MFA alum Bernard Clay will be with us Wednesday evening at 7 pm in the Gatton Student Center Room 330AB. Please pass the word. He will be reading from his new collection of poems ENGLISH LIT.

Bernard Clay is a Louisville, Kentucky, native who received an MFA in creative writing from the University of Kentucky and is a member of the Affrilachian Poets collective. His work has been published in various journals and anthologies. He currently resides on a farm in eastern Kentucky. English Lit is his first book.

You are invited to attend the 41st English Department Awards Day Ceremony on Friday April 29, 2022, at 2.00-3.00

This year’s awards day event will take place in the Esports Theatre Gallery, UKFCU Esports Lounge, 401 S. Limestone, Lexington, KY 40506

Keynote Address

Professor DaMaris Hill

Download the electronic program here: https://english.as.uky.edu/sites/default/files/2022%20Awards%20Day%20Pr…

The Cottrill-Rolfes Endowment in Catholic Studies will be hosting Dr. Quentin Wodon, Lead Economist In Education Global Practice for the World Bank, for a lecture next week on Tuesday, March 8, at 4:00 pm.: "The Global Role of the Catholic Church in Education, Healthcare, and Social Protection: Challenges and Opportunities"

Dr. Quentin Wodon is a Lead Economist in the Education Global Practice at the World Bank. A lifelong learner, he holds four PhDs. As part of his volunteer work for the Global Catholic Education project, he conducts research on Catholic and faith-based engagement around the world in education, health, and social protection, with two main aims: making the work of the Catholic Church better known in the international community, and bringing to the Catholic Church the expertise emerging from international experience. In this lecture, he will share an assessment of the role of Catholic and other faith-based organizations in the social sectors, including whether they succeed in serving the poor and providing quality services, particularly in Africa.

The Lewis Honors College’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Council proudly hosts The Interviewer Asks: A Docupoetry Reading with Teja Sudhakar on Tuesday, April 12^th at 4:00pm either in the Lewis Hall Scholar’s Lounge or on Zoom. This event is hybrid. In-person attendees will enjoy light refreshments from Martine’s Pastries, a local immigrant women-owned business. Zoom attendees may register here to attend remotely: https://uky.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZ0sfuyurDkqG9AErQc97AeU4ErWxEZWLBEO  

Teja Sudhakar’s original, interdisciplinary work merges oral history and poetry and explores how immigrant women in Lexington, Kentucky conceptualize and navigate borders, homes, places, and spaces. Teja’s docupoetry amplifies women’s voices and interprets their stories gathered through her collaborative oral history project with diverse immigrant women in our community. Docupoetry, a tradition of expressing investigative research through lyrical acts, is driven by the researcher’s own positionality and process of learning alongside their data. Teja’s own negotiations of identity as a first-generation immigrant woman of color imbue the recorded stories exchanged with her narrators, women tracing their origins to Mexico, Pakistan, Canada, Syria, and France. Her poetry provides a beautiful and moving window into how women weave together memory, identity, and place. Please join us for the first public reading from Teja’s poetry chapbook Looking for Smoke. 

Teja is a double-major in Gender and Women's Studies and Psychology, with a minor is creative writing. She immigrated to the United States from Tamil Nadu, India when she was 5 years old. Sudhakar has received some of the University of Kentucky's highest honors, including the Singletary Scholarship, the Gaines Center for the Humanities Fellowship, and admission into the Lewis Honors College, where in 2019 she founded The Work in Progress Society--the only student-led writing workshop housed at LHC. She would go on to direct the group for the next three years. While at Gaines and Lewis, Sudhakar would also complete apprenticeships under Dr. Rebecca Gayle Howell and Dr. Zada Komara, and in 2021, she collaborated with Howell to co-moderate the Lewis Honors College keynote by the Kingsley Tufts Awarded poet, Ross Gay. Sudhakar's first language is Telugu, her second language is Tamil, and her third is English. She writes in English. Her first chapbook, hold fire (2020), a collection of poems that combines the confessional mode with feminist Hindu myth revision, received U.K.'s top prize for undergraduate creative research, The Oswald Award. Her second chapbook, Looking for Smoke (2022), presents a sequence of docu-poems that explore Kentucky women's immigration narratives, including the poet's own. In recent weeks, Sudhakar has received admission into several top ranked M.F.A. programs in the U.S., one of which she will attend upon graduation. 

We are very pleased to announce that next CHSS Faculty Book Manuscript Workshop will take place on Thursday, March 24, 2022, 4pm EST ​

Professor Jordan Brower of the Department of English will discuss Hollywood Signs: Scenes from a Literary History of the Studio System with Catherine Jurca, Professor of English and Visual Culture at California Institute of Technology 

 Karen Petrone (History) will serve as moderator. 

The book introduction is attached.  Please do not cite without author's permission.

Hollywood Signs has two distinct goals corresponding to the fields of literary and film and media studies. On one hand, this study follows the arc of the Hollywood studio system from 1912 to 1952—its genesis, consolidation, global extension, and self-understood demise—by way of its attitude toward and engagement with the concept of the “literary”. “Literary” describes my objects of study in three distinct but overlapping ways: as forms of writing produced within the studio system, principally prose fiction; as intellectual property; and, most abstractly, as the “other” of entertainment. The poles of this period are set at a confluence of economic, legal, and aesthetic circumstances that defined the art and industry of Hollywood: from the moment when Adolph Zukor’s Famous Players company spearheaded the development of the studio era by producing pictures based on copyrighted literary properties to the moment just after the Paramount antitrust decision mandated the disintegration of the vertically integrated oligopoly. On the other hand, Hollywood Signs describes the permutations of primarily United States-based literary modernism as they occur within an increasingly commodified, increasingly multi- and transmedial culture. This book posits the studio system as a dynamic set of conditions among which literary experimentation occurred alongside of and dialectically engaged with popular literature (and especially the genre of Hollywood fiction). 

Please use the Zoom link below to join the meeting:

Join from PC, Mac, Linux, or mobile device: https://uky.zoom.us/j/82184454304

Or iPhone one-tap (US Toll):  16468769923,82184454304#  or 13017158592,82184454304#

Or Telephone:

    Dial:

    +1 646 876 9923 (US Toll)

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    Meeting ID: 821 8445 4304

    International numbers available: https://uky.zoom.us/u/kbDyC2fdsz

Or Skype for Business (Lync):

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In Spring 2021, the Cooperative for the Humanities and Social Sciences awarded its first round of grants to allow UK faculty members to invite an expert in their field to review their book manuscripts before submitting the manuscript to the publisher.  We congratulate all four winners.  See https://chss.as.uky.edu/grant-recipients

Karen Petrone

Director, A&S Cooperative for the Humanities and Social Sciences

Professor of History

University of Kentucky

Lexington, KY  40506-0027

Tel: 859-257-4345

petrone@uky.edu

Zoom link: https://uky.zoom.us/j/86860238320