Make a Lasting Impact
Our research and community and global partnerships give students and faculty the chance to have positive, lasting impacts around the world.
Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences
Contributing to Knowledge
Faculty & Student Research
Our faculty and students work around the world in labs, studios, archives, and libraries making discoveries that address real-world problems and ambitions.
Faculty Research Project Spotlight
NEH STIPEND HELPS PROFESSOR PURSUE FULL-TIME RESEARCH
Beth Karlsgodt, associate professor in history, was awarded a summer stipend from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), which supports full-time work on a humanities project for a period of two months. Karlsgodt, who wrote Defending National Treasures: French Art and Heritage under Vichy (Stanford University Press, April 2011), began her research in August on a new book on the post-World War II recovery of art that had been looted by the Nazis in France, mainly from Jewish collections. She is exploring the fate of pieces that returned to France but were not claimed by survivors or heirs and remained in the custody of the postwar government.
"The French state appropriated around 2,000 unclaimed works of art for French museums, and continues to hold nearly all of them. With greater public awareness of Holocaust-era assets since the 1990s, this postwar appropriation has generated public controversy as well as cultural property litigation," said Karlsgodt. Much of her research took place at the U.S. National Archives near Washington, D.C., which holds many documents related to the postwar art recovery effort.
"This award provides a tremendous morale boost, knowing that senior scholars have reviewed and supported the project in a competitive application process," Karlsgodt said of the award given to only eight percent of all applicants. "Receiving this honor makes me all the more motivated to carry out careful, rigorous research and produce quality scholarship worthy of NEH support."
Student Research Project Spotlight
UNDERSTANDING OF NEW CULTURES INSPIRES ANTHROPOLOGY GRAD STUDENT
As an undergrad archaeology student while attending Beloit College, Carly Santoro made a unique discovery during an archaeological field school in Chile's Atacama Desert. "I realized that I was more interested in the living culture of the people in the town we were staying in than in the artifacts we were digging up," she said. This realization led her to pursue a Master's in Cultural Anthropology at DU, and this summer Santoro began work on her Master's thesis in Mozambique, Africa.
"My research in Mozambique focused on international aid organizations and how they view the cultures and peoples they work with. I am interested in whether or not these organizations, which consist of mostly European and American staff members, take culture into consideration when designing and implementing their programs, and how native Mozambicans view these organizations," said Santoro.
Santoro's time was split between Manjacaze, a small town in southern Mozambique, and Maputo, the country's capital. "As a rural town, Manjacaze struggles to obtain some of the same resources as the residents of Maputo, and extreme poverty is common. Maputo is a cosmopolitan city where the majority of international aid organizations are located, although slums and poverty are present in this urban center as well," she said. Read more...