By Richard LeComte 

Akiko Takenaka

LEXINGTON, Ky. -- After years of military rule and devastating war, women in Japan led the effort in promoting peace. During the Cold War, peace activism was considered a communist activity, but the women’s identities as mothers enabled them to avoid the label. The struggle of these women fascinates Akiko Takenaka so much that she wrote a book about it. 

“They said, ‘We are mothers, we produce lives, and therefore we are the protectors of lives. We care about children the most, and we must protect our children,’” said Takenaka, associate professor of history at the University of Kentucky and inaugural director of the Global Asias Program.  

Takenaka’s book, “Mothers Against War: Gender, Motherhood, and Peace Activism in Postwar Japan,” is due out in 2024 from the University of

Norina Samuels

LEXINGTON, Ky. (Oct. 26, 2023) — Growing up in Winder, Georgia, a historic suburb northeast of Atlanta, Norina Samuels discovered that the quality time she spent with her family differed from that of her peers. While others reveled in exhilarating amusement parks and lavish beach getaways, Samuels' single mother, Karen, defied convention as she loaded Samuels and her brother into the family car and visited cemeteries.

“All my classmates asked, ‘Where did you go for Spring Break?’” Samuels said. “They all went to Myrtle Beach, and I answered, ‘I was looking up dead people.’ That’s what my mom enjoyed — she was really interested in genealogy. We spent a lot of our off-school time just traipsing along to the graveyards, so I got into looking at the headstones and all that stuff.”

By visiting cemeteries scattered through Tennessee and

By Lindsey Piercy 

LEXINGTON, Ky. (Oct. 9, 2023) — How important is word of mouth when understanding climate change?

A new project, led by the Kentucky Climate Consortium research team at the University of Kentucky, is proving that oral histories can provide an intimate view of our shifting world.

The consoritium acts as a catalyst for climate research and education across the Commonwealth by providing networking opportunities for Kentucky-based climate scholars.

Through her work with the consortium, Lauren Cagle, associate professor in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and Digital Studies and director of 

By Lindsay Travis 

AppalTRuST brings together a team of researchers across the UK colleges of Medicine, Nursing, Public Health, Education and Arts and Sciences as well as the UK Markey Cancer Center and BREATHE. Jeremy Blackburn | Research Communications.

LEXINGTON, Ky. (Oct. 6, 2023) — The University of Kentucky will be home to a new research center focused on tobacco regulations in the Commonwealth named the Appalachian Tobacco Regulatory Science Team. Ann Kingsolver, professor of anthropology in the College of Arts & Sciences and director of the Appalachian Studies Program, is a member of the team. 

AppalTRuST is funded over five years with a $19 million grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse  under the 

By Whitney Hale

Isha Chauhan

LEXINGTON, Ky. (Oct. 4, 2023) — Isha Chauhan, a biology major in the University of Kentucky College of Arts & Sciences and Lewis Honors College student from La Grange, Kentucky, will receive one of 68 Astronaut Scholarships this year and has and completed a DAAD RISE research internship in Germany.

“These awards have given me the opportunity to connect with diverse groups of people and develop cross-cultural relationships,” Chauhan said. “I am so thankful to have received the chance to explore my future career through these unique experiences.”

As an Astronaut Scholar, Chauhan will receive up to $15,000 from the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation.. The scholarship is presented annually to outstanding college students majoring in science,

By Richard LeComte 

Karrieann Soto Vega

LEXINGTON, Ky. -- The portmanteau “DiaspoRicans” describes a demographic to which Karrieann Soto Vega belongs: people who come from or who trace their roots to Puerto Rico and don’t reside there. As part of her scholarship at the University of Kentucky, Soto Vega explores what it means to be part of Puerto Rico, especially in how artists and activists express their views on their relationship to the rest of the United States. 

 "I'm interested in part in popular culture and how activist rhetoric seeps into the work of reggaetón artists like Bad Bunny,” said Soto Vega, assistant professor of Writing, Rhetoric and Digital

By Tatum Armstrong Monday

LEXINGTON, Ky. (Oct. 2, 2023) — The University of Kentucky Martin Luther King (MLK) Center, Martin-Gatton College of Agriculture, Food and Environment, Lewis Honors College, College of Arts and Sciences, and Department of Hispanic Studies are hosting “Cafecito con Chavez: An Evening with Eduardo Chavez.” 

The event will take place from 6 to 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 5., in the Gatton Student Center’s Harris Ballroom. 

Chavez, the grandson of activist Cesar Chavez, is notable for his work as a filmmaker and speaker. The release of his feature

Dr. Arnold Stromberg

By Richard LeComte 

LEXINGTON, Ky. -- Katherine Thompson remembers Dr. Arnold Stromberg, former chair of the University of Kentucky’s Dr. Bing Zhang Department of Statistics and David M. Allen-Richard L. Anderson Endowed Professor, as a leader who was always ready to help students and faculty with a quick analysis.  

“I knew people he had touched, but I didn't realize how many people he had impacted in his career,” said Thompson, associate professor of statistics in UK’s College of Arts & Sciences. “It wasn’t just the students. He helped assistant professors from other colleges working toward tenure by providing statistical support on manuscripts so they could be published. If he got that e-mail, he was up at midnight doing their analysis, no problem. He helped people who didn't have another source; not because he needed to, but just

By Lindsey Piercy

Ted Schatzki’s research interests lie in theorizing social life. He is widely associated with a theoretical approach called practice theory that is active today in many social disciplines. Mark Cornelison | UK Photo.

LEXINGTON, Ky. (Sept. 22, 2023) — Theodore Schatzki, professor of geography, philosophy and sociology at the University of Kentucky, is serving as the 2023-24 College of Arts and Sciences’ Distinguished Professor and will deliver the annual Distinguished Professor Lecture next spring.

By A Fish  

Carlos Verea Zacarias

LEXINGTON, Ky – Carlos Verea Zacarias sees his position as president of the University of Kentucky Latino Student Union as one that facilitates recovery — he’s making sure his home on campus continues to bounce back from the COVID-19 pandemic and is set to help its members in their college careers and beyond. 

“The last couple of presidents were focused on making sure our organization stayed active during COVID,” Verea Zacarias said. “My job is making sure that my students find a home at UK and that they connect with one another and rely upon each other. My job is to regrow that community and make sure that everything stays in check both with administrative work and with the well-being of the students.” 

Healing is part of Verea Zacarias’ future. The pre-med biology major

By A Fish

Participants and judges in the 2023 competition.

LEXINGTON; Ky. — Each spring, the Dr. Bing Zhang Department of Statistics in the University of Kentucky’s College of Arts & Sciences holds a data science competition. This event is a great way for first-year graduate students to get experience analyzing real datasets.

Tori Stanton is a statistics Ph.D. student and senior research assistant in the Predictive Analytics and Data Science Hub, where she collaborates with researchers from the Martin-Gatton College of Agriculture, Food and Environment. Stanton has been involved with the competition since her first year at University of Kentucky. She has risen from participant to organizer.

“For many students this is one of the first experiences they have with a real dataset,” Stanton said. “Many datasets used in class are picked to demonstrate a

By Richard LeComte 

Sarah Tishkoff

LEXINGTON, Ky. -- Sarah Tishkoff, the David and Lyn Silfen University Professor in Genetics and Biology at the University of Pennsylvania, will deliver the annual Thomas Hunt Morgan Lectures at the University of Kentucky. 

The first lecture, “African Integrative Genomics: Implications for Health and Disease,” will be at 3:30 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 5, in room 116 at the Thomas Hunt Morgan Biological Sciences Building on the UK campus. The second, “Human Evolution and Adaptation in Africa,” will be at 11 a.m. Friday, Oct. 6, in the W.T. Young Library Auditorium. The events are free and open to the public.  

In addition, a reception for alumni will be from 6 to 9 p.m. Friday, Oct. 6, at the Thomas Hunt Morgan House, 210 N. Broadway in Lexington. Alumni and Biology

LEXINGTON, KY -- Two University of Kentucky Department of Chemistry professors in the College of Arts & Sciences. several current UK graduate students and a former grad student  contributed to an article reporting a major advance in increasing the stability of perovskite solar cells, which was published recently in the journal Science.

Co-authors at UK are Kenneth Graham, associate professor of chemistry; Chad Risko, John C. Hubbard Professor of Chemistry; and graduate students Harindi R. Atapattu, Keerthan R. Rao, and Zhuoyun Cai. An article on the discovery issued by the University of Toronto can be found here.

Currently, perovskite solar cells show power conversion efficiencies that are on par with commercially available solar

By C. Lynn Hiler 

LEXINGTON, Ky. (Aug. 25, 2023) — The Chellgren Center for Undergraduate Excellence recently named 34 new fellows, five endowed professorships and three faculty fellows.

The Chellgren Student Fellows Program is open to all majors and takes place during the student’s second year at UK. During this time, students receive help understanding the process of research within their discipline, a research mentor to oversee a spring research project and assistance in preparing for the next phase of their career. Student Fellows also benefit from a variety of extracurricular events designed to broaden cultural and intellectual horizons. Among them are: 

By Richard LeComte 

Kevin Alejandrez

LEXINGTON, Ky. -- Kevin Alejandrez, who recently earned his doctorate in sociology from the University in Kentucky, is one of 18 American Council of Learned Societies Leading Edge Fellows for 2023. 

This community-engaged humanities initiative demonstrates the capacity of humanistic knowledge and methods to help advance justice and equity in society. The program is made possible by a grant from the Mellon Foundation. 

The council’s Leading Edge Fellowship Program supports outstanding early career Ph.D.’s in the humanities and interpretive social sciences as they work with social justice organizations in the United States.  

Alejandrez will fill a two-year position with the Center for Cultural Power as a Learning and Impact Manager to co-create and implement culturally responsive evaluation protocols and tools

By Richard LeComte 

Ellen Riggle

LEXINGTON, Ky. -- Ellen Riggle, professor of political science and gender and women's studies in the University of Kentucky’s College of Arts & Sciences, has received the Harriett A. Rose Legacies prize from the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning in Lexington. 

The prize goes to writers 55 and older who submit poems, stories, essays or memoirs drawn from the writer’s personal history.   

Readings by contest winners will be at 6 p.m. Tuesday, Aug. 22, at the Carnegie Center, 251 W Secod St.  

Riggle received first place for a series of five poems. They are titled: “The LADIES Room,” “The Ladies ROOM,” “Law: …sex as assigned on a person’s birth certificate," “Queer” and “Hyper-Vigilance.”    

“The poems are all inspired by the intersection

By Richard LeComte 

A scene from "This is What a Wildcat Sounds Like."

A recent initiative in the University of Kentucky Department of Linguistics delves into the many ways language is spoken and heard on a diverse college campus — “This is What a Wildcat Sounds Like.” The video creates a mosaic of what UK community members sound like when communicating and how that enriches the experience for all stakeholders on campus.  

"The project began as an attempt to raise awareness of dialect diversity on this campus," said Allison Burkette, chair of the Linguistics Department in the UK College of Arts and Sciences. “I have seen a couple of other videos from other schools, and I thought it was important because there's been at least one dissertation and several articles written about it.” 

One of the issues

Leon Sachs, associate professor of French and Francophone Studies in The University of Kentucky's College of Arts & Sciences, has written an opinion piece in Inside Higher Ed titled "What If the Campus Speech Crisis Is a Hoax …and we create a better university for nothing? Leon Sachs argues there’s no harm — and much benefit — in taking concerns about the campus speech climate seriously."

"We should think about campus speech debates the way my hometown political cartoonist, Joel Pett, suggested we think about climate change. Some years ago, Pett published a political cartoon satirizing climate change denial: A speaker onstage at a climate summit is explaining the many benefits of greener environmental policies. In the crowd, a defiant

By A Fish 

High school students participate in Camp Kiki Academy. 

LEXINGTON; Ky. — Gaming and esports have grown in popularity over the past few years, but gaming also is being used as an educational tool. Kishonna L. Gray, a professor of Writing, Rhetoric, & Digital Studies at the University of Kentucky, has been working with under-resourced students to teach them team building, communication structures, peer mediation, conflict resolution and other skills through the art of game development. 

“What Camp Kiki Academy does is it provides a curriculum.” she said, “The class is a gaming class, but they learn different skills inside those gaming classes. We wanted them to build the capacities that may have gotten a lot of them in trouble before. The decision-making part, confidence, self-esteem, so we've integrated a lot of the things that the

By Richard LeComte

Abigail Mortell

LEXINGTON, Ky. -- History can be as exciting as live drama, as Abigail Mortell has found. Mortell, a recent University of Kentucky history major and Lewis Honors College student, took her research into the history of indigenous peoples in Brazil and turned it into a play, which received first place for Humanities: Creative in the annual Oswald Research and Creativity Competition in UK’s Office of Undergraduate Research.

The play, “Surviving the Sertão: A Play in Two Acts,” originated as a creative assignment in a class taught by Erik Myrup, associate professor of history.

"I submitted a play in two acts, which has a historical basis, but it’s also fictional,” Mortell said.  "I intended to provide the historical perspective from the native side, which we don't actually have in real life. But it had to be rooted in the