germanic & Slavic Languages & Literatures at the �Ǹ�Թ�. “I realized there wasn’t really a book that introduces Old Norse mythology from the vantage point of the literature itself, the sources. I wanted people to know the texts and stories where we get this information.”

Mathias Nordvig is an associate teaching professor in the CU �Ǹ�Թ� Department of Germanic & Slavic Languages & Literatures.

The results of that epiphany — and a lot of hard work — have just been published: Old Norse Mythology: An Introduction to the Poetic Edda and Prose Edda (Routledge, 2026; 166 pages with black-and-white illustrations).

Nordvig, who is proficient in Danish, Swedish, Norwegian and Icelandic, presents works and exegesis of the two major sources of Old Norse mythology: the Poetic Edda, a collection of alliterative verse and narrative poems recorded by anonymous authors based on centuries of oral and written tradition; and the Prose Edda, an assemblage of tales written by the Icelandic Christian scholar Snorri Sturluson around 1220 CE.

He describes the Poetic Edda as “complicated,” due to its origins as a collection of verse remembered and composed by unknown authors from verse from ancient folk material — “grand poem” about such things as Odin challenging a giant about wisdom, the creation story and Ragnarök, a kind of Old Norse apocalypse — and subsequently assembled as a single work.

“When they were written down, they were already centuries old. They were reinterpreted and misunderstood in the later context,” says Nordvig, who is proficient in Danish, Swedish, Norwegian and Icelandic. “They are written in different meters and different translators made different choices.”

One poem, “Hindla’s Song,” taken from a book that includes the tales of Viking travel to North America — Christopher Columbus was centuries behind it turns out — is one of the few works in which the female deity Freya “does the walking and talking,” Nordvig says. It recounts the story of Óttarr, who summons Freya to help him identify his ancestry to win an inheritance. She turns him into a boar and rides to the underworld to retrieve the sorceress and seer Hindla, and the two women recount his pedigree in detail.

“Óttarr just happens to be related to every famous Viking that ever existed,” Nordvig says.

In Old Norse Mythology: An Introduction to the Poetic Edda and Prose Edda, CU �Ǹ�Թ� Professor Mathias Nordvig presents works and exegesis of the two major sources of Old Norse mythology.

He cites “The Song of Hárbard” as a favorite. In the tale, Thor and a snarky ferryman who just might be the hero’s father Odin in disguise, “have a kind of rap battle,” he says. They trade barbs and boasts about their respective sexual and magical feats as they traverse a flood-swollen river.

“It’s hilarious,” Nordvig says. “There are some wonderful insults in there.”

He describes Snorri’s Edda, as the Prose is also known, as a “more comprehensive presentation of Old Norse mythology to go to when you want to know something or look it up.”

The historian and politician Snorri wrote from his 13^th-century Christian perspective, so he is at pains to inform readers that he doesn’t really believe this stuff. In one section, he shores his position with a frame story in which the gods are merely humans duping a foolish king of Sweden.

“The other is the same kind of setting, only everyone is really drunk,” Nordvig says. “That was the only way he could present the stories.”

Snorri quotes from poems unknown in any other source, and modern scholarship has found that Snorri didn’t always get it right.

“There is this famous idea that Odin the god-king and warrior-king is accompanied by two ravens and two wolves. But he based that on his own extravagant interpretation of poetry. There is no mention of ravens and wolves closely connected to Odin,” he says.

Nordvig also notes that there is crossover between Old Norse mythology and material from the British Isles and Ireland, where Vikings raided and established settlements for 300 years, beginning in the late 8^th century.

“Some of that old Irish charm, the old English charm, shows up in western Norway,” he says.

While published as a textbook, Nordvig says he also wrote with lay readers in mind.

“I tried to make it as accessible as possible, somewhere between academic and popular language,” he says. “I’m trying to open it up for readers, to scratch the surface off and present this wealth of fascinating, sometimes confusing, information.”

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CU �Ǹ�Թ� scholar Mathias Nordvig publishes new book on Old Norse mythology.

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Top image: "Der letzte Kampf" by Johannes Gehrts, 1888

But is the book better than the movie?

Rachel Sauer — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 00:16:44 +0000

But is the book better than the movie? Rachel Sauer Wed, 08/19/2026 - 18:16

A scene of Odysseus and his men from Christopher Nolan's blockbuster film The Odyssey. (Photo: Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures)

Mitchell Pentzer

As it surpasses $1 billion in box office revenue just weeks after its release, Christopher Nolan’s film The Odyssey continues to stir longstanding debates—and enhance the study of myth and movies at CU �Ǹ�Թ�

“It is a truism that historical ﬁlms are always about the time in which they are made and never about the time in which they are set.” So opens Jeffrey Richards’ 2008 book Hollywood’s Ancient Worlds, published after the turn-of-the-century flurry of Gladiator, Troy, Alexander and 300. How much truer is it of movies based not on any real historical moments, but rather on myths and literature of antiquity?

Much of the controversy about The Odyssey, Christopher Nolan’s $1 billion-and-counting epic, has centered around questions of authenticity, faithfulness to the source or, more directly, how Nolan has imagined it: the racially diverse casting, the level of remorse (and chastity) shown by a Homeric hero, the absence of Achilles or women in the Land of the Dead, even how well any of the actors can draw a bow.

Mitchell Pentzer is a lecturer and Latin program coordinator in the CU �Ǹ�Թ� Department of Classics.

When viewing a film explicitly based on such a famous work, certain expectations are understandable, and sorting through those expectations is something students at CU �Ǹ�Թ� could do in a Department of Classics course, CLAS 3400, titled “Swords and Sandals on the Silver Screen”—more colloquially known as “Classics and Film.” In this course, students unpack expectations, get past questions of authenticity and dig into what films inspired by ancient history and literature are trying to do with the source material. We can see how writers and directors use antiquity’s art and history as vehicles to explore ideas important to us today; that is, if a movie is not (just) about some historical event or ancient text, what is it about?

We learn far less—about our own moment and culture, and about antiquity as well—from picking on what a director and their team get wrong, and far more from investigating the positive decisions made to accomplish their vision. And the vision of Nolan’s Odyssey is less one of ancient heroes and monsters than it is one of a fragile, modern, even global civilization.

As Nolan’s latest blockbuster gets variously knocked around or defended on social media and in longer-form reviews and opinion pieces (Emily Wilson in the London Review of Books, Wilson again in The Atlantic, Theo Nash in Slate, and Daniel Mendelsohn in the New York Review of Books are some landmarks), its predecessor in treating Homeric epic, 2004’s Troy, has appeared as an obvious point of comparison. We open “Classics and Film” with this movie, directed by Wolfgang Petersen of Das Boot and written by David Benioff of HBO’s Game of Thrones.

Is your Ancient Greek curiosity piqued?

If students want to take their experience of The Odyssey further, our Department of Classics has much to offer, including Classical Greek itself, with a cycle starting every fall, or an intensive two-semester program in the summer. Students usually take on portions of Homer in the original language in the fourth semester.

We have Latin too, with the first course in the sequence offered in both fall and spring, and courses on ancient literature in translation at all levels, including upper-division courses dedicated to Epic and Tragedy, the bulk of our sources on mythology. Our ancient history and art and archaeology classes are perennial favorites for students at all levels.

Classics and Film runs this fall but has been so full so often that we plan to make it a regular offering as a larger-enrollment course—stay tuned! And this fall on Oct. 15, we’ll hold an Odyssey Day, with a read-through of Homer’s text that people can participate in. Keep an eye on our departmental website, colorado.edu/classics, for more information.

Mitchell Pentzer

And although Troy has the enduring star power of Brad Pitt, Eric Bana and Orlando Bloom (Legolas in the Lord of the Rings films), it wasn’t so well-received upon its release. Nevertheless, some of today’s critics of The Odyssey have cited Troy as the exemplary treatment of Homeric epic in film. It isn’t, for many reasons, but among them is the conspicuous figuring of the steely-gray-armored Greeks as secular, cynical, greedy invaders of an Eastern Trojan nation characterized by earth tones and a religiosity deemed outdated even by its defenders. Was this film really meant to present an unadulterated, authentic Iliad, or was it really a product of a world at that moment watching the United States wage war in Iraq and Afghanistan?

A more faithful presentation of ancient text is Michael Cacoyannis’ 1977 film Iphigenia, sometimes delivering lines from Euripides’ tragedy Iphigenia at Aulis as verbatim as can be. Yet Cacoyannis, through choice cinematography and editing, still offers a warning about the dangers of mobs and armies that reflects the experience of Greeks who lived under the 1967-1974 military junta and witnessed the violence at Athens Polytechnic in 1973.

The Coen brothers, on the other hand, sidestep the matter of Homeric faithfulness by following the Odysseus of 2000’s O Brother, Where Art Thou?, George Clooney’s Ulysses Everett McGill, through 1930s Mississippi instead of the Bronze Age Mediterranean. Still, the film explores ideas central to Homer’s own Odyssey: What makes civil society, justice and a person’s identity?

Nolan’s Odyssey, in contrast to that other treatment of Homer’s Odyssey, looks and feels nominally ancient, if not Bronze Age, through set design, costuming (for the most part), and even some of the musical scoring. The decision to embrace American accents (the British Tom Holland’s Telemachus shows us it’s not careless but deliberate) instead of some vaguely British one—more common for the sword-and-sandal epic—is the first indication that this retelling isn’t just about a mythical and ancient world, or even one in a minor way distanced from our own.

People have picked on Telemachus calling his father “Dad” for being anachronistic—as though ancient Greeks must honor father and mother without diminutives—but Nausicaa, the Phaeacian princess who discovers the shipwrecked Odysseus, calls her father πάππα (“Pappa” or “Daddy”) in Book 6 of Homer’s text. They’re not altogether different from us.

Then there are certain objects that seem deliberately anachronistic and embody a theme of modernity. The Trojan Horse is for Nolan an instrument of destruction that breaks Zeus’ law, a version of xenia, an imperative of hospitality for ancient Greeks, that was broadened by the film for a post-Christian world. It is so conspicuously crafted, nigh-unbelievably smoothed and curved (in far better shape than the decaying palace on Ithaca, despite being constructed on a beach by an army 10 years into its campaign), as to seem Classical or even modern—in contrast to Troy’s almost laughably ramshackle horse.

This fantasy, this work of amazing craftsmanship that leads to the end of a civilization, bears obvious similarities to the atomic bomb in Nolan’s Oppenheimer, as viewers have already observed. Likewise, Agamemnon’s armor is black, spotless, plastic-seeming, like Darth Vader or a brand-new action figure; this Agamemnon, greed-driven as always, is an impersonal, artificial product of industry, and the more ominous for that.

A scene of Odysseus and his men from Christopher Nolan's blockbuster film The Odyssey. (Photo: Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures)

The film doesn’t limit its conscious modernity to visual elements. Composer Ludwig Göransson’s score stands out as perhaps the most original in the genre, with reconstructed ancient instruments holding pride of place much of the time. Odysseus’ theme on pipes and flutes, when he converses with Penelope before the trial of the bow and axes and recounts his transgressions, is suitably haunting. The ancient aulos, an ancestor of the oboe, backs the Sirens, a panoply of bronze gongs adds texture throughout the film, and the repeated bow-pluck has a lyre behind it in homage to an authentically Homeric simile:

Just as a man who has mastered the lyre and the art of song
Will easily stretch a string all the way round a new peg,
Attaching the twisted sheep-gut firmly at either end —
So, with no effort at all, did Odysseus string the great bow.
With his right hand he held the bow while he made a test of the string,
Which sang out beautifully, like the sound a swallow makes
(Odyssey 21.406-411, trans. Mendelsohn, 2026)

But Göransson also makes frequent use of synthesizers, especially for bass notes or for jarring, percussive screeches in the Land of the Dead. When Menelaus tells the story of Troy’s infiltration to Telemachus, the drums beat out dactyls, the meter of epic, that blend into galloping four-counts.

All of this tells us Nolan’s priority is not authenticity. He is, in fact, calling attention to the artificiality of it all and challenging us to see how the story can map out onto our own world, now one much bigger than Homer’s. With this in mind, other decisions make more sense: for example, the diverse casting.

Apart from the fact that people have been able to travel for a very long time, Nolan is telling a story about the breakdown of social contracts spanning different continents and how the consequences rebound upon the violators. It is appropriate, then, to see how we’re all in this together: though we may look different, be variously heroic or rash or dosed with lotus blossom at times, we are nevertheless small and dependent on each other’s kindness in an unpredictable and dangerous world.

Will Nolan’s Odyssey find a place in the required viewings of “Classics and Film”? Ousting O Brother, Where Art Thou? is not an act I take lightly. It’s also in competition with a spate of other films released in just the last few years: the 2023 John Malkovich vehicle, Seneca; Francis Ford Coppola’s 2024 Megalopolis; that same year’s The Return with Ralph Fiennes; and Gladiator II.

We keep returning to antiquity to make meaning for ourselves and tell vital stories, and I don’t expect us to stop. This is a good problem for us classicists to have.

Did you enjoy this viewpoint? Subscribe to our newsletter. Passionate about classics? Show your support.

As it surpasses $1 billion in box office revenue just weeks after its release, Christopher Nolan’s film The Odyssey continues to stir longstanding debates—and enhance the study of myth and movies at CU �Ǹ�Թ�.

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Top photo: A scene of the Trojan Horse in Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey (Photo: Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures)

A lifetime of dance started on a skateboard

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 23:02:17 +0000

A lifetime of dance started on a skateboard Rachel Sauer Mon, 08/17/2026 - 17:02

When hip-hop icon and legendary choreographer Rennie Harris joins 'The Ampersand' podcast, expect to learn the difference between the backslide and the moonwalk

Listen to The Ampersand

Late last year, New York Times arts critic Brian Seibert, in discussing Rennie Harris’ piece “American Street Dancer,” wrote that “Harris has done more than any other choreographer to reveal and develop the metaphorical and narrative expressivity of American street dance.”

In the world of dance, he’s a legend—named a “Living Legend” by Dance magazine, in fact—yet he’s also the guy you might occasionally see tooling around the �Ǹ�Թ� campus on a skateboard.

Harris has changed the face of concert dance by introducing hip-hop and street styles in innovative ways, and for 10 years he has been a guest artist in CU �Ǹ�Թ�’s dance program.

Rennie Harris has changed the face of concert dance by introducing hip-hop and street styles in innovative ways and for 10 years he has been a guest artist in CU �Ǹ�Թ�’s dance program. (Photo: Osamu Inoue)

He recently joined host Erika Randall, CU �Ǹ�Թ� dean and vice provost of undergraduate education and professor of dance, on "The Ampersand,” a College of Arts and Sciences podcast. Randall and guests explore stories about ANDing as a “full sensory verb” that describes experience and possibility.

For Harris, that experience and possibility starts with showing up. Hip-hop is a participatory culture, he says, and for those who show up? Well, that’s when the divine happens.

RENNIE HARRIS: My first skateboard was made by a cat, his name is Lewis Bailey. He is part of the younger kids, siblings, of Bill Bailey.

ERIKA RANDALL: Stop it.

HARRIS: Yes, he was my classmate and …

RANDALL: And he built boards? Tell me the story.

HARRIS: We were friends since middle school, parochial school. I went to Roman Catholic, he went to a public school. So, he built boards, and that was how I got my first board.

RANDALL: Did you know who … so, who was Bill Bailey?

HARRIS: Bill Bailey is his father. Bill was a tapper. Pearl Bailey, his aunt. I used to hang out at their house all the time. He's also the first person I saw do the backslide.

We were in recess, and he was gliding across the gravel and everyone stopped. He looked like he was walking, but he was gliding. He was moving backwards, but his feet …

RANDALL: First time you've ever seen it.

HARRIS: Yeah. Knees going foom, like what the heck is that? And he says, oh, my father taught me.

RANDALL: Stop it.

HARRIS: And that's all he said. Later on, we became really close friends.

RANDALL: But he didn't call it moonwalk.

HARRIS: No, no, the original, it's called the backslide. The moonwalk actually goes forward, and it looks like you're walking on the moon.

RANDALL: Yeah, that's moonwalk in hip hop.

HARRIS: That's why it's called the moonwalk in street dance, yeah.

RANDALL: But Earl Snakehips Tucker was doing the backslide …

HARRIS: I saw Bill Bailey in 1933 do it, do the backslide. And he was known for that.

RANDALL: In tap shoes.

HARRIS: So, that's the first time I see it. I meet with—his name was Johnny, Lewis Bailey, but they call him Johnny, Johnny Bailey. Yeah, so he made me a board. And then he started teaching me 360s, spacewalk, walk the dog, helicopter, doing planks …

RANDALL: So, you were breaking on your board.

HARRIS: Yeah, doing handstands and planks on the board. I was like, oh, snap. Yeah, so we should do all that. I said do 360s with two boards.

RANDALL: And you were dancing at the same time

For Rennie Harris, hip-hop is a participatory culture. (Photo: Bob Emmott)

HARRIS: Yeah, all this was happening at the same time.

RANDALL: You were always doing all the things.

HARRIS: Yeah, especially in the summer we would get up and be out of the house by 8 in the morning. We were just out. We were out. And, of course, this is when landlines were …

RANDALL: For people listening at home, that's when there's a phone in the wall and a cord that's attached.

HARRIS: So, at that time we would go out, never went back home until like 11 at night.

RANDALL: So, it wasn't even, ‘It starts to get dark, I want you home, Lorenzo.’

HARRIS: When I was younger, it had to be when the streetlights came on. That was always like 6, 7. You had to be on the block.

RANDALL: Within yelling distance.

HARRIS: ‘I need to be able to see you,’ that kind of thing. And so we would go out 8, 9 in the morning. I'd be across the city three or four times already by the time I got back. We were just walking and doing all kinds of stuff.

RANDALL: And you had a crew.

HARRIS: Yeah. We were skateboard. We played basketball. We'd go to the park. We used to play army man because we all thought we were going to go into the military after high school.

RANDALL: You did?

HARRIS: Oh, that was the plan ...

RANDALL: So, your first performance, can you take us back as a dancer, the first time you made money and when you had the entrepreneurialism, the moxie to say, ‘I'm going to make money on this thing that we've been doing in the community but now I'm going to figure out how to make a living?’

HARRIS: The first time I ever got paid was not performance. I was teaching. And I did this little lecture, Brenda Dixon Gottschild brought me in. I was about 14 or something.

RANDALL: BDG brought you in at 14?

HARRIS: She was at Temple. Yeah.

RANDALL: How did you know her?

HARRIS: I didn't at the time.

RANDALL: How'd she find you?

HARRIS: I have no clue.

RANDALL: That is bizarre. She's one of the greatest dance scholars of all time, and she's bringing in 14-year-old not yet Sir Rennie Harris.

HARRIS: We had become very popular in Philadelphia as a street dance crew. We were poppers, we weren't breakers.

RANDALL: What was your crew's name?

HARRIS: The Scanner Boys. And we became so popular that our name was at city hall. All the programs and all the things, any time there was an event ...

RANDALL: Let's get the Scanner Boys.

HARRIS: They called the Scanner Boys to be the entertainment. You know what I mean.

RANDALL: So, you brought hip hop to the university at 14.

HARRIS: Possibly, yeah.

RANDALL: That's wild.

HARRIS: Because everyone wanted to know what I did.

RANDALL: Yeah, so what did you say? What does 14-year-old Rennie say about popping?

HARRIS: I was just explaining what pop is, we're street dancers, blah blah blah blah.

RANDALL: Did you demo?

HARRIS: Yeah, I demoed. I demoed, I remember that. And I remember sitting in her office at Temple.

RANDALL: She saw a gap, though, in dance studies. She saw that this was not in the books, that this was not in the classroom. This was not in the literature. And you were the first guest then. I'm going to say you were the first.

HARRIS: Yeah, I was a kid.

RANDALL: And you did not have designs yet to be in the Academy or bring hip hop to the …

HARRIS: Oh, no. I will tell you this, because you mentioned something about money earlier. I will tell you this. It was all economics. If you paid me, I'd dance. I was like Tina Turner, your private dancer. That was one of my favorite songs, too.

RANDALL: Oh my God, Tina.

HARRIS: But do you know what I'm saying? So, we would go to different bars, go to lounges, and try to get money from the old people because we knew the old people would be drinking and they would be drunk.

RANDALL: Would you put out a jar or a hat?

HARRIS: We would have a hat, and say we go to the door of the bar and be like, ‘Hey, can we come in and dance?’ And dude was like, ‘Quick, make it quick.’ All right, all right. So, we'll go in and they'll put some music on, and we'll play off the jukebox, play something. And we would dance, and then we'd pass the hat around.

RANDALL: And you would take turns improvising? Or would you run it like a cipher?

HARRIS: It was always an improvisation, and it was always what I would call traditional hip hop busking. We would all stand in a line, do what they call the Soul Clap or the Soul Step, just a two-step to the left. And then we would do a solo, and then sometimes we'd do a routine to break it up. You know what I mean? And really, any kind of choreography was just a means to get to the solo for everyone. And so that's what we did, and then we would put out the hat.

Click play to hear the rest of the conversation!

Did you enjoy this article? Subscribe to our newsletter. Passionate about dance? Show your support.

When hip-hop icon and legendary choreographer Rennie Harris joins 'The Ampersand' podcast, expect to learn the difference between the backslide and the moonwalk.

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Top photo: Rennie Harris (left) teaching a dance class. (Photo: Patrick Campbell/CU �Ǹ�Թ�)

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