Fellowships
2023-2024 Heller Center Fellows
Thursday, September 21* 7pm
Maria Luisa Tucker
Journalist, Podcaster, and Artist
Sound, Story and Imagination: A Narrative Podcasting Workshop
Maria Luisa Tucker is an award-winning journalist and podcast producer. She produced the critically acclaimed podcast Death of an Artist (Sony/Pushkin), which explored the artworld’s reaction to the 1985 death of Cuban artist Ana Mendieta, and accusations that sculptor Carl Andre killed her. The show made seven “best of 2022” lists and was nominated for two podcasting awards. Tucker also created Three Million Acres (Audible), the story of the hunt for her missing father and an exploration of what it means to be a family, and was a producer for The Line (Apple Original/Jigsaw Productions), a podcast about the biggest war crimes trial in a generation, which won a 2022 duPont-Columbia Award. She holds an M.A. in American Studies from Columbia University and a B.A. in Print Journalism from Texas State University.
*This 2-hour workshop will teach the building blocks of a narrative podcast. Participants should come with at least a seed of an idea for a podcast they would like to make, and a laptop or notebook. By the end of the workshop, participants will have written a plan that includes a description of their podcast idea, a plan for researching and gathering several different kinds of audio, and a sound design concept.
*Co-sponsored with the Department of English
Thursday, March 7, 2024 * 7pm
Dr. Paul Josephson
Professor
Colby College in Waterville, Maine
A Journey Through Nuclear Landscapes of the US West
The Rocky’s majestic landscapes obscure its nuclear legacy. Just ninety miles from UCCS, the Rocky Flats Plant manufactured nuclear weapons parts; at least two major plutonium fires pumped radiation in the environment, much of it drifting in the direction of Denver. To the south and southwest, in Colorado and New Mexico, poorly regulated uranium mining fed the bomb-making and reactor enterprises, exposed Navaho workers to excessive radiation and spread radioactive particles into the surroundings where animals picked up plutonium or carried it around in their fur and feathers. Hundreds of such Colorado migratory and resident wildlife species as prairie falcons, deer, elk, coyotes, songbirds, and the Preble’s meadow jumping mouse passed through Rocky Flats and uranium mines and other facilities without any attention to human borders and fences. This talk will explore the shaping of the Nuclear West by the Cold War and the impact of national security desiderata on the environment.
Paul Josephson is professor emeritus at Colby College in Waterville, Maine. He is a specialist on big science and technology in the twentieth century. The author of fourteen books, he has received a number of awards and grants, including from the National Science Foundation that funded his ongoing project for a Global Nuclear Environmental History. Josephson, a historian of technology and environmental history, is interested in the relationship between state power, various publics and environmental concerns. He has conducted field research in Russia, Ukraine, Northern Europe, Eastern Europe, Brazil and the United States. His interest in nuclear power dates to Cold War air raid drills in elementary school, his Red Atom (1999, re-published 2005), and his deep concerns about the ongoing assault of nuclear power stations in Ukraine by Russia.
*Co-sponsored with Geography and Environmental Studies and the History Department
