For nearly two decades, the Jewish Studies program has drawn students and faculty from all over UK to teach and learn about Jewish culture, language, history, and beyond. In this podcast, I spoke with up-and-coming Jewish Studies Director, Jan Fernheimer, about what’s in store for Fall 2013, including a visiting scholar from Israel, a film series, and opportunities to connect with communities within and beyond the Commonwealth.
University of Kentucky alumni Debdas Mukerjee graduated in 1962 with his Ph.D. in genetics. After UK, Mukerjee contributed his expertise to the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center before his career finally carried him to the Environmental Protection Agency where he was a Senior Environmental Health Scientist for the United States.
All of this was not Mukerjee's plan but he found that both the University of Kentucky and the state itself opened the doors of America to him in way he would never have imagined. In this podcast, Mukerjee reminisces on his "innumerable" memories at UK and gives some advice to current students so that they too can get the most from their academic experience.
Local book conservator and letterpress printer Alex Brooks graduated from the University of Kentucky in 2003 with a degree in English. He graduated from a Master’s program in Book Conservation in England at West Dean College in 2012. In this interview, Brooks talks about his experiences at UK and in England, and how he is putting his knowledge to use around Kentucky.
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.
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.
Every year, Teach for America places thousands of college graduates and professionals in schools in inner cities and rural areas. Luke Glaser, a double major in English and Spanish, has been selected to teach Spanish in an Appalachian high school for the next two years through the program. In this podcast, Glaser talks about his connection to Teach for America and what he plans to do afterward.
One such researcher is Professor Gary Ferland of the Department of Physics and Astronomy. Since the late 1970s, he’s been using computer modeling software to carry out experiments that would otherwise be impossible. With his widely used program Cloudy which simulates clouds of interstellar matter out in space and UK’s high-tech supercomputing infrastructure, Ferland and his students have been able to help answer some of the biggest questions facing astronomers as well as society.
Fibromyalgia causes pain that can be felt in muscles, joint and even skin. Although it is the most common musculoskeletal condition after osteoarthritis, it is often misunderstood and misdiagnosed.
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?
Professor Thomas Marksbury hopes to address some of these questions this coming spring semester in his class UKC 310: History Of Hip. The class, which satisfies a UK Core requirement in Intellectual Inquiry in the Humanities, will encourage students to trace their own paths through the history of “hip”, a meditation on its permutations throughout history and those individuals who embodied it.
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 together.
