By Ryan Girves

Last week, University of Kentucky graduate and undergraduate students competed in the final rounds of the 5-Minute Fast Track Research Competition and the 3-Minute Thesis Competition (3MT). While two final winners prevailed, research also came out ahead.

Research is one of the foundations of the university — creating solutions to some of the world's most pressing issues. Research is also one of the great opportunities provided to students at UK. 

Often, when we think of research, a scientist with smoking beakers comes to mind, but that does not always have to be the case. The 5-Minute Fast Track Research Competition, for undergraduate students, and 3MT, for graduate students, aim to change the stereotype surrounding research, while also providing students with an opportunity to present their research to an audience in a way that is brief and

The editors of Early American Literature are pleased to announce the fifth annual Early American Literature Book Prize, which will be given for an author’s second or subsequent academic monograph about American literature in the colonial period through the early republic (roughly 1830). The prize is offered in collaboration with the University of North Carolina Press, the Society of Early Americanists, and the MLA’s Forum on American Literature to 1800.

Monographs published in 2017 or 2018 are eligible for the 2019 prize, which carries a cash award of $2000. 

The deadline for nominations is February 1, 2019. Please send a single copy of any books nominated for the 2019 prize to:

EAL Book Prize
c/o Professor Marion Rust
Editor, Early American Literature
Department of English
University of Kentucky

By Mack McCormick and Whitney Hale

University of Kentucky Associate Professor of English and University Press of Kentucky author Crystal Wilkinson’s novel, “The Birds of Opulence,” has been named the winner of the 2016 Appalachian Writers Association's Appalachian Book of the Year for Fiction. The multigenerational novel follows four generations of women in a bucolic southern black township as they live with and sometimes surrender to madness. This marks the fourth award “The Birds of Opulence” has won, including the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence, the 

By Nick Harling

The University of Kentucky College of Arts and Sciences has named the first recipients of its Inclusion Fellows program, an initiative for faculty interested in actively orchestrating and advancing efforts to build a more inclusive campus.

Fellows can develop and implement scholarly, community-building, pedagogical, mentoring and networking events, initiatives or programming. The fellowship period serves as a professional development opportunity for the fellows, as it enables them to enhance their responsibilities and bring forth new ideas and measures that will positively affect students.

“The overall goal of the Inclusion Fellows Program is to draw on and support faculty to create sustainable change to enhance inclusivity within the college,” Cristina Alcalde, associate dean of inclusion and internationalization, said. “Over the

By Julie Wrinn

Chris Green (’93 B.A.) majored in English for the usual reason: he loved to read. His path to that degree, however, and to his success as a partner in the internationally prominent New York law firm Boies Schiller Flexner, was unusually long and circuitous.

“I was really introduced to serious writing by Bill Floyd, one of my all-time favorite teachers. He taught us Yeats in the eighth grade,” recalls Green. “Since then, I’ve loved poetry, especially the modern poets.” The doors Floyd opened proved to be the high point of Green’s early academic career, however, because he “back-slid” in high school.

Thanks to his SAT scores, Green was admitted to Princeton, but he lasted only three semesters. “It was an intensely challenging academic environment, and my study skills weren’t on par with my classmates.” He worked hard but couldn’t manage his

By Lindsey Piercy and Whitney Hale

One of Lexington's benches portrays Crystal Wilkinson's 2016 book, "The Birds of Opulence," published by University Press of Kentucky. The bench can be seen outside Wilkinson's Wild Fig. Mark Cornelison | UK Photo.

Looking for a great place to dive into a summer book? Well, you’re in luck. Kentucky's literary heritage is being featured around Lexington as part of the new Book Benches public art exhibit to encourage reading.

The 36 fiberglass benches, which depict colorful artistic renderings of books by Kentucky authors, were unveiled in Gratz Park before being stationed in spaces around the city last month. The project, a collaboration between Arts Connect, 

By Julie Wrinn

On both sides, it was love at first sight. Joan Swanberg (B.A. 1981) had grown up in Cleveland but was drawn to the University of Kentucky for its beautiful campus, southern charm, and affordability. During her first two years at UK she thrived in her studies but had brought home to Ohio one too many “bad boyfriends.” At the beginning of her junior year, Joan remembers her mother saying, “Why don’t you go find a nice boy at church?”

Greg Swanberg (B.G.S. 1985) lived at UK’s Newman Center, the campus Catholic ministry, and served as its co-president. Joan went to church, and Greg caught sight of her through a window and told a friend, “I’m going to marry that girl.” When later introduced to Greg, Joan was similarly struck, and they’ve been together ever since.

As the Swanbergs’ Mill House Residency for UK creative writing graduate students prepares

The recognition that archives are partial, filled with lacunae that demand scholarly attention, has fueled research engaging the epistemological, cultural, and political forces of early American materials and repositories. While powerful, positivist recovery work—efforts to fill gaps and hear silenced voices— has theoretically and materially expanded early American studies, the archive remains yet and always incomplete. This special issue of Early American Literature seeks essays that work around, across, or beside missing or marginalized records. “Beyond Recovery” invites submissions that address some of the following questions: What avenues exist for scholars when archival research reaches a dead end of missing or absent records? How can scholars and archivists intellectually and ethically engage with archival absence? Are there some archival gaps that not only cannot but also

The decade since the publication of Catherine Gallagher’s landmark essay “The Rise of Fictionality” (2006) has witnessed an increasing concern with overturning well-established theories of the rise of the novel and the development of literary realism through a re-examination of the axiomatic values underpinning contemporary attitudes toward the concept of “fiction.” Variously substantiating, expanding and adapting Gallagher’s central claim that “fiction” is not a universal constant but a particular mode of negotiating referential truth claims that only emerged in the mid-eighteenth century, scholars of the early British and French novel such as Sarah Tindal Kareem, Srinivas Aravamudan, and Nicholas D. Paige have recently offered invigoratingly new accounts of the complex and contested epistemological status of imaginary stories as they began to define and redefine themselves against