Books

Great Horse Flu brought early 1870s America to a near standstill

Kimberly van Mourik — Tue, 13 Oct 2026 18:38:32 +0000

Great Horse Flu brought early 1870s America to a near standstill Kimberly van Mourik Tue, 10/13/2026 - 12:38

Although largely forgotten today, the Great Horse Flu of 1872-1873 had an infection rate of nearly 90%, resulting in wide-ranging effects on North American society, which relied upon horses for agriculture, transportation, commerce and even manufacturing.

Bradley Worrell

New book by ��ñ�� historian Thomas G. Andrews documents the forgotten epidemic that hobbled America and had wide-ranging effects on society

When Americans picture the 1870s, they likely imagine an age defined by railroads, steamships and rapid industrialization. Yet, ��ñ�� historian Thomas G. Andrews argues those familiar images obscure a more important reality: 19th century North America still ran on horsepower.

“Horses were doing essentially all of the things that internal combustion engines do for us today,” says Andrews, who serves as the director of the Center of the American West and whose research focuses on the environmental and social history of the American West. “As someone recently said to me, horses were the forklifts of the 19th century and that’s exactly right.”

��ñ�� history Professor Thomas G. Andrews, whose research focuses on the environmental and social history of the American West, is the author of the new book, The Great Horse Flu: A Forgotten Contagion and the Fate of Reconstruction America, which documents how America’s horse-powered economy was paralyzed by horse influenza.

That dependence upon horses, donkeys and mules explains why a largely forgotten outbreak, which Andrews calls the Great Horse Flu, proved so devastating at the time. The disease, which first appeared in 1872 and did not let up until late 1873, infected as much as 90% of North America’s equine population, hobbling transportation systems, slowing commerce, complicating public safety efforts and contributing to an economic depression in the United States.

The disease and its consequences are the subject of Andrew’s new book, The Great Horse Flu, which places the outbreak at the center of a transformative moment in North American history.

Origin of the outbreak

Andrews acknowledges there is a lot historians and scientists still don’t know about the Great Horse Flu, in part because no physical samples of the virus exist today. However, he says his research does point to the origins of flu, which began in an inland farming area outside of Toronto, Canada.

Why there?

While it’s impossible to say with 100% certainty, Andrews speculates that it had to do with the confluence of settlers introducing improved breeds of livestock from different regions, which brought new influenza variants with them, and the area’s extensive wetlands near Lake Ontario that supported vibrant populations of wild waterfowl, which are known carriers of influenza diversity.

“You had humans, domestic animals and wild birds all interacting in one environment. In retrospect, it’s easy to see how an influenza variant could emerge there,” he says. “What’s much harder to explain is why it happened there instead of somewhere else with similar conditions.”

Because the outbreak occurred in a rural area not near a major sea or lake port, and because there are no reports of major outbreaks from elsewhere in the world during the same period, Andrews says it seems clear that “rather than being imported, this seems to be something that evolved in that place and time.”

While the particular circumstances of the flu’s origins remain a mystery, Andrews says the infection rates in equines strongly suggest this was a novel form of virus.

“Any influenza strain that reaches those kinds of infection rates is either striking a population that has never encountered that type of virus before or one that has never seen that particular variant,” he explains. “Once this novel variant emerged, it easily bypassed the immune defenses horses would normally have.”

Virus spreads across the U.S.

Once the horse flu crossed the border from southern Canada into the United States, it quickly spread to major East Coast population centers such as New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Boston and then fanned out to the south and west.

“This outbreak spread so quickly because it was perfectly suited to exploit the economies and societies of North America,” Andrews explains. “Virtually everyone depended on horses, donkeys and mules for transportation. Horses were everywhere. They worked constantly, came into contact with other horses, and often did so in confined spaces like stables, city streets and farmyards.

“Sometimes, the virus traveled with horses being moved by rail or steamship, creating what looked like leapfrog outbreaks,” he adds. “In other cases, there were apparent super-spreader events, such as a traveling circus troupe that crossed from Ontario into New York and was blamed for introducing the disease into several communities.”

Once horse influenza reached a community, it tended to spread like wildfire.

“In places where we have detailed records, the outbreak generally infected at least of 90 percent of horses, donkeys and mules,” Andrews says. “There were reports from Brooklyn claiming that virtually every horse in the city had contracted the disease. Similar infection rates appear in rural areas.”

Andrews estimates the overall mortality rate was somewhere between 1% and 4%, amounting to anywhere between 112,500 and 540,000 horses, in addition to tens or even hundreds of thousands of mules and donkeys. Donkeys seem to have been affected most severely, although the reasons remain unclear, he adds.

“The vast majority of animals recovered,” Andrews says. “However, there is clear evidence of what I would call ‘long flu.’ Some horses remained sick for months. Some never regained their previous strength. There are scattered reports of horses dying more than a year after their initial infection. Those patterns look remarkably similar to what we now see in post-viral syndromes, such as long-COVID.”

Impacts on everyday life

Horses and other equines might most commonly be associated with agriculture and ranching in the 1870s, but in truth they fulfilled many other vital functions, Andrews says. As a result, horse flu impacted most areas of transportation, commerce and industry.

“The outbreak was so disruptive because it was highly infectious, horses were essential to so many aspects of everyday life and people responded by removing their sick animals from service,” Andrews says.

They were used extensively on farms to work fields and transport crops. Even on farms where horses did not get sick, Andrews says farmers were often reluctant to transport their produce into cities for risk of exposing their horses to the contagion, slowing commerce.

In cities, streetcar companies reduced transportation services. Meanwhile, commerce slowed to a crawl, as horses were used to haul freight and move canal boats. Horses were also used heavily for coal mining, logging operations and some aspects of manufacturing.

“While cotton presses were often steam-powered, horses were essential for moving materials within warehouses and industrial facilities,” Andrews says. The combined effect of so many horses out of commission, he says, was that “production slowed, goods moved more slowly and trade networks became constrained.”

Typically, the onset of horse flu reduced conditions in impacted areas to a crawl for a week or two, but Andrews says it often took several more weeks for things to begin to return to normal.

Flu and a great fire

The Great Horse Flu also played a role in the disastrous Great Boston Fire of November 1872, which destroyed 776 buildings across 65 acres and caused estimated property damage of between $66 million and $73 million.

For reasons that remain unclear, the Great Horse Flu originated outside of Toronto, Canada, and then quickly spread to major U.S. East Coast population centers before fanning out to the south and west. According to Andrews, horse flu contributed to the Great Boston Fire of November 1872 and it played a part in the Panic of 1873, which resulted in a years-long depression.

“Horse flu was an important contributor to the fire, but the relationship is more complicated than people often assume,” Andrews says. “The simple version of the story is that horses pulled fire engines, the horses got sick and therefore the fire spread. There’s some truth to that, but it’s not the entire explanation.”

It was precisely because of horse flu that the transport of most commercial goods had ground to a halt in the city, causing highly flammable materials such as cotton, leather, oil and paper to accumulate in warehouses in the downtown area, Andrews says. He says the Boston Fire Department recognized the problem at the time and had developed a contingency plan, which involved having dozens of volunteers pull fire engines using ropes.

“Over short distances, humans could move the equipment almost as quickly as horses. The problem arose over longer distances,” Andrews says. “As fire alarms increased and fire engines had to travel from farther away, people simply could not match the stamina of horses.”

The horse flu outbreak also made it difficult to deliver coal needed to power the engines and prevented many residents from saving their property because there were too few healthy horses available to move their belongings, he adds. What’s more, he says downtown Boston at the time did not have enough modern fire hydrants or upgraded water pipes.

“The horse flu absolutely contributed to the disaster, but it interacted with many other factors,” Andrews says.

He adds that horse flu, combined with the Great Boston Fire and the Great Panic of 1873, led to a years-long economic depression.

“When the horses became sick, everything became slower, more expensive and less efficient. Those effects spread throughout the economy,” he says. “The Panic of 1873 was the trigger (for the depression), but the horse flu outbreak imposed economic costs for roughly a year. When you add together its effects across different regions and industries, the consequences became significant.”

Lessons learned and forgotten

Andrews says that the Great Horse Flu ultimately seems to have petered out after 1873 as it moved farther south, into Mexico, Cuba and Central America. Still, in the years immediately following, Americans continued to reflect on the impact the contagion had on the country, often relating it to timely breakdowns in transportation, commerce and industry, he says.

“Unlike the 1918 flu pandemic, which many historians argue faded quickly from public memory, the Great Horse Flu continued appearing in public discussion into the 20th century,” Andrews says. “I think that’s because the experience was so unusual; it turned life upside down.”

Still, in time, memories of the contagion faded.

Andrews believes some of that is due to the way history is taught. He notes the late 19th century is usually remembered as the age of railroads, factories and steam power. Horses receive comparatively little attention despite remaining essential to daily life. He says another factor is that relatively few people realize horses can contract influenza.

“Finally, the outbreak was diffuse. It was disruptive, but it didn’t have the catastrophic mortality we often associate with events that become central to collective memory,” Andrews says. “The goal of the book is to show that this seemingly forgotten event actually had profound consequences.”

Why it matters today

For Andrews, the story of the Great Horse Flu is more than an exercise in historical recovery. It’s a reminder of how dependent societies can become on a single piece of infrastructure—and how vulnerable they can become when something goes wrong.

Researching his book during and after the COVID-19 pandemic reinforced that lesson.

“It (horse flu) reminds us that influenza remains a remarkably adaptable and powerful disease,” Andrews says. “We need to recognize that diseases moving between humans and animals will continue to pose serious challenges. The history of disease isn’t simply a story of scientific triumph. It’s also a story of ongoing adaption and vulnerability.”

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New book by ��ñ�� historian Thomas G. Andrews documents the forgotten epidemic that hobbled America and had wide-ranging effects on society.

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��ñ�� poet kills her darlings ... and publishes them anyway

Rachel Sauer — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 13:00:00 +0000

��ñ�� poet kills her darlings ... and publishes them anyway Rachel Sauer Tue, 10/06/2026 - 07:00

Hope Kerrigan

Program for Writing and Rhetoric Professor Jen Stewart wrestles with faith, motherhood, myth and the moon in poetry collection Darling Heresies

Jen Grace Stewart killed her darlings—and turned them into Darling Heresies, her new book of poetry.

It’s common advice in creative writing, the idea “to get rid of the stuff that you’re really attached to when it’s not serving you,” Stewart explains.

Jen Stewart is an assistant teaching professor in the ��ñ�� Program for Writing and Rhetoric.

Combined with “heresies”—a nod to her evolving systems of belief—the phrase captures what she describes as “ways of believing that are not orthodox, that are not appropriate, that you hold dear, even if they're not the best thing for you.”

Stewart, an assistant teaching professor in the ��ñ�� Program for Writing and Rhetoric, recently released Darling Heresies as a “sister” to her debut, Madonna, Complex and in it wrestles with concepts of faith, motherhood and myth. The timing of the book’s release was planned to coincide with the beginning of the fall semester, which Stewart says feels like a great time to release work.

“There's so much phenomenal energy at the beginning of an academic year,” she says. “To me, it's better than New Year's.”

Capturing the heart of the moon

The journey into Darling Heresies begins at the cover, which features an illustration of a woman with her head replaced by the moon, a visual anchor further strengthened by the collection’s dedication to Endymion—the handsome figure from Greek myth who captured the heart of the moon.

“I really liked the idea that the Endymion figure is someone who witnesses the moon, who loves the moon, who sees her,” Stewart says.

Darling Heresies “represents a four- or five-year span of time that covered early motherhood, moving away from my faith tradition and going through a divorce,” she says. Stewart and early readers describe the throughline of the collection as “an argument with patriarchy,” challenging restrictive roles placed on women in marriage, motherhood, faith and landscape.

Jen Stewart explores faith, motherhood and myth in her poetry collection Darling Heresies.

“If my first book was a faith journey narrative with a particular arc, this is just the continuing of the journey,” Stewart says in comparing Darling Heresies to Madonna, Complex. “It's a little less certain about things. There's a lot more doubt in it.”

That doubt hasn't slowed Stewart down. If anything, it's pushed her toward balance — a discipline she practices even while keeping an extremely busy teaching schedule.

With Darling Heresies newly in print, Stewart is teaching a 4-4 course load in the Program for Writing and Rhetoric. “During the school year, it's difficult for me to get myself to the mental space that's open enough to receive poetry work—teaching and writing have to live in different spaces for me,” she says. She allows space for poetry to find her by spending time in art museums and nature, keeping analog journals, jotting notes-app entries and circulating drafts through an editing group's email chain.

Stewart credits her colleagues and students as major sources of inspiration. “My department is very collegial, very supportive,” she says. “There are a lot of us pursuing creative work who, even though that's not part of our job description... we're doing, we're teaching, we're writing poems.”

Offering advice for aspiring poets, Stewart says, “Poetry is a weird, niche space in the world, despite being ignored by most mainstream media. It's tiny, but it's also wide.” She encourages students to reframe how they think about poetry, emphasizing its communal aspect: “I want them to see poetry as less a precious artistic thing and more a communicative act that will connect them to other people—to listen and to be listened to.”

And even with a newly published book, Stewart is already considering what’s next. She hopes to explore fragmented essays, drawing inspiration from writers such as Maggie Nelson and Heather Christle. Her biggest upcoming project, though, is channeling creative energy into building class curricula and course readings. “I used to feel like poetry was being shut away,” she says, “and it's only been in the last five years or so that I've been able to say, no, class development is creative work too.”

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Program for Writing and Rhetoric Professor Jen Stewart wrestles with faith, motherhood, myth and the moon in poetry collection Darling Heresies.

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Scholar asks: what separates signal from static?

Rachel Sauer — Wed, 30 Sep 2026 13:00:00 +0000

Scholar asks: what separates signal from static? Rachel Sauer Wed, 09/30/2026 - 07:00

Cody DeBos

��ñ�� applied mathematician Brian Zaharatos asks, ‘What becomes of thinking when machines think for you?’

When you ask an AI model to solve a math problem, it will. Ask it to draft a legal brief, summarize a medical study or grade a stack of essays, and increasingly, it can do that too.

Whether the resulting output is accurate is less assured.

Even so, artificial intelligence technology is advancing faster than most people can reckon with what it means for them. From its impact in the workplace to decaying trust in information, even the researchers building today’s leading AI models don’t have the answers.

Brian Zaharatos, a teaching professor in the ��ñ�� Department of Applied Mathematics, has been searching for one through a philosopher’s lens.

Brian Zaharatos is a teaching professor in the ��ñ�� Department of Applied Mathematics.

His new book, Patterns and Static: Philosophy and the Question Concerning Statistics, isn’t about artificial intelligence inherently, but the ponderings within its pages have much overlap.

“I don’t want to oversell any AI angle. The book is primarily about the inescapably philosophical nature of statistics, and disagreements about the nature of probability and inference,” Zaharatos says.

Yet, Zaharatos raises a question many people are asking themselves right now. What’s left for the human mind once machines can think for us?

‘Computation can be automated. Judgment cannot’

The book’s real focus is a century-old argument over what justifies drawing a conclusion from gathered evidence. Rather than settling the debate, the proliferation of AI into nearly every facet of daily life has raised the stakes.

“Inference is the process of drawing conclusions based on evidence. It’s about moving from data to theories. As the great computer scientist and philosopher Judea Pearl says, ‘How we go from what to why,’” Zaharatos explains.

As an undergraduate, Zaharatos took much inspiration from the work of philosopher Hubert Dreyfus, whose interpretations of Heidegger and his existentialist theories, shaped how he thought about meaning.

“At times, I have been quite convinced by Dreyfus’ main theses about what computers can’t do. His arguments are nuanced, and the fact that AI has come such a long way in the last several years is not by itself strong evidence that he was wrong,” Zaharatos says.

He goes on to explain that he was right about some things, including that AI doesn’t “understand” or “care” in the same way humans do.

“But it seems like he was wrong about others. For example, he famously claimed (during the era of first-gen AI) that AI would never have the ability to drive a car. Enter, Waymo,” Zaharatos says.

What’s more important than deciding what AI can do, however, is deciding when it can be trusted. This, Zaharatos says, is one of the defining questions of our current time.

“Who judges whether we take the proposed solution to be correct with little or no critical thinking on our part, or whether we put it to a rigorous test? Clearly, we do,” Zaharatos says.

The dangers of an agreeable machine

Zaharatos didn’t write a word of Patterns and Static with AI, but he did lean on various AI tools to pressure test his own arguments while drafting it. He came away wary.

“The danger is that we surrender our critical thinking abilities to machines… so I think figuring out how to resist that in some ways and to further hone your skills is difficult but important,” says ��ñ�� mathematician Brian Zaharatos.

“I often found it too agreeable. Or I’d find myself questioning what it was saying to me because I know it can be sycophantic. Do you really think my presentation of this argument is strong or are you doing what you’ve been nudged to do—flatter me and keep me engaged?” he asks.

This agreeableness, Zaharatos warns, is a real danger with AI tools. Not so much that AI gets things wrong (which it will), but that it makes believing the output easy, without requiring one to take a moment to step back and examine it.

“Critical thinking is a skill to be cultivated and fine-tuned, similar to physical skills like playing a sport. If we do not practice critical thinking, we will lose it. AI and technology allow us to think less,” he explains.

Zaharatos has seen this playing out both in his own life and in the classroom, where he’s consciously trying to find ways to work against it.

“It’s important to put yourself in situations that seem synthetic or not quite real world that force you to do critical thinking. It actually is very good training for realistic situations when you’re responsible for making a judgment,” he says.

Zaharatos employs a variety of puzzles and scenarios to train his own reasoning skills and those of his students. These problems come with guardrails, forcing one to work through them with nothing but a pencil and paper.

Why bother doing _______, if AI can do it?

Across academic circles, corporate workplaces, and even family living rooms, this question has been asked ad nauseum over the past few years. Zaharatos hears it often.

His answer returns to the idea that a machine can’t do the real thinking for you.

“We’re often so focused on the output. But the output that you get is going to be a function of what you feed into the system. I think you have to know something about your problem and about inference to begin with in order to give AI the proper direction,” he says.

This is part of the reason why he wrote Patterns and Static in the first place. It’s a love letter to inference and to what it really means to decide something based on what you know.

“The fact that there are fundamental disagreements among the top minds in statistics and science about how to properly conduct inference is interesting in its own right,” he says.

Statistics isn’t going to be everyone’s passion, and Zaharatos knows it. But in a world where AI makes it easy to hand off your thinking, his advice has less to do with math than it does with finding whatever it is that makes you want to sit around and ponder.

“If these topics are not inherently interesting to you, my advice is to find something that is. Curiosity is a wonderful state to be in,” he says.

Patterns and Static: Philosophy and the Question Concerning Statistics, and a free sample of the first two chapters, is available now at brianzaharatos.com/book.

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��ñ�� applied mathematician Brian Zaharatos asks, ‘What becomes of thinking when machines think for you?’

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Scholar studies animals through the love in their hearts

Rachel Sauer — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 03:27:04 +0000

Scholar studies animals through the love in their hearts Rachel Sauer Mon, 09/28/2026 - 21:27

Rachel Sauer

In new book for younger readers, ��ñ�� Professor Emeritus Marc Bekoff advocates for increasing humanity’s ‘compassion footprint’

Zebras, it turns out, are bro huggers.

In Namibia’s Etosha National Park, behavioral ecologist Caitlin O’Connell observed that male zebra leaders “wrap necks, nip and sniff one another around the head and sometimes the genitals. Then they exhibit an exaggerated chewing behavior with their teeth bared and the corners of their lips drawn up as if smiling or laughing with necks extended and ears directed forward. It really looks like they are enjoying a hilarious joke together.”

And then everyone does their business on “a communal dung pile.”

Marc Bekoff is a ��ñ�� professor emeritus of ecology and evolutionary biology.

For a long time, conventional wisdom—and even scientific observation—would have asserted that this is merely instinctual mammalian behavior, nothing more than complex evolutionary responses to environmental and inter-group stimuli. They’re animals, after all; surely they aren’t exhibiting joy, playfulness or love?

Not so, says Marc Bekoff, a ��ñ�� professor emeritus of ecology and evolutionary biology. In his recently published book for younger readers, Love in their Hearts: A Celebration of Animal Emotions and a Guide to Compassionate Action, written with longtime collaborator Jeff Campbell, Bekoff advocates for increasing humanity’s “compassion footprint.”

“The message is to be nicer to humans, be nicer to non-humans, treat all living things with respect,” Bekoff explains. “We are never too young to hear that message and learn that lesson.”

‘Animals have thoughts and feelings’

Bekoff began learning that lesson, which became the work of his lifetime, when he felt sorry for a goldfish. Growing up in Brooklyn, New York, “everyone had the requisite goldfish in an aquarium on the kitchen counter, including my family, and I used to feel so sorry for that goldfish,” he recalls.

He also spent hours riding his tricycle around the neighborhood, talking to all the animals he saw, and rather than being worried, his parents were supportive. “I used to tell my parents I could feel the emotions of the dogs and cats and mice and birds, I would tell them that animals have thoughts and feelings, and my parents supported it because why not?” he says.

When he was 6, he and his family moved from Brooklyn to Lynbrook on Long Island, which at the time had swaths of woods to explore. Bekoff was a good athlete and a mediocre student, but he nevertheless knew that he had to at least try to get to college if he wanted to continue building a scientific foundation beneath his observations of animals.

Jane Goodall, who would become Bekoff’s dear friend and professional collaborator, “used to say it felt wrong to harm animals and it felt right to try to learn about them, so I went to college and then I got a master’s in neurobiology, then I spent two years in a PhD/MD program disliking every day of it,” Bekoff says.

It was around that time, in the late 1960s, that famed researcher and animal behaviorist Michael Fox joined the faculty at Washington University in St. Louis. Fox, a Royal Veterinary College-trained veterinarian who also held a Doctor of Science in ethology and animal behavior, was doing exactly the sort of work that Bekoff wanted to do: non-invasive, observational science focused on animal behavior.

Fox accepted Bekoff as a graduate student, and he earned a PhD in animal behavior. After a year as an assistant professor of biology at the University of Missouri in St. Louis, he came to ��ñ�� in 1974 to study behavioral ecology and carnivore behavior.

“The message is to be nicer to humans, be nicer to non-humans, treat all living things with respect,” says scientist and author Marc Bekoff.

“So, I got my job here, and down on 30th and Marine on East Campus, back when the Institute for Behavioral Genetics was one of the only buildings down there, I somehow got a grant and convinced the university to put in a chain link fence enclosure so we could study coyotes,” Bekoff says. “We had a few coyotes who had been rescued, and they became this beacon. Everybody went down there to see them, so much that we had to put up signs telling people not to play with them.”

From there, he studied Adélie penguins at Cape Crozier, Ross Island, Antarctica, then initiated a field project studying coyotes in Grand Teton National Park.

“I always was driven to know what animals were thinking and feeling, I knew there was a way to study this scientifically and I was really persistent because I knew I was right,” he says. “Back when I was starting out, the major school of thought was behaviorism—the idea that with animal behavior, everything is a stimulus response, and the brain is a black box that we can’t know anything about.

“I said no, there’s just got to be something going on in animals’ minds, particularly concerning what they’re feeling and what they’re calculating. These are wild animals who have difficult lives; I knew there had to be so much more going on.”

Complex emotional lives

A significant facet of Bekoff’s research has been to systematically and non-invasively observe animal behavior to gain insight into the “black box” of animal minds. In addition to the usual challenges of research, he says, was the resistance he initially encountered in the scientific community, many of whose members equated ethology—or the study of animal minds—with finger waggling and magical thinking.

“The science had to be irrefutable,” Bekoff says. “We didn’t have a choice. Michael Fox, my mentor at Washington University, was one of the first ethologists who practiced the science of watching—slow watching, slow looking, just going out and watching animals. We weren’t putting electrodes in their bodies or cutting out parts of their brains; it was uncontrolled.

“A group of us were just really persistent, getting grants and I published tons in refereed journals and published books, just keeping at it and putting it out there, and slowly but surely we had evidence showing that animals have extremely complex emotional lives.”

That growing body of evidence—gathered by Bekoff, Goodall and a community of scientists around the world—is, in part, what inspired Bekoff to write Love in their Hearts, for which Goodall wrote the foreword.

Bekoff gathered animal stories from colleagues around the globe, including O’Connell’s observations of zebra bro hugging, to embody “the universality of emotions.” The aim is not to prove that animals have emotions—“We know they do,” Bekoff says—but to bring those emotions to life for younger readers who may be interested in science, who may spend hours observing animals or who may simply love their pets and have a sense that their pets love them, too.

Love in Their Hearts also gives young readers actionable steps to help care for both animals and Earth—a compassionate conservation approach that children are never too young to learn, Bekoff says, and that he still teaches in Jane Goodall’s Roots and Shoots groups.

“It’s the basic principle of the One Health philosophy,” Bekoff says. “What’s good for animals is good for us, and what’s bad for them is bad for us. Let’s change the world for all its inhabitants.”

“What’s good for animals is good for us," says Marc Bekoff, "and what’s bad for them is bad for us. Let’s change the world for all its inhabitants.” (Photo: Dylan Shaw/Unsplash)

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In new book for younger readers, ��ñ�� Professor Emeritus Marc Bekoff advocates for increasing humanity’s ‘compassion footprint.’

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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, ��ñ�� 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 ��ñ�� 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.

��ñ�� 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 Boulder, 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, ��ñ�� 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

��ñ�� 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 ��ñ��. “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 ��ñ�� 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, ��ñ�� 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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��ñ�� scholar Mathias Nordvig publishes new book on Old Norse mythology.

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

The weather’s hot, the books are cool

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 21:31:07 +0000

The weather’s hot, the books are cool Rachel Sauer Mon, 08/03/2026 - 15:31

There’s still plenty of time to dive into a summer reading list, and College of Arts and Sciences authors can meet every reading mood

Friends, it’s hot out—don’t-touch-the-steering-wheel, try-to-fry-an-egg-on-the-sidewalk hot, with scant relief in the forecast.

It’s the sort of weather that calls for a hammock in the shade and a good book. So, even though we’re well into summer and perhaps starting to think about heading back to school, it’s not too late to dive into a summer reading list.

If you’re looking for some recommendations to see you through the rest of summer, the College of Arts and Sciences can help. Our faculty and alumni have written books that cater to a fascinating range of interests—from Roman temple robbery to a middle school student trying to figure things out to an exploration of Colorado’s eeriest places.

So, what are you in the mood to read?

Reading vibe: Creepy but make it Colorado

Suggestion: Eerie Colorado: Mountain Folklore, Monsters and Tales of the Supernatural, by Jack Daly, a lecturer in the ��ñ�� Program for Writing and Rhetoric.

Daly explores all things supernatural, unexplainable and unnerving in the Centennial State. Beyond simply organizing these legends in one volume, Daly also grapples with the role supernatural folklore plays in the historical and contemporary culture of Colorado.

Reading vibe: Thinking about the Roman Empire

Suggestion: Stealing from the Gods, by Isabel Köster, a ��ñ�� associate professor of classics whose research focus is the history, religion and literature of the Roman Republic and the early Empire.

Ancient Romans often plundered temples in their wars of conquest—sometimes openly and with astonishing scale. Large statues and famous works of art were carried away from foreign lands to Rome, treasuries were emptied and sacred spaces were stripped bare.

Yet, despite how frequently these robberies occurred, Romans still expressed sharp moral outrage about it—not for the plundering itself, but for particular individuals accused of committing it for the “wrong” reasons.

Reading vibe: Remembering forgotten histories of choice and liberal religion

Suggestion: God Bless the Pill, by Samira Mehta, a ��ñ�� associate professor of women and gender studies and director of the Program in Jewish Studies.

It's time to remember the often-forgotten history of mid-20th-century Protestant, Jewish and Catholic leaders and believers who embraced birth control as part of God’s plan. In fact, many denominations that were “skeptical to disapproving” in the early 20th century came around to supporting and advocating for birth control and family planning.

Reading vibe: The "A" in AI could also stand for "art"

Suggestion: Lily in a Codebox, by Lee Frankel-Goldwater, an assistant teaching professor of environmental studies at the ��ñ��.

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

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

Reading vibe: Feeling like a mango

Suggestion: Confessions of a Mango, a mid-grade novel by Katheryn Lumsden, a ��ñ�� molecular, cellular and developmental biology alumna, and Nathan Pieplow, an associate teaching professor in the Program for Writing and Rhetoric.

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

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

Reading vibe: Gloriously alive

Suggestion: How it Feels to Be Alive: Encounters with Art and Our Selves, by Megan O'Grady, an assistant professor in art and art history and a former art critic at The New York Times.

“I have often been bludgeoned by art’s beauty, energized or pulverized by its emotional content, vacuum-sealed within its force-field," O'Grady says. "I’ve looked at it and thought, This is exactly what it feels like to remember someone I lost, or, This is what love is, a tenderness toward existence.”

Additionally, she contends, art “provokes unanswerable questions about how to live in a fragmenting society. It enacts transfers of energy, joy and defiance. It suggests new forms of connection and belonging.”

Reading vibe: More reading, please

Suggestion: The Novel Experience, by Helmut Müller-Sievers, a professor of Germanic and Slavic languages and literature.

Helmut Müller-Sievers has an idea to help reignite students’ interest in taking literature courses: Rather than teaching novels as a source of knowledge, academics should encourage young readers to pay attention to the experience of reading.

“Every experience is novel, and every novel is an experience,” he says.

Reading vibe: Science can happen anywhere!

Suggestion: A Life of Science—In Gyms!, a memoir by Doug Seals, a distinguished professor in the Department of Integrative Physiology who chronicles more than four decades in biomedical research.

Imagine a biomedical research laboratory. Chances are, visions of gleaming equipment, climate-controlled rooms, and the hum of precision instruments come to mind.

But what if that lab was really a century-old gymnasium plagued by electrical outages, noise and temperatures that swing with the seasons? Those are just some of the challenges Doug Seals faced while establishing one of the most productive aging research programs in the country.

Reading vibe: Walking through the garden

Suggestion: The Garden, a work of poetry by Julie Carr, professor of English and creative writing and chair of women and gender studies.

Questions of what to do about violence and the spiritual paralysis it can cause let Julie Carr down wandering paths of mystical tradition, of memories of her uncle, of dreams of fire in the dry Colorado grass, of imaginings like fragments of broken glass. And she arrived at The Garden, her recently published book that weaves fractured narratives into reoriented themes of time, war, Jewishness, memory, techno-biology, friendship and grief.

Reading vibe: A road trip through memory

Suggestion: Music for Leaving, a novel by Erika Randall, dean and vice provost of undergraduate education and professor of dance

Meet Eleanor Murphy: She's 61 and on a road trip of reconciliation and reclamation across I-70, a small duffle bag and her childhood hopeless chest of failed dreams beside her on the seat of a 1960s Dodge truck.

On a journey to connect with her sister and her estranged daughter, Eleanor considers themes of longing, relief and hope—sometimes given voice through items she connects with like a peach pit, her engagement ring and a dashboard hula dancer. Along the way, she learns that though leaving is often seen as failure, sometimes it is its own superpower.

Keep reading!

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There’s still plenty of time to dive into a summer reading list, and College of Arts and Sciences authors can meet every reading mood.

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How does it feel to be alive? Art has answers

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 22:29:25 +0000

How does it feel to be alive? Art has answers Rachel Sauer Mon, 06/15/2026 - 16:29

Clint Talbott

��ñ�� Professor Megan O'Grady's book fuses memoir and art criticism in ‘unusual and risky’ work that’s drawing fans and kudos

When it comes to art, your heart is as important as your brain. This is what Megan O’Grady feels.

She should know. O’Grady, assistant professor in art and art history at the ��ñ��, is the author of How it Feels to Be Alive: Encounters with Art and Our Selves, published this year.

A former art critic at The New York Times, O’Grady calls the book “unusual and risky,” but the gamble seems to have paid off. The New Yorker chose it as one of the best books of 2026 thus far, and it has received a starred Kirkus review. Art and literary publications, from Hyperallergic to The Yale Review, have covered it, and a wide range of readers have found her approach to art “resonant in their own lives.”

Megan O'Grady, assistant professor of art and art history at ��ñ��, is the author of How it Feels to Be Alive: Encounters with Art and Our Selves, published this year. (Photo: Thorsten Trimpop)

The book focuses on five works of art, which frame, reflect or distill chapters in her own life. She quotes the artist Barbara Kruger, who defined art as “the ability, through visual, verbal, gestural and musical means, to objectify one’s experience of the world: to show and tell, through a kind of eloquent shorthand, how it feels to be alive.”

O’Grady concurs, saying: “I have often been bludgeoned by art’s beauty, energized or pulverized by its emotional content, vacuum-sealed within its force-field. I’ve looked at it and thought, This is exactly what it feels like to remember someone I lost, or, This is what love is, a tenderness toward existence.”

O’Grady is a critic and essayist and has also written for The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review and Vogue.

Recently, she answered questions from Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine. Her responses follows:

Question: How can a regular person have greater appreciation for art? Are there steps one could take?

O’Grady: In my view, your appreciation of art is no more or less refined as mine or anyone else’s. My book directly challenges the idea that one must be an expert to enjoy art, and I’m skeptical of approaches to art that feel precious or exclusionary. Part of being human is to look for meaning in life—and art is one mode of seeking.

How It Feels to Be Alive models a mode of looking at art as an intimate encounter, one that deploys—in my experience, anyway—not instantaneously, but over time, in different seasons of life: as teenager trying to figure out who I was, or in moments of loss—after the end of a long relationship, or after losing my home and everything I owned in a freak accident.

Art helped me think through becoming a parent, and the awareness that I had deeply implicated myself in our broken world. It changed the way I think about the natural world and the invisible histories written into the landscape. It made me look very clearly at people with very different experiences of American life than my own, and it challenged me to deal with some of my own unresolved feelings about all sorts of things: creating a home, the unconscious shame I had about my body, about materialism and guilt.

I’ve always been interested in art’s capacity to make us feel things, to challenge the way we see ourselves understand the world around us. This, to me, is why we need art—in any form, be it visual art, music, literature—and why we come to it seeking answers or solace or self-recognition or things we can't put into words.

Nan Goldin, Picnic on the Esplanade, Boston, 1973, cibachrome print. (Courtesy of Nan Goldin and Gagosian)

We live in an era that both fears and devalues art, that often treats it as a commodity, an artifact to categorize by medium and period, or to instrumentalize in displays of political dominance. I’m especially concerned by characterizations of art as elitist, decorative or superfluous, and we can already see the result of our educational systems’ deprioritizing of the arts and humanities in declining creative and critical-thinking skills.

We look at art with the same eyes we do everything else. What are you attracted to and why? Is there more to be learned from other works by a particular artist, or about the artists and the times they were responding to? Art is entirely subjective: It hits us all differently depending on where we’re at in life, our experiences and interests.

I encourage readers to seek out the art in their midst—this is what I try to do, anyway. Build it into your life; get on mailing lists. For those interested in visual art who live in the Boulder area, the MFA show at CU Art Museum is a great place to see emerging artists addressing the issues of our time. There are exceptional art institutions as well as alternative art spaces across the country.

Question: Your book has elements of a memoir and elements of art criticism. In taking this approach, you share portions of your life that range from joy and pain and points in between. Can you talk about how such open introspection might help the reader understand art better—or feel it more fully?

O’Grady: Art is private in origin and public in expression—this is essential to its power. As an art critic for The New York Times, I found myself listening to artists’ stories, many of them intensely personal, and reflecting on everything that had led up to the creation of these charged objects we see in museums and galleries. The artists had risked a lot to make the work they did, and their trust in me was humbling. I began to think of the other side of the equation—what impact art had had in my own life, and what I was risking in my work as a critic.

Things were heating up in the world—a global pandemic, a turn toward fascist politics, race and gender-based violence—and I began thinking more about why we should care about things like art in times that often feel chaotic and cruel. Because I did care, even though so many things about our culture leads us to cultivate cynicism and self-interest. Being honest about these things is a risk; truth-telling is a risk. Because art both exposes and asserts cultural values, it can really upset people.

Agnes Martin, Friendship, 1963, gold leaf and gesso on canvas, 6 ft. 3 in. × 6 ft. 3 in. (190.5 × 190.5 cm). Gift of Celeste and Armand P. Bartos. (© Agnes Martin Foundation, New York / Artists Rights Society [ARS], New York. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY)

These are the tensions that inspired me to write the book and that guided its structure. Honestly, we should all be taking risks right now.

Question: If a student asked you to list five works of art that conveyed how it feels to be alive, how would you answer?

O’Grady: We all have to find the answer to this for themselves. How It Feels to Be Alive tackles recurring themes in my life and in the lives of some of the artists I’ve known.

In the chapter on Agnes Martin, I’m thinking about connection and isolation, and the impact our friends have on us. A chapter that begins with Carrie Mae Weems’ “Kitchen Table Series” leads me consider the complexity of seeing oneself clearly when we’re so busy being seen. Kruger’s “Untitled (Your Body),” which kicks off chapter 3, was one of the first works of art that led me to understand what it meant to have a critical perspective on the world, and later, as a parent to a daughter, to confront my own internalized misogyny.

The great performance artist Pope.L, with whom I traveled to Flint, Michigan, to do a project involving the tainted water—we bottled and sold it as a Pope.L-branded art object to raise money for the people of Flint—challenged my uneasy feelings about home as troubling national or personal identity, the subject of chapter 4. The last chapter is about environmental artists and how they reframe our position on Earth, anchored by the largely overlooked land artist and monumental sculptor Beverly Pepper.

These are the major themes, but within each chapter, they become more complex, involving other artists and works. And they are certainly not the only themes in life—the book doesn’t try to be comprehensive. That would be impossible. Rather, it seeks to model a way of looking at art, encouraging others to seek out their own works of art in any form that are meaningful to them.

Question: You mentioned that you love your students, who are “less interested in making a mark than in leaving no trace,” a great line. Your writing (and good writing generally) is also a form of art. Do your students appreciate that, particularly in the TikTok era? Do you have a sense of this?

O’Grady: They all see reading and writing as essential to their creative process. My graduate students, MFA candidates in arts practices who are learning where they fit into larger conversations about representation and politics, use writing to refine the conceptual elements of their visual practice—that is, to better grasp and articulate a strong point of view, which involves a great deal of reflection and critique. We’re all asking ourselves what’s important in this moment in time in which our attention is fragmented and monetized and so much of what used to connect us feels broken.

Most of the artists I teach and write about in the book—Glenn Ligon, Barbara Kruger, Arthur Jafa, Trevor Paglen, Robert Adams, Imani Jaqueline Brown and Carrie Mae Weems, just to name a few—use text or narrative extensively in their art and/or have a writing practice complementary to their visual work.

Question: Beverly Pepper’s art, which forms the basis of a chapter in your book, was criticized with sexist tropes, but it reflects (or punctuates) the monumental scale of the landscape and the cosmos. Perhaps this question is outside the realm of how it feels to be alive, but your recounting of this episode spurs a question about how it feels to be a female artist in a male-dominated world. Or, more generally, how it feels to create art that is the “deeply rooted understory.”

O’Grady: Part of what thrills me about being a critic is looking at a single work of art over time and thinking about how it can reveal tremendous cultural shifts, and personal ones.

Art is private in origin and public in expression—this is essential to its power.

Pepper’s story, for me, is very much about how it felt to be alive as a discredited or overlooked artist—one who was making work that was by any measure groundbreaking and radical. It is dehumanizing not to be recognized for one’s work because of the body one is born into.

In the last chapter, I play with the idea of the anomaly—in art history, but also in the cosmos. Humans always center themselves, but what if, as Pepper and other artists have done, we centered the land instead, reframing our perspective? What if we are the anomalies? This is what art and art criticism does best: reframe and challenge our assumptions.

Pepper’s anomalousness is but one example of the many people left out of art’s dominant narratives. Art history is a set of stories that are continually being rewritten, in part because so many people were left out of previous drafts, or because considerations of their work were so essentializing. In the book, I argue that it is impossible to make art or behold it separately from the conditions of its making and beholding.

Question: In the chapter “Forces of Nature,” you ruminate on the landscape of Colorado, suggesting that remarking on its humbling effect is “cliché.” Can an observation or feeling that might be called a cliché be expressed in a way that is not cliché?

O’Grady: I certainly hope so! Art/literature/music show us this time and again—that the things others have experienced before us have the capacity to compel us anew via the human imagination. Life, at the end of the day, is a cliché. Behind human is a cliché. It has all been felt before—this is part of what makes art capable of transcending time and place—and yet there will always be more to think, to see, to say.

Question: You offer an extended meditation on Agnes Martin’s Friendship, particularly by the suggestion to approach her work “as you would cross an empty beach to look at an ocean.” That seems to suggest that we should have an emotional and intellectual receptivity?

O’Grady: Those are Martin’s words, not mine. She articulated this as an ideal—an ambition for her work. She was reaching the peak of her powers just as conceptual art, with its theories and manifestos, was beginning to dominate the conversation. Martin, who found solace in Christian and Buddhist thinkers, wanted something less intellectual from her work: to induce a particular feeling of infinitude, humility, wonderment and vastness in spectators.

In my book, I return a few times to Martin’s image of crossing the beach to look over the ocean. In her life, Martin had the experience more than once of coming metaphorically to the edge of the shore, or precipice, in her life—as, perhaps, we all have, in our own ways, when we’re at loose ends. It is both exhilarating and terrifying to look into the great beyond, and she confronted this to a degree that perhaps no artist has before or since.

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��ñ�� Professor Megan O'Grady's book fuses memoir and art criticism in ‘unusual and risky’ work that’s drawing fans and kudos.

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Claes Oldenburg, American, born in Sweden (1929–2022); Coosje van Bruggen, American, born in the Netherlands (1942–2009). Shuttlecocks, 1994, aluminum, fiberglass-reinforced plastic, paint, 230 9/16 × 191 7/8 in. (585.6 × 487.4 cm). The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri. (© Estate of Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen. Image courtesy of Nelson-Atkins Digital Production & Preservation)

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Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen. Shuttlecocks, 1994, aluminum, fiberglass-reinforced plastic, paint. The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri.

‘Every novel is an experience’

Rachel Sauer — Fri, 22 May 2026 12:30:51 +0000

‘Every novel is an experience’ Rachel Sauer Fri, 05/22/2026 - 06:30

Clay Bonnyman Evans

��ñ�� scholar Helmut Müller-Sievers’ recently published book makes the case for a new way of reading—and teaching—novels

“Every experience is novel, and every novel is an experience,” says Müller-Sievers, professor of Germanic and Slavic languages and literature at the ��ñ��.

“Every experience is novel, and every novel is an experience,” says ��ñ�� scholar Helmut Müller-Sievers.

In his new book The Novel Experience (Cornell University Press, 2026), Müller-Sievers follows the lead of three thinkers with “radical” notions about experience—the third-century Mahāyāna Buddhist monk Nāgārjuna;19th-century philosopher and psychologist William James; and19th-century German philosopher and writer Friedrich Nietzsche—and draws on his own experiences of reading.

“Fewer and fewer people are taking literature courses. We foolishly try to counter this loss by emphasizing what kind of knowledge students get from reading,” he says. “Because we are so focused on knowledge, we eliminate and, in a sense, prohibit the expression of the experience of reading novels.”

What was it like to read the book?

Rather than presenting a novel as something to be interpreted and or critically examined, the idea is to encourage readers to observe and communicate what it was actually like to read the book: Why did they choose the book? How difficult was it? How long did it take? Under what conditions—place, time, surroundings—did they read the book? Were they drawn to or distanced from the different characters? Did they enjoy it? Did anything stick with them when finished? How did the protagonist’s experience relate to their own?

In emphasizing knowledge to the exclusion of experience, the Western academy has promoted “an atrophied, mutilated sense of what experience is,” Müller-Sievers says. “We think there is a self . . . that is predicated on a division between the experiencer and what is experienced. James, Nāgārjuna and Nietzsche are radical critics of that idea.”

“The academy is deeply uncomfortable with the idea that novels should entertain. But entertainment and being entertained are deeply human activities and might even be uniquely human,” says Helmut Müller-Sievers.

Where Western thought from time immemorial has argued that there exist stable, individual human “selves” that go through life almost as if watching a movie, distinct from their own experiences, Buddhist thought argues that separation between consciousness and experience is a delusion.

Müller-Sievers doesn’t dispute that there is knowledge to be found in literature or that it requires knowledge to understand and teach it in certain ways. But focusing almost exclusively on knowledge ignores the primary motivations most people who read novels: experience and entertainment.

“When people who are not academics read a book, they are not primarily interested in knowledge, but rather in partaking of an experience,” he says. “The academy is deeply uncomfortable with the idea that novels should entertain. But entertainment and being entertained are deeply human activities and might even be uniquely human.”

Müller-Sievers sees no contradiction in reading for both knowledge and experience and argues that sharing the experiences of reading with others increases interest and enjoyment.

“So, rather than say, ‘Hey, let’s learn about Thomas Mann,’ it’s ‘Hey, let’s talk about the experience of reading about an experience. We can find common language that makes it exciting,” he says.

Müller-Sievers also sees reading for experience as a “civic virtue.” Humans can never have the experiences of another in the real world, but they can by reading novels. Reading novels can help students become more aware of their singular distinctness from others and their experiences.

And at a time when artificial-intelligence continues to insinuate its way into nearly every aspect of modern life, he detects a clear, inviolable distinction between human and machine intelligence.

“Only humans can have experiences. AI can only imitate experiences by looking back. It always looks back; it has to look back,” he says. “There is no way to distinguish between human and AI knowledge. But we can distinguish between deep human experience and the retroactive intelligence of AI.”

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��ñ�� scholar Helmut Müller-Sievers’ recently published book makes the case for a new way of reading—and teaching—novels.

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Is it temple robbery? That depends on who is doing the taking

Rachel Sauer — Mon, 18 May 2026 19:15:43 +0000

Is it temple robbery? That depends on who is doing the taking Rachel Sauer Mon, 05/18/2026 - 13:15

Bradley Worrell

New book from ��ñ�� scholar Isabel Köster examines temple robbery and the ancient Roman politics of moral blame

That contradiction lies at the heart of Stealing from the Gods, the new book by Isabel Köster, a ��ñ�� associate professor of classics whose research focus is the history, religion and literature of the Roman Republic and the early Empire. Her book, which has its origins in her PhD dissertation, examines how Roman authors thought about sacred theft, imperial power and moral character.

Isabel Köster, a ��ñ�� associate professor of classics, notes that calling someone a temple robber became the ultimate character assassination in ancient Rome.

In a recent interview with Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine, Köster discussed who was doing the robbing, explaining why temples were such tempting targets and why calling someone a temple robber became the ultimate character assassination in ancient Rome. Her comments have been lightly edited for style and condensed for space.

Question: How common was temple robbery? Also, who was doing the taking and where was it happening?

Köster: In military contexts, it seems to have been fairly common. However, it was usually not labeled ‘temple robbery’ unless a Roman author wanted to emphasize a character flaw. For everyday thefts—small amounts of money or objects disappearing from sanctuaries—we know very little; our sources simply aren’t interested in that kind of activity.

These weren’t small, anonymous thieves. They were generals, governors and emperors.

Most cases took place in conquered or soon‑to‑be‑conquered territories, especially in Greece and Asia Minor. The few instances we have in Rome itself are associated with periods of civil war.

Question: Why plunder temples?

Köster: In many ancient communities, sanctuaries were essentially the equivalent of banks today. They were often the most heavily fortified places in a town, with solid walls and impressive doors. They were used to store valuables that belonged to the community, such as treasuries, and also private valuables that individuals entrusted to the gods. If you didn’t want to keep something at home, one option was to bring it to a sanctuary and ask the deity to look after it.

So, if you’re conquering territory and need money quickly, temples are a very natural place to go. Especially during long, expensive campaigns far from Rome, some temple plundering was probably inevitable. That’s simply a reality of the economics of ancient warfare.

What’s interesting is how Roman sources frame this. They ask, first of all, who is doing the plundering? If it’s a general with an impeccable reputation who claims to be acting for the good of Rome—funding further war and later returning treasures for public display—then that’s considered acceptable. Nobody criticizes those cases.

But if the person involved already has a reputation for greed or moral failings and is clearly enriching himself, then the same behavior is treated as temple robbery. This distinction allows Roman authors to frame standard warfare practices as fine while isolating blame onto particular individuals.

Question: What kinds of objects were typically taken from temples?

Köster: Generally, the more spectacular, the better. We’re talking about giant statues, large amounts of coinage and especially famous works of art. In some extreme cases, particularly greedy individuals went much further—breaking decorations off doors or removing parts of statues they couldn’t transport. But in general, Roman armies had the logistics to move large items and they took advantage of that.

Despite how frequently temple robberies occurred, ancient Romans still expressed sharp moral outrage about it—not for the plundering itself, but for particular individuals accused of committing it for the “wrong” reasons.

Question: What happened to the plunder once it was taken?

Köster: Some of it was melted down on the spot to generate revenue and pay soldiers. Other objects—especially famous artworks—were selected to be transported back to Rome for triumphs and public display. How those decisions were made and how much was lost is something we simply don’t know.

Question: Was temple plundering technically illegal under Roman law?

Köster: Often, no. Roman law was quite clear on this point: If a sanctuary was not located in Roman territory and its possessions had not been formally consecrated by the Roman people, then legally speaking, taking from it was not considered a temple robbery. A sanctuary in a territory that Rome was about to conquer didn’t necessarily count as a properly sacred space from a Roman legal perspective.

That’s one of the reasons the moral outrage in the literary sources is so interesting. There’s a real disconnect between what was legally permissible and what ancient authors chose to condemn.

Question: If plundering from temples in foreign lands was typically legal, what qualified as temple robbery in Roman eyes?

Köster: That’s the key question, and the answer is: Who did the taking? When Roman authors decide whether something counts as temple robbery, they don’t usually start by asking what was taken or where. They ask who was responsible?

If the person plundering was seen as morally upright and claimed to be acting for the benefit of Rome—funding campaigns, returning treasures for public display—then the act was framed as acceptable.

But if the person already had a questionable reputation, then the exact same behavior became reprehensible. Calling someone a temple robber is character assassination. It’s a way of saying this person is greedy, impious and unfit for power.

Question: How does that distinction help Romans think about their empire more broadly?

Köster: It’s a very clever rhetorical move. Roman imperial conquests inevitably involved violence and the destruction of sacred spaces, but Roman authors didn’t want to portray the entire system as flawed. By framing temple robbery as the failure of a few bad individuals, they could acknowledge harm without accepting collective responsibility.

Thus, it’s not a problem with Roman warfare, according to this logic. It’s a problem with isolated people who can’t behave themselves.

Question: The Roman statesman, philosopher and lawyer Cicero plays a big role in your book. Why are his speeches about temple robbery so important?

Köster: You can’t study temple robbery without Cicero’s speeches against Verres, the former governor of Sicily. Temple robbery is not part of the formal charges against Verres, which focus on corruption, but Cicero devotes enormous attention to attacks on temples because he felt they strengthened his argument.

Cicero clearly felt that these stories helped his case. The logic is: If someone is capable of violating sacred spaces so badly, then of course he’s capable of embezzlement and corruption. Verres becomes the benchmark against which all other temple robbers are measured.

Question: You state in your book that temple robbers become almost caricatures in Roman literature. What do those caricatures look like?

Köster: They’re remarkably consistent. A temple robber is never just someone who steals from temples. They are also accused of murder, torture, illegal enslavement and all kinds of brutality.

"In Rome, accusations of temple robbery were less about protecting the gods and more about defining who belonged and who didn’t."

But what’s really interesting is how often these figures fail at basic ‘Roman-ness.’ They can’t give a good speech. They don’t know how to host a dinner party properly. They dress inappropriately and don’t know how to behave in elite social settings. Despite reaching the top of society, they’re portrayed as outsiders to Roman culture.

Question: Based on available historical records, how many Romans were convicted of temple robbery? Also, what punishments did they face?

Köster: We have no robust evidence for prosecutions for temple robbery—sacrilegium in Latin—during the period I study, nor do we have definitions of the crime or discussions of penalties. In later Christian sources, where sacrilegium signifies a broad range of crimes that diminish the sacred status of someone or something (e.g., blasphemy or insulting the emperor), it is a capital offense. Here it merits the most horrific penalties that the Roman world has to offer, such as throwing people to wild animals for public entertainment. But in pre-Christian Rome, at least in the sources that survive, accusations of temple robbery are not a legal charge, but supporting evidence in other cases.

Question: What roles do the gods themselves play in these Roman narratives? Do they ever punish temple robbers?

Köster: Sometimes. There are dramatic stories of divine punishment: People struck dead, afflicted with disease—even losing their hands while trying to plunder a sanctuary. But those stories are surprisingly rare.

Most of the time, temple robbers get away with it. That raised big questions for me about ancient ideas of divine justice and the reliability of gods as protectors of their own property, which will be the focus of my next major project.

Question: If readers could take one or two ideas away from your book, what would they be?

Köster: That when we encounter moral outrage in ancient sources, we should ask what that work is doing. In Rome, accusations of temple robbery were less about protecting the gods and more about defining who belonged and who didn’t. The first question to ask isn’t ‘what happened?’ It’s ‘who is being accused?’

At its heart, this is a book about insults. And insults tell us what a culture values.

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New book from ��ñ�� scholar Isabel Köster examines temple robbery and the ancient Roman politics of moral blame.

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Top image: "The Triumph of Aemilius Paulus" by Carle Vernet, 1789

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