Research & Creative

Together, we explore and create

In the Department of Art and Art History, together, we discover, imagine, engage, solve and express. We make, teach, and interact with art that helps us explore and challenge our world.

Winter 2020

Navigating the Complex Terrain of Life

Health isn’t solely the purview of hard science. Politics, economics, rhetoric, art, and history all provide essential perspectives on what it means to be healthy. This issue gives a liberal arts perspective on health.

Understanding the Invisible: Air Quality and Health

A citizen-science project aims to see if the act of measuring air quality influences how we understand and think about the air from a day-to-day standpoint. Journalism professors and students are working with air quality scientists to incorporate the social sciences—or the human elementin to their investigation.   

Surviving an Invasion during a Pandemic in the 14th Century

The people of Provence were undergoing multiple crises of war, famine, and plague in 1360. Their stories about a miracle woman, collected during an inquest considering her for sainthood in the Catholic church, helped them understand what was happening, and gave them ideas for how to recover from these devastating issues.  

Balancing our bodies: How people in early modern Spain approached health and medicine

Our ideas about what health is and what sickness and disease mean are big questions about what kind of society we want to live in, what it means to have a good life, and what it means to be living as you believe is most appropriate or best. In early modern Spain notions of health and healthcare changed due to religious expulsion or conversion, colonialism, and more.  

Mental health, community-building, and the challenges of a global pandemic

In the Department of English at CSU, initiatives that seek to bolster mental health, such as reading, writing, and thinking reflectively, creatively, and critically have long played an important role among students and the broader community: Initiatives that include the Writing Center, the Veterans Writing Workshop, and Speak Out! These opportunities to explore both joyous and difficultexperiences require an emotional labora re-tooling during pandemic times, and an awareness that not all mental health healing can come from the mind. 

Art is an Essential Part of the Human Experience

Art-making is one of the many means of expression that humans engage with to understand and interpret the world around them. Community based art education is a collaboration between students and their teacher, tailored to the students’ needs. CSU art education students and teachers craft meaningful visual art experiences for students throughout Fort Collins.