by Rebekah Tilley

photos by Richie Wireman

For many of us, our freshman year of college is the first transitional step into experiencing the world. As a freshly minted high school graduate, doctoral student Leah Bayens instead spent that first year in the woods reading.

“There is something about that experience that forged in me what was already a deep-seated understanding of the importance of those kinds of rural communities, the importance of not developing everything into suburban enclaves,” explained the Louisville native. “It was a foundational experience for me because of that. It was also my first real foray into understanding farm culture.”

Since that time Bayens has grafted herself into the land, the culture and the nature that surrounds it all. It permeates her graduate research, how she lives her life, and who she is at her core.

Anyone who has ever had doubts about majoring in English – with questions about job prospects or a well-defined career path – should talk to Andrew Crown-Weber.

He was in the same boat when he came to UK, unsure as to where an English degree would lead him – the answer has been, just about anywhere and everywhere.

The Danville native always knew he enjoyed language. Growing up in a house that emphasized reading books over watching cable television, his connection with words has been firmly entrenched. Add in his wide-eyed enthusiasm for knowledge and his varied academic interests, and Crown-Weber found an A&S education to be the perfect launch pad for travel, learning and adventure.

Early on he landed in Jonathan Allison’s class on James Joyce and William Butler Yeats, which led to an opportunity

Frank X Walker - co-founder of the Affrilachian Poets, widely published writer, founder of a journal of Affrilachian culture, and recipient of numerous writing and teaching awards - will join the faculty of the University of Kentucky in January 2010. Walker has accepted a position in the UK College of Arts and Sciences Department of English, where he will teach in the Creative Writing Program as an associate professor. As he returns to his alma mater, Walker will also bring with him Pluck! The Journal of Affrilachian Arts and Culture, which he founded in 2007.

“The college is thrilled Frank will be joining the English department and bringing with him expertise in Affrilachia,” said

Katherine Osborne knew UK’s Department of English was the right graduate program for her the moment she met then-DGS Ellen Rosenman during a campus tour.

"She talked about her work, but she was more interested in me,” said Osborne, a Frankfort, Ky., native and graduate of Hanover College in Indiana. “I could tell she was interested in graduate students. That was evident from the get-go. She just completely turned me on to the program.”

Now in her fifth year at UK, Osborne’s interest in 19th-century British literature has flourished under Rosenman’s mentoring. Osborne credits two of Rosenman’s courses—one on George Eliot and the other on material objects in the Victorian age—as the impetus for development of her own dissertation

Andrew Bozio first got hooked on British literature as a junior at Louisville’s St. Xavier High School. He knew then and there he’d found his calling.

Having just finished his first year of studies in the English PhD program at the University of Michigan, Bozio credits his undergraduate experiences at UK with helping establish a foundation for his intended career in early modern literature.

A Gaines Fellow and member of the UK Honors Program, Bozio graduated from UK in December 2006 with a degree in English and minors in French and philosophy. His classes in Arts & Sciences, the Honors Program, and the Gaines Center for the Humanities program “absolutely” prepared him for his graduate level coursework, he says.

It was the combination of those three things, the skills that one program offered, another program was able to supplement and help develop,” he says