UK English Professor and Affrilachian poet Frank X Walker has been named Kentucky's Poet Laureate! In this segment from UK at the Half with Carl Nathe, Walker talks about the award and his childhood dreams of literary accomplishment. 

Creative expression and disease aren't two topics that are often juxtaposed, but UKC 310: Art and Epidemics, will explore five diseases from a creative and technical angle: tuberculosis, AIDS, cancer, alcoholism, and the plague - through a variety of creative lenses, including film, short fiction, poetry, and art. Rita Basuray and Katherine Rogers-Carpenter will co-teach the fall 2013 course, looking at the parallels between scientific and creative writing, and where these forms diverge. 

This podcast was…

In May 2013, ten students will go to Costa Rica to do ethnographic writing for English 205: Advanced Composition. Steve Alvarez of WRD is taking the group to the town of Heredia for four weeks. The course meets the graduation requirement for writing, and will include service learning opportunities and plenty of cultural experiences. For more information about taking this class, please contact the instructor. 

This…

Most of us heard that the world was going to possibly end on December 21st, 2012, and that it was predicted by the traditional Mayan calendar. In this podcast, Rusty Barrett, a linguist and scholar of Mayan culture and history, explains the superstitions and misunderstandings surrounding December 21st, and a little bit about how the Mayan calendar works.

SPOILER ALERT: The day after our interview, Barrett recieved an email from a Mayan organization (…

The words “hip” and “hipster” carry around a lot of baggage. Often, due to misconceptions, "hipster" is used as an insult meant to suggest some sort of failed or inauthentic attempt at being "hip." But what if that isn’t what “hip” is? What if “hip” isn’t some obsession with the fleeting but a more permanent state?

More than thirty of the world's leading morphologists are contributing to a book that will be out in spring of 2014 - and they're working together with the help of an online collaboration tool developed by the Hive. Professors Andrew Hippisley and Greg Stump are currently compiling and editing the upcoming Cambridge Handbook of Morphology. In this podcast, Hippisley and Stump describe the book, and how and why they are putting it…

Fall of 2012 was the perfect time to conduct a class about American electoral politics - so it was taken up as the topic for Currents, a class offered to incoming Freshmen. The course explores the 2012 election from a variety of academic perspectives - including, but not limited to, philosophy, economics, history, and, of course, political science. In this podcast, five Currents students shared their experiences with the class. 

The students interviewed are: Trevor McNary, a double major in…

At the end of May 2012, the American Studies Center at Shanghai University hosted a three-day symposium and student summit. The summit was a two-part discussion of an excerpt from the book by Maxine Hong Kingston, "The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts." The discussion was facilitated by Michelle Sizemore, an assistant professor in the Department of English. In this interview, Sizemore discusses the text, the unique…

Frank Walker, associate professor in the Department of English, discusses the origin of the word "Affrilachia" and how the use of the word forces the redefinition of a region traditionally described as all-white. Walker noted several key artists and intellectuals from Appalachia to illustrate the region's cultural diversity.

This podcast is a recording of his lecture on May 21st, 2012, at Shanghai University. The session was part of the…

At the end of May 2012, a delegation of faculty from the University of Kentucky went to Shanghai University to promote the American Studies Center, a partnership between UK and SHU. Michelle Sizemore facilitated a group discussion between UK and SHU students about cultural difference, identity, and storytelling across cultures. Four faculty members, Mary Anglin,…