Interdisciplinary Work at DU

Movement in Early Medieval Monasticism

by Donna Beth Ellard (English) and Barbekka Hurtt (Biology)

Movement in Early Medieval Monasticism was an interdisciplinary graduate course co-taught by Donna Beth Ellard (English) and Barbekka Hurtt (Biology)

 that explored how movement shapes human learning, cognition, and experience. By combining theories of motor learning and physiology with philosophical and historical studies of early medieval monastic practices, students engaged in both seminar discussions and hands-on laboratory work, using electromyography (EMG) technology to analyze movement while examining its broader cultural and cognitive significance. 

The Multimedia Legacy of Florian Yuriev

by Polina Dimova (Russian)

This project is devoted to Ukrainian architect, artist, and composer Florian Yuriev (1929-2021) and explores Yuriev’s multimedia experiments with color-music and his “Flying Saucer,” a modernist building for cosmic color-music art in Kyiv. The project combines interdisciplinary research on multimedia art and music and my teaching of Soviet Space Age literature and film in my common-curriculum Winter 2026 course RUSS 2461 Russian Science Fiction. I will organize a screening of the documentary Infinity: According to Florian (2022) and invite its director Oleksiy Radynski for a virtual visit, interview, and Q&A with my RUSS 2461 students, Russian majors, minors, and Russian club members. The budget will cover an honorarium for Radynski and light refreshments. I will incorporate ideas from Radynski’s visit in an article on color-music as a utopian substance in the USSR that I am developing for the journal "Studies in East European Thought," which is due in June 2026.

Racial Violence Triangle (RVT) Framework

by Tony Holder (Accounting) and Kimberly V. Jones (History)

Newspaper accounts of violent events provide researchers with critical direction for understanding economic, social, cultural and community aspects of America’s response to violence as well as the root of brutality against African Americans during the Jim Crow era. Professors Tony Holder (Accounting) and Kimberly V. Jones (History) partnered across disciplines, along with then-graduate student Mayowa Alabi (MS `24), to establish a new way of understanding the nature of American racial violence. Their work on what is called the Racial Violence Triangle (RVT) provides an analytical framework to examine how systemic forces pressured some people and provided the opportunity to commit violence rationalized through the American tapestry of racial animus. They have submitted an article, based on this work, for publication.  

Disobedient Ecology: Rethinking Plantation Plant Life in Nineteenth-Century Global Capitalism

by Menglu Gao (Victorian Literature)

My new book project, tentatively titled "Disobedient Ecology: Rethinking Plantation Plant Life in Nineteenth-Century Global Capitalism,” reads literary works and scientific writings on plantation plants in British colonies to tell a story about how nineteenth-century plant life, as imagined by nineteenth-century and contemporary authors, shelters forms of resistance to exploitative imperial capitalism for both nonhuman and human life and unites racialized laboring figures (enslaved and indentured laborers, mostly from Africa and Asia) and Indigenous inhabitants across different continents. While recent scholarship in the environmental humanities has shown that capitalist exploitation of ecology extends beyond the plantation economy to haunt the seemingly “natural” spaces such as the pastoral countryside and even forests in literary representations, I take the opposite direction to argue that nineteenth-century and postcolonial texts, apart from registering the ubiquity of imperial power and capitalism (even critically), also expose their limits in the face of vegetal life within the very settings of the colonial plantation.