Korbel ranked 12th best place in the world to earn a master’s degree in international relations.
Korbel ranked 20th in the world for the best undergraduate degree in international studies.
Korbel ranked 12th best place in the world to earn a master’s degree in international relations.
Korbel ranked 20th in the world for the best undergraduate degree in international studies.
From science to the arts, students from departments across the University of Denver gathered this spring to present their research projects at the annual Undergraduate Research Showcase.
The Undergraduate Research Center awarded many of these students grants to conduct their research, which culminated in a diverse display of creative and engaging projects. The research represents the advancing intellectual growth dimension of the 4D Experience.
“DU’s undergraduate research activities are truly premier, providing students with rigorous opportunities to work with thought leaders from across campus—flexing their muscles as thought explorers, translating and learning critical skills, and building the confidence to tackle the problems of tomorrow,” says Corinne Lengsfeld, senior vice provost for research and graduate education.
Here are descriptions of nine of this year’s coolest research projects, along with what students told us about their experience.
Jacqueline Stephenson
“By examining how scholars have used a lens of queerness and mediation to analyze key hagiographies—first of saints, more broadly, and then of female saints—and using these approaches to examine the inherently queer actions, positions and roles found in Saint Brigit’s First Life, we can gain a clearer view of societal views towards queerness during the early medieval period and in early medieval Ireland, in particular.
In doing so, this thesis will help chip away at the monolithic view of the period as well as the queer erasure within—demonstrating that queerness has always been a fundamental part of human society.”
What was the best part about doing this research?
The best part about doing this research was actually contributing to the scholarship and demonstrating that queerness has always been here, even in the places we might least expect. Additionally, seeing concepts we often don't associate with religion and this period were fascinating.
An example is one of her miracles being essentially an abortion, where a young unmarried woman didn't want to be pregnant and came to Saint Brigit, who made the fetus disappear. This is literally a celebrated miracle and not condemned—something shocking considering present-day religious attitudes toward abortion.
Vincent Pandey
“A modern model for peace is the Olympic Truce, a United Nations General Assembly resolution that calls for the pausing and prevention of new conflicts from one week before the Olympic Games through one week after the Paralympic Games. Some argue that the symbolic nature of the truce allows it to create moments of peace in conflicts, while others argue that it is nothing more than a gesture of goodwill that has not actually been used for peace.
My research question is: Has the Olympic Truce ever been successfully implemented to prevent the onset of new conflict or in creating a ceasefire during an ongoing conflict? I use conflict data and case studies to determine the prevalence of conflict during Olympic Truce periods and four case studies to analyze attempts to use the Olympic Truce and some of the challenges faced.”
Lauren Tapper
“Through photography, Hawai'i Uncovered aims to explore the conflicting aspects of identity in Hawai'i, reveal the true characteristics of the state and separate its perception by tourists from the reality that locals know all too well. Photos were taken at popular tourist and lesser known ‘locals-only’ destinations on multiple of the Hawaiian Islands. The photos focused mostly on the way that people interact and exist within these places and amongst each other through a candid and observational lens.
The idea of community and belonging are both the saving grace and downfall of these islands, allowing many to be proud and excited about who they are while also leaving some cast out and forgotten. Both the romanticized and ignored aspects of these islands are what make the state unlike anywhere else in the world and are essential in defining Hawai'i in an honest fashion.”
How did the idea for this research come about?
I got the idea for this research as someone who was born and raised in Hawaii and came to the mainland to notice that there was a huge discrepancy between what people think they know about Hawaii versus what is true, or at least what I know to be true.
Haven Hinds
“This project is a study of extinct flowers, their histories, environments, biology, colors and assigned personalities—manifested in 3D models and a digital book. The goal was to select six flowers with interesting histories and/or cultural connections. Since the flowers can, for the most part, not be seen or kept, they were created in Blender as accurately as possible. To give people a means of connection with the flowers, each was assigned a personality based on different factors. These factors could be the colors they possess, where geographically they thrived, parts of their history or biological factors.
To allow these personalities to further flourish, color spaces were created in Affinity Designer to be applied not only as the background of the models but also as the background of half of the book’s pages. Each person who interacts with the book is encouraged to pick out flowers they connect to and create their own garden of these now-gone flowers.”
What was the best part about doing this research?
The best part about doing this research was finding out some of the love stories connected to these flowers. I am a hopeless romantic, so I enjoyed even the tragic ending to the ancient stories connected to the flowers. Their stories allowed me the opportunity to give the flowers personality traits, allowing others to further connect.
Erin Kubat
“ʽA Midsummer Night’s Dream’ is one of Shakespeare’s most renowned plays, steeped in a world of dreams and magic, and will be the second show in the Department of Theatre’s winter quarter season. This show has the goal of bringing in college audiences that have not had the full experience of witnessing live theatre and who may have previous, negative notions about Shakespearean plays. The goal was to transform our audience for the two hours they witnessed this play into people that can enter a world of magic, try something new, appreciate it, challenge their own thinking and revitalize an art that took a heavy blow in recent years.
In order to achieve this fantastical reality onstage, I worked closely with the costume designer (Janice Lacek) and director (Sabin Epstein) to research, design, prototype and fabricate specialty props and costumes to create the multiple distinct worlds present in ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream.’ By the end of the project, I designed, prototyped and fabricated five large-scale specialty props sporting at least 50 separate pieces, each using advanced painting and texturing methods, LEDs lights and wiring techniques, foam molding, paper mâché, and wig making techniques.”
Murphy Li
“This project leverages virtual reality (VR) technology to create an immersive stargazing experience that makes the wonders of the cosmos accessible to all. By integrating VR with educational strategies, we aim to revolutionize the teaching and experience of astronomy. Our primary objective is to enhance astronomy education by developing a VR platform that transcends conventional teaching methods, making celestial phenomena accessible and engaging for users from diverse educational and geographical backgrounds.
This initiative will democratize access to astronomy, promote STEM education and introduce users to advanced technological learning tools. The approach involves constructing detailed celestial models and integrating them into a user-friendly VR interface.”
Trevor Briggs
“Flamethrower Vol. 1-3 is a series of three EPs (short albums) that combine jazz, classical and commercial electronic music to produce an artistic work in which the perception, function and musical context of electronic instruments is challenged. I approached these compositions treating electronic components as instruments, writing out scores as I would for brass and wind instruments. I also utilized cutting-edge electronic hardware to generate degenerated, fragmented and evolving sounds.
This type of in-depth sound design allowed me to write, perform and record novel parts for unique instruments. The remainder of the sounds on these recordings incorporate sampling of field recordings to generate new instruments or soundscapes and unconventional recordings of woodwinds (saxophone, clarinet, flute, bass clarinet and alto flute) from Professor Remy Le Boeuf, my faculty partner.”
What was the best part about doing this research?
The best parts of this project were tiny moments where I was really able to see how the final product was coming together. These times came through all parts of the writing and production process. I recorded Professor Remy Le Boeuf on woodwinds a few times for the album, and those sessions were full of those moments. There's a lot of momentary joy in making music with other people. As a recording engineer and producer, I have been feeling very lucky and grateful that I'm the one that gets to capture and shape these moments for others to listen to.
Ren Pratt
“This paper discusses how the unhoused population suffers at the hand of technological inequality despite being relatively offline. It presents theories on how this would change if we reapproached how technology is used to assist the unhoused. It suggests implementing blockchain as a resource as well as modifying the websites built for the unhoused.
Employees at shelters are interviewed for this paper about their experiences with using digital resources to rehouse and restabilize the vulnerable. They are asked how the sites can be improved for more optimized use. The sites are also tested against current user experience (UX) standards for accessibility.”
How did the idea for this research come about?
My idea for this research came from two different sources. The first was the approximately 100 hours of volunteer work that I did with a local organization that works with the unhoused. I worked with caseworkers and other employees to get a better understanding of how the organization was run and what major needs were held by the unhoused population. It opened my eyes to a lot of problems that I hadn’t thought about before, especially how difficult it is to escape homelessness and why it is so difficult.
The second source came later, when I was already working on my thesis paper. I was studying abroad in Greece and took a really interesting UX design class. That class made me start thinking about what UX looked like throughout my life, so when I was looking at government sites to understand where the unhoused would need to be using personal identification, I started noticing all these UX problems that would be easy to fix, which was baffling and frustrating to me, so I decided to add a second part to my paper.
Emily Lin
“Suicide remains a global health concern for the field of health, which urgently needs innovative approaches for early detection and intervention. This paper focuses on identifying suicidal intentions in SuicideWatch Reddit posts and presents a novel approach to detect suicide using the cutting-edge RoBERTa-CNN model, a variant of RoBERTa (Robustly Optimized BERT Approach). RoBERTa is a language model that captures textual information and forms semantic relationships within texts.
By adding the Convolution Neural Network (CNN) head, RoBERTa enhances its ability to capture important patterns from heavy datasets. To evaluate RoBERTa-CNN, we experimented on the Suicide and Depression Detection dataset and obtained solid results. For example, RoBERTa-CNN achieves 98% mean accuracy with the standard deviation (STD) of 0.0009. It also reaches over 97.5% mean area under the curve (AUC) value with an STD of 0.0013. Then, RoBERTa-CNN outperforms competitive methods, demonstrating the robustness and ability to capture nuanced linguistic patterns for suicidal intentions. Hence, RoBERTa-CNN can detect suicide intention on text data very well.”
The University of Denver has announced the inaugural designation of six existing DU research entities as official DU Research Institutes.
“These new Research Institutes possess national and international reputations of significant stature, creating the peer reputation needed for their departments or divisions to become highly respected,” says Corinne Lengsfeld, senior vice provost for research and graduate education. “They serve the fundamental mission of the University by creating an accessible educational environment that attracts, retrains and retains top faculty and students.”
To be considered for designation as a Research Institute, an entity must have a three- to five-year annual average of $1.5 million in research expenditures from external sources. It must also be found to contribute to the fabric of the University through a certain number of faculty involved and students taught and trained.
Research Institutes get more access to resources from DU departments including Information Technology, Marketing and Communications and Advancement, among others. They will also receive financial incentives from the University to stabilize their administration and cover other costs.
More information on Research Institutes can be found on the DU Research Policies webpage.
The new Research Institutes are as follows:
The Butler Institute for Families (Graduate School of Social Work)
The Frederick S. Pardee Institute for International Futures (Korbel School of International Studies)
The Institute for Human-Animal Connection (Graduate School of Social Work)
The Marsico Institute for Early Learning (Morgridge College of Education)
The Stress, Early Experience and Development Institute (College of Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences)
The Institute for Relationship Science (College of Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences)
“A great daughter of DU.”
That’s how Condoleezza Rice, University of Denver alumna and former secretary of state, described the late Madeleine Albright, who blazed a trail for Rice and other women in government as the United States’ first female secretary of state.
At DU’s Korbel Honors program last week, the University of Denver posthumously honored Albright with the Josef Korbel Award. Rice’s video tribute to Albright came alongside another reverent testament to Albright’s legacy from the only other female former secretary, Hillary Clinton.
Clinton, Rice and other speakers—including Albright’s daughter, Alice Patterson Albright—spoke at length about Albright’s ties to DU through her father, Josef Korbel, a Czech American diplomat and the founder of the Josef Korbel School of International Studies.
Rice shared a story about how she first connected with Albright while Michael Dukakis was running for office in Massachusetts. Albright called Rice and asked if she’d be interested in advising on foreign policy for the Dukakis campaign.
“I paused. There was, frankly, a long pause,” Rice remembers. “And I said, ‘Madeleine, I'm a Republican.’ [Albright] kind of shrieked. ‘How could that be? We have the same father!’
“We did have the same intellectual father, Josef Korbel. And I am so grateful that Madeleine and I were able to become friends and colleagues and do so much together.”
Clinton’s arrival on stage was met with a standing ovation from the crowd. Whoops and cheers could be heard even as she sat down with Korbel School Dean Fritz Mayer.
Clinton recalled first hearing about Albright’s work during the political campaigns that Albright worked on—including the Dukakis campaign that Rice had remembered.
“I was so excited when I learned that she had gone to Wellesley—we’re both Wellesley College graduates—and that she was interested in policy and politics, as was I,” Clinton said.
She told the story of how she and her husband, then-President Bill Clinton, came to the decision that he should nominate Albright as the first female secretary of state.
“I thought her values were really in line with Bill’s from the very beginning, in part because of her own background,” Clinton said. “She understood the danger posed by the war in the Balkans and the aggression that was taking place there…. And so I was a strong advocate of Madeleine's nomination to become secretary of state and, luckily, my husband agreed.”
Albright’s ties to both Wellesley College and the University of Denver were also a focus of the evening. Korbel professor Rachel Epstein used the event to announce a new partnership between Wellesley and Korbel: the Wellesley-Korbel Albright Fellows Program, which will allow Wellesley undergraduate students to continue their education at Korbel with a one-year master’s program.
The first class of Wellesley-Korbel Albright fellows will arrive at DU in the fall of 2024.
At the conclusion of the evening, Alice Patterson Albright took to the stage to remember her mother. She recalled spending much of her childhood on and around the DU campus—even playing with her sisters at Observatory Park.
Patterson Albright stressed the immense impact that her grandparents, Josef and Mandula, had on her love for the United States and for diplomacy.
“My mom inherited her parents’ love and gratitude for America,” she said. “She felt deeply motivated to give back to the country that had given her family a chance to win freedom. The way that she chose to serve shaped by her most important teachers—[Grandpa] and Grandma—who instilled in her fierce convictions and values that she carried to her final days.”
The Korbel Honors event also recognized the accomplishments of an outstanding professor and a notable alumna.
Professor Singumbe Muyeba was awarded the Korbel Outstanding Teaching Award, while Chilean Ambassador to the United Nations Claudia Fuentes Julio was honored with the Korbel Distinguished Alumni Award.
Korbel School Professor Keith Gehring speaks to a group of Ukrainian mayors.
The group of Ukrainian mayors who visited the University of Denver last week may not have been a typical delegation to the annual Cities Summit of the Americas, but their presence on DU’s campus was impactful, nonetheless.
The five mayors spoke with Korbel School of International Studies professors Rachel Epstein, Martin Rhoades and Lapo Salucci about their experiences leading their citizens through Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a war which has displaced more than 14 million people. The roundtable included mayors Vitaliy Klychko of Kyiv, Ihor Terekhov of Kharkiv, Ivan Federov of Melitopol, Yuriy Bova of Trostyanets and Oleksandr Kodola of Nizhyn.
Despite the heavy human and infrastructural toll the war has taken on their cities, the mayors centered much of the discussion on the regrowth that has been achieved in the past few months.
Mayor Kodola of Nizhyn, a northern city in Ukraine’s Chernihiv region, spoke through a translator. He said the fighting in Nizhyn lasted a month and a half, resulting in many casualties and much destruction.
But he said he was proud of how the city has rebuilt following the conflict.
“For more than one year, we’ve given life back to our city and restored [it] to full capacity,” he said. “My task as the mayor is to restore life in the city.”
Bova is mayor of Trostyanets, which was occupied by Russia on Feb. 24, 2022, and liberated just over a month later.
He said that Russians tortured and robbed Trostyanets’ citizens, stealing all of the city’s computers.
“But almost 99% of people have returned to the city,” Bova said.
He thanked the U.S. for its role in supporting Ukraine through the war, saying, “[A] huge part of restoration of the city is due to international connections.”
Following the mayors’ conversation with professors Epstein, Rhoades and Salucci, the group attended a presentation by Korbel professor Keith Gehring that detailed several possible scenarios for Ukraine’s recovery, as determined by the Frederick S. Pardee Center for International Futures.
Gehring shared that the Pardee Center had developed four scenarios for Ukraine’s future pre-invasion by Russia—and said that the applicability of those predictions is limited but shouldn’t be entirely discounted.
Gehring then outlined four post-invasion scenarios: No war, war, success and misfortune.
The first scenario, “no war,” is counter factual, Gehring said.
“We do this so that we can baseline existing dynamics in the model and compare that with the alternative scenarios that are closer to our reality,” he said.
The other three scenarios are a closer representation of what is currently happening in Ukraine.
“We have to make bold assumptions, so the effects of war are resident in all three scenarios, but they also assume a stagnation or cessation in conflict by 2033,” Gehring said.
The “war” scenario includes approximated shocks to economic growth, trade, agriculture and the energy system and other potential shifts caused by Russia’s invasion.
The “success” scenario involves meeting top governmental targets for recovery in multiple categories, while the “misfortune” scenario sees recovery efforts fail to meet not only Ukrainian governmental goals, but also World Bank and European Commission targets.
Among Gehring’s key takeaways was a warning about Ukraine’s potential reliance on foreign aid—a factor that all the mayors expressed gratitude for during the roundtable discussion.
“In the near term, of course, aid will be essential. But that, too, is problematic,” he said. “[That] dependency [could] limit long-term growth as well the interests of the international community, which waxes and wanes.”
This article appears in the winter issue of University of Denver Magazine. Visit the magazine website for bonus content and to read this and other articles in their original format.
As China has grown its economy and international influence over the last half-century, it has become known as a major world power, working alongside—and sometimes against—the U.S. to advance its interests.
Now, new research from the University of Denver’s Frederick S. Pardee Center for International Futures suggests that China may overtake the U.S. as the world’s greatest power sometime in the next 20 years. If that happens, it will mean a very different world.
To get a handle on that different world—and possibly on how to avoid it—Pardee Center director Jonathan Moyer and his team use the International Futures (IF) model, developed at DU by professor Barry Hughes over a 40-year period, to forecast and examine development within major systems such as economics, demographics and governance.
“We’ve also done quite a bit of work on thinking about how to measure power and influence in the international system,” he says. “This is a really messy, kind of complicated area, because you can’t measure power and influence directly in an aggregate way, for a variety of reasons.”
But the IF model’s index-based approach allows researchers to measure these things—power and influence, specifically—in a more indirect way.
“We create indices that try to approximate measures of power and influence, and then we use those within the International Futures system to forecast what’s the most likely development trajectory,” Moyer explains. “Then, the last bit of the puzzle is to create alternative scenarios. So, we’re not interested in just simply predicting what’s going to happen, but instead, we’re interested in better understanding the range of uncertainty and the things that would have to happen to dramatically shift these development trajectories across time. That’s the focus of this kind of U.S.-China work.”
In most of the scenarios that the Pardee team played out—about 90%—China did overtake the U.S. as the world’s next great power. What would need to happen for the U.S. to remain in that top spot?
Collin Meisel, associate director of geopolitical analysis at the Pardeee Center, says that for the U.S. to remain the world’s No. 1 power, China’s gross domestic product (GDP) growth would have to slow—a lot.
“In the analysis that we did, we did look across a broad range of scenarios, and those included pessimistic growth forecasts for China,” he says. “But some analysts would say that we should be even more pessimistic. And so, if Chinese growth really stagnates, or if current GDP figures are sort of overstated, then there’s a chance that China wouldn’t pass the U.S. as the world’s leading power.”
Moyer says a world with China as the globe’s top power may look quite different than the reality we’re living today. For example, because China’s ambitions are disparate from those of the U.S., international conflicts could be managed in a different way.
“There are lots of other countries that have decent capabilities. The Europeans are still going to be powerful in the future; South Korea, Japan will still be influential in the future,” Moyer says. “And the world’s going to look very different with India. India’s going to be growing dramatically over the next number of years for the same kind of structural reasons. And so how does China deal with India [and Pakistan]—two-nuclear armed countries that have had border conflict?”
Diplomacy isn’t the only aspect of international dealings that could change under China as the world’s leading power. Moyer says the economic relationship between the U.S. and China might undergo some significant re-wiring—a strategic uncoupling of sorts.
“Let’s say you depend on someone for your daily lunch because they make a great sandwich, better than the sandwich you are able to make. If they become a jerk and start withholding that sandwich or raising the price of that sandwich, you’re likely going to make your own sandwich, even though it’s less desirable. Strategic decoupling is kind of like that—you stop depending on someone (or some country, in this case) for your well-being because you’re concerned about how that dependence can be used against you.”
The specifics of the situations aside, the researchers say that one thing is for sure: The countries that matter in the international system are changing, and tools and research can help us better understand how these changes will impact our lives.
Leaders of four prominent U.S. think tanks came together last week to take part in a discussion about civil discourse, diverse perspectives and the role of disagreement in a healthy democracy.
The event was the first of the University of Denver’s Denver Dialogues, a series of virtual conversations with experts from the American Enterprise Institute, Aspen Institute, Hoover Institution and New America meant to spark respectful and constructive conversations about world and national events.
University of Denver Chancellor Jeremy Haefner introduced the event by underscoring the importance of engaging authentically and respectfully when challenging evidence-based ideas and presented Denver Dialogues as a way to engage with complex topics as an academic community.
“Since my inauguration as Chancellor, I have committed the University of Denver to be a beacon for intellectual curiosity: for free speech, academic freedom and thought pluralism,” Haefner said. “We do this—and we affirm these values—because they are critical and central to the functioning of democracy.”
The conversation featured former U.S. Secretary of State and current Director of the Hoover Institution Condoleezza Rice, a well-known graduate of the University of Denver. Additional panelists included Robert Doar, president of the American Enterprise Institute; Dan Porterfield, president and CEO of Aspen Institute; and Anne-Marie Slaughter, CEO of New America.
Josef Korbel School of International Studies Dean Fritz Mayer and Scrivner Institute of Public Policy Director Naazneen Barma moderated the discussion.
Mayer initiated the discussion by commenting on the importance to democracy of everyone, including those whose political positions do not eventually prevail, accepting the results of referendums on those positions.
“It’s hard to think of a more important issue in this country and, indeed, around the world, than the deterioration of the civic culture on which democracy depends,” Mayer said. “A fundamental requirement of a democracy is that, while we may disagree vehemently about what is to be done, we accept the legitimacy of those with whom we disagree.”
Before opening the floor to the think tank leaders, Barma emphasized the purpose of Denver Dialogues: to model difficult yet respectful conversations about tough subjects for the DU and Denver communities.
“One of the Scrivner Institute’s central mandates is to serve as a hub for conversations on public policy and the collective good,” she said. “The Denver Dialogues will bring substantive policy conversations to our campus and our broader community, while modeling approaches to constructive debate.”
So, what is the nature of the problem when it comes to dwindling civility in public discourse?
Rice said it comes down to information echo chambers.
“We get our information in groups—affinity groups, which we feel very comfortable [in],” she said. “I can, today, go to my website, I can go to my aggregators, can go to my cable news channel. I never have to actually encounter anyone who thinks differently.”
Rice said the opening of hearts and minds to others’ points of view will allow civil discourse to blossom.
Slaughter echoed Rice’s negative view of hive-mind communication.
“Even if we were disposed to listen, we are not in spaces where we are being exposed to people who disagree with us, in a way that allows us to talk, rather than shout, or simply defend,” she said.
Slaughter offered up a valuable lesson: You can’t persuade unless you’re willing to be persuaded.
“And that means coming at any discourse, or dialogue, or conversation with an open enough mind to think, ‘I’m listening and I’m willing to change my mind,’” she said. “Maybe not my core principles, but I’m listening and willing to let you persuade me, and in return, you’re more likely to let me persuade you.”
The think tank leaders urged DU community members to see themselves not just as red or blue—to think about people as more than their policy stances.
Doar placed the blame for increasingly volatile conversations on the growing polarity of political parties.
“We’re retreating to our corners, and the fringes are dominating the dialogue—and the social media world exacerbates that by feeding into and promoting the most angry responses from people that participate in that,” he said.
“I would want to particularly compliment you guys at the University, because I believe part of the problem is on our college campuses … there hasn’t been sufficient viewpoint diversity, and there has been too much shutting down of people who say things that are contrary to the prevailing view,” Doar continued.
Dan Porterfield argued that the problem lies within the human spirit itself.
“We are the problem,” he said. “Because all humans have a tendency to gravitate toward what makes us comfortable or move away from what we fear. This is one of the things we all have to learn, in our schooling, in our family upbringing—how to deal with our vulnerability in such a way it doesn’t prevent us from engaging with others.”
For more information about Denver Dialogues and upcoming events, visit the series website here.
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