By Richard LeComte

On episode five of “Holler Back!,” Stacie Fugate and Michael Hamilton converse with Montgomery County High School senior Larah Helayne, a singer-songwriter whose activism for LGBTQ issues in Montgomery County, Kentucky, has brought her attention in Appalachia. During the podcast, Fugate talks to the teenager about her strong emotional reaction to hearing Helayne’s songs.

“I’m sitting in the audience and crying,” Fugate says. “It wasn’t just me; everybody around me is crying.”

That kind of emotional attachment to Appalachia and its people sparks the passion Fugate and Hamilton bring to “Holler Back!,” a podcast run by two Appalachian Studies minors in the College of Arts & Sciences at the University of Kentucky. The podcasts themselves are part of the programming of UK’s

LEXINGTON, Ky. (Aug. 10, 2020) — The discussions over removal of Confederate memorials in the United States have been some of the more prominent ones in our current cultural landscape. Gaining momentum from other recent social movements that are happening concurrently, from Black Lives Matter to #MeToo and beyond, the focus of these discussions now seems to have widened to include memorials and statues that go well further back than the American Civil War, and beyond the borders of this country.

Amy Murrell Taylor, the T. Marshall Hahn Jr. Professor of History at the University of Kentucky, last appeared on "Behind the Blue" in September of 2017. On this newest episode, Taylor returns to discuss how this movement has progressed over the past three years, and how the

By Hillary Smith

LEXINGTON, Ky. (Aug. 6, 2020) — Members of the University of Kentucky Spinal Cord and Brain Injury Research Center (SCoBIRC), in collaboration with UK College of Arts and Sciences, are working to increase the representation of Black undergraduate students in neuroscience.

“It is our obligation as professors and scientists to train the next generation of neuroscientists and to promote diversity and inclusivity in doing so,” said Mark Prendergast, director of the neuroscience B.S. degree program within the College of Arts & Sciences.

SCoBIRC is providing $25,000 to fund five yearly research training awards for undergraduate

By Jay Blanton

LEXINGTON, Ky. (Aug. 5, 2020) — University of Kentucky President Eli Capilouto and faculty leaders in the African American and Africana Studies (AAAS) program on Wednesday announced the establishment of the proposed Commonwealth Institute for Black Studies — a multidisciplinary program that will highlight UK’s growing research around issues of race and racism.

Capilouto and AAAS faculty on Thursday announced an initial $250,000 investment as seed money to leverage additional investment to help the institute move forward with a critical series of initiatives. The creation of a new institute, ultimately, must receive approval from UK’s University Senate.

The interdisciplinary institute will establish research clusters across the campus and promote UK’s growing research and scholarship

By Jenny Wells-Hosley

LEXINGTON, Ky. (Aug. 4, 2020) — It’s not every day members of an international team of scientists find themselves perplexed over unexpected data results. And it’s even less likely the team will turn to a student to help make sense of the findings. But this was what happened with University of Kentucky student Maryam Dehghanian.

Dehghanian, a doctoral candidate in the UK Department of Physics and Astronomy in the College of Arts and Sciences, has spent the last three years helping a team of NASA and European Space Agency (ESA) astronomers understand observations they made while studying a supermassive black hole at the center of NGC 5548, a nearby galaxy. The observations were made as

By Alicia Gregory

LEXINGTON, Ky. (Aug. 3, 2020) — The University of Kentucky recently was awarded a Centers of Biomedical Research Excellence (COBRE) grant to study translational chemical biology from the National Institutes of General Medical Sciences, part of the National Institutes of Health. The $11.2 million grant will fund UK's Center of Biomedical Research Excellence in Pharmaceutical Research and Innovation (CPRI).

This COBRE Phase 1 funding will provide campuswide junior faculty research and career development support, core infrastructure and pilot grants in the translational chemical biology research space. Critical infrastructure, in the form of cores, will support advanced research across UK campus: Chang-Guo Zhan directs

By Richard LeComte

Phillip Skipwith is plumbing the depths of the evolutionary processes that create species – and his subjects have scales.

“I want to understand how you go from having a ancestral lizard skull to having a derived snake skull,” he said. “That’s a big change.”

Big changes are in store for Skipwith himself this summer as he begins work as an assistant professor in the Department of Biology at the University of Kentucky’s College of Arts & Sciences, where snakes and lizards – and evolutionary dynamics as seen through comparing the inner tissues of snakes lizards – will be his thing.

“I’m just an animal fanatic,” said Skipwith, who’s coming from a postdoctoral position at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. “What will be coming out of my lab will be mostly herpetology and molecular

By Jenny Wells-Hosley

LEXINGTON, Ky. (July 27, 2020) — The University of Kentucky Appalachian Center has honored 12 students with its annual research awards. Nine graduate students received the James S. Brown Graduate Student Award for Research on Appalachia, and two graduate students and one undergraduate student received the center's Eller and Billings Student Research Award. 

“The Appalachian Center is thrilled to support these student researchers that represent nine departments across four colleges,” said Kathryn Engle, associate director of the Appalachian Center. “We look forward to learning from their work as they continue to produce cutting-edge research in and on the region.”

The James S. Brown Graduate Student

By Lindsey Piercy 

LEXINGTON, Ky. (July 23 2020) — It’s a 25,000-piece puzzle that researchers have longed to solve. That’s because the 25,000 fragments represent the Dead Sea Scrolls, and inside are ancient secrets — mysteries that have been locked away for 2,000 years.

For more than two decades, Brent Seales has doggedly labored to help solve the puzzle.

Seales, professor and chair of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Kentucky, is considered the foremost expert in the digital restoration of damaged and unreadable manuscripts. To this day, his quest to uncover the wisdom of the ancients is ever evolving.

By Madison Dyment

Sociology doctoral candidate Henry Zonio in the University of Kentucky’s College of Arts & Sciences was selected as the recipient of the 2019-2020 Graduate School Presidential Fellowship.

This competitive fellowship recognizes and rewards one graduate student annually for her or his  exceptional academic and research merit in their field of study.

Receiving this award allowed Zonio to advance in his field by giving him the ability to focus on completing ethnographic field observations and drafting his dissertation he will be defending this coming fall semester. Within sociology, Zonio focuses on social inequalities, the sociologies of childhood, education and religion. His dissertation is an ethnographic study on how Sunday school teaches children about race and gender, with the studies focusing on three racially homogenous churches,

By Richard LeComte

LEXINGTON, KY (July 20, 2020) – Three current faculty members and one incoming assistant professor of the University of Kentucky’s Psychology Department have delved into studies addressing the effects the COVID-19 virus pandemic has had on Americans. The projects range from exploring the virus’s effects on spike proteins on the brain to how middle- and high-schoolers are changing their consumption of media after schools went online.

These incipient efforts will bear fruit for helping the United States cope with the disaster and demonstrate the relevance of research in UK’s College of Arts & Sciences. The faculty members are Pooja Sidney, Christia Brown and Mark Prendergast; the incoming faculty member, Matthew Kim, is coming from the University of Washington.

Pooja

By Emily Sallee

LEXINGTON, Ky. (July 20, 2020) — Brittney Woodrum, a 2015 arts administration and College of Arts & Sciences Hispanic Studies graduate, has received a 2020 Boren Fellowship to travel to Yangon, Myanmar for a year of intensive language study. The Boren Fellowship funds research and language study proposals by U.S. graduate students in world regions critical to U.S. interests. Woodrum is currently pursuing a master’s degree in international security/humanitarian aid at the University of Denver.

During her time

By Lindsey Piercy

LEXINGTON, Ky. (July 17, 2020) — From the Great Depression to the Civil Rights Movement — each generation has been shaped by the national and international events that take place during their formative years.

Will the same be said for the COVID-19 pandemic?

Anthony Bardo, an assistant professor with a dual appointment in Health, Society and Populations and the Department of Sociology in the UK College of Arts and Sciences, believes it’s important to consider how perspectives will change. As a medical sociologist and health demographer, his research is driven by the desire to

By Ann Blackford

LEXINGTON, Ky. (July 13, 2020) — People often ask Christopher Decker of Los Angeles why his daughter Sophia Decker, whom he describes as an extremely gifted student in languages, chose to attend the University of Kentucky.

“I always respond by saying she fell in love with Latin and Ancient Greek," he said. "When I say there is only one accredited university in the U.S. where the classics faculty conduct class in the target language, people often guess it to be Harvard, Yale, Georgetown or Notre Dame. The correct answer is the University of Kentucky, and that is why Sophia chose to attend UK."

Christopher Decker and his wife, Theresa Decker, were so impressed by UK’s Latin program that they recently donated a $25,000 endowed fund to the UK Department of Modern and

By Whitney Hale

LEXINGTON, Ky. (July 1, 2020) — For the first time in its 42-year history, the Kentucky Women Writers Conference will take place online to ensure the health of its participants and presenters amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The conference will go forward as scheduled Sept. 17-20 with headliner and celebrated poet Evie Shockley. All readings, discussions and workshops will be presented virtually. Several prominent Black writers will be featured as part of the event. 

“Our organization has a long and proud history of lifting up the voices of Black women, from our first conference in 1979 with Maya Angelou, Alice Walker and Toni Cade Bambara, to the

By Adrian Ho and Richard LeComte

LEXINGTON, Ky. (June 30, 2020) — Six College of Arts & Sciences faculty members received Alternative Book Grants from the University of Kentucky Libraries.

These faculty

By Addison Cave

LEXINGTON, KY. (June 22) -- Sheila Jelen, interim director of the program in Jewish Studies and associate professor of Hebrew and Jewish Studies in the Department of Modern and Classical Languages, Literatures and Cultures in the College of Arts & Sciences at University of Kentucky, was recently awarded the Zantker Charitable Foundation Professorship in History.

Jelen has published a variety of monographs and edited volumes including, most recently, Salvage Poetics: Post-Holocaust American Jewish Folk Ethnographies (2020) and Reconstructing the Old Country: American Jewry in the Post-Holocaust Decades (2017). Her work has appeared in such journals as Prooftexts, The Jewish Quarterly Review, The AJS Review, Religion and Literature, Comparative Literature Studies and Hebrew Studies.

By Madison Dyment

LEXINGTON Ky (June 22) – Carrie Oser, professor of sociology, will serve as the new Di Silvestro Professor in the College of Arts & Sciences at the University of Kentucky. UK’s Board of Trustees approved the appointment in June.

The Di Silvestro Professorship recognizes a full professor who is dedicated to enhancing research excellence. As a five-year appointment that begins on July 1, the DiSivestro Professor receives an annual research stipend.  Oser, who was also a UK sociology and psychology undergraduate, was nominated by Dean Mark Kornbluh.

“I’m grateful for the wonderful alumnae of the College of Arts & Sciences for their contributions to support the research, education and service missions of UK,” Oser said.

Oser, associate chair in the Department of Sociology, is a ’ 98 UK graduate, the associate director of the

By Jay Blanton and Kody Kiser

LEXINGTON, Ky. (June 22, 2020) — Tracy Campbell is the E. Vernon Smith and Eloise C. Smith Professor of American History at the University of Kentucky. He has written well-received accounts of voter fraud in the country, a biography of the Gateway Arch and a compelling biography of Ed Prichard, a legendary name in Kentucky politics whose life was a story of tragedy and redemption.

Recently, Campbell’s latest book was published — "The Year of Peril: America in 1942." It is a month-by-month chronicle of 1942, a tumultuous and often unsettling year in which America fully engaged in World War II. The deeply researched and richly detailed book underscores the fragility of democracy, the

By Richard LeComte

Sumit R. Das, University research professor of physics and astronomy, has been named to the Jack and Linda Gill Endowed Professorship in the College of Arts & Sciences at the University of Kentucky. UK’s Board of Trustees approved the designation in December, and the appointment takes effect in July. 

The Gill Research Excellence Fund supports the Gill Professorships in Science and Engineering. The deans of the Colleges of Arts & Sciences and Engineering jointly administer the program. Professors are recommended by a committee based on a nomination letter. Das also is a College of Arts & Sciences Distinguished Professor for 2019-20.

“Das has made major contributions in a range of different areas related to the branch of theoretical physics known as string theory, the unified theory of elementary particles and gravity that