By Gail Hairston

University of Kentucky Professor Emeritus Edward Stanton’s young adult, prehistoric fiction novel “Wide as the Wind” has received a second international award — the coveted Moonbeam Children’s Book Award, presented by the Jenkins Group for authors, illustrators and publishers from the United States, Canada and six additional countries.

Earlier this year, “Wide as the Wind” (Open Books Press) won the 2017 Next Generation Indie Book Award for Young Adult Fiction.

Described by the publisher as “a timely piece of environmental fiction,” “Wide as the Wind” is the first novel of any genre to deal with the stunning, tragic history of Easter Island and its implications for our modern world. It has been described as “both a stirring novel of adventure and a prophetic tale for our times.”

That’s an impressive achievement for any book, much

By Jenny Wells

This weekend, the University of Kentucky Department of Mathematics will host the first Julia Robinson Mathematics Festival for middle and high school students across the state.  The event will be held 9 a.m. to noon Saturday, Nov. 4, in the Don & Cathy Jacobs Science Building.

"This is part of a national initiative begun in 2013 to have students work on mathematics puzzles in a collaborative, noncompetitive and fun environment," said Margaret Readdy, UK professor of mathematics, who is organizing the event with Richard Ehrenborg, also a UK professor of math. "Professor Ehrenborg and I became interested in this after I brought our two sons to a Julia Robinson Math Festival in Princeton three years ago while on sabbatical. It was a

By Gail Hairston

World Languages Day and more than 250 Kentucky high school students return to the University of Kentucky campus Nov. 1.

Two UK College of Arts and Sciences departments, the Department of Modern and Classical Languages, Literatures and Cultures and the Department of Hispanic Studies, have planned a full day for the young students.

The students, who are studying either Spanish, French, German, Latin, Chinese, Russian or Japanese, will attend two classes in the morning and then have a question and answer session with current UK students and alumni regarding careers and opportunities in language and cultural study.

World Languages Day will continue with Assistant Professor Molly Blasing, who will discuss the college’s Keys

By Laura Brower

A convocation took place to signify the UK-BITZH partnership and provide an opportunity for College of Arts and Sciences and Gatton College representatives to meet with BITZH second-year students who were interested in attending UK.

A delegation of University of Kentucky administrators and deans visited Beijing Institute of Technology at Zhuhai (BITZH) in early September. On Saturday, Sept. 9, a convocation took place to signify the UK-BITZH partnership and provide an opportunity for the College of Arts and Sciences and Gatton College of Business and Economics representatives to meet with BITZH second-year students who were interested in attending UK.

The executive director of the International

By Tatyanna Pruitt

Laura Greenfield, a UK College of Arts & Science geography alumna, was recently awarded the Sargent Shiver Youth Warriors Against Poverty Leadership Award by the Marguerite Casey Foundation. The award is presented to recognize and honor the vision, passion, and dedication of young people on improving the lives of families and communities.

Greenfield is the member-leader of Kentuckians For the Commonwealth’s (KFTC) Environmental Justice Analysis Work Team for the Empower Kentucky Project. She collaborated with other KFTC members to do an Environmental Justice Analysis for Kentucky, helping to further understanding of the relationship between pollution, health, race, and poverty.

“I cannot even express how honored I am for the nomination and for receiving this

By Kathy Johnson

The University of Kentucky Center for Equality and Social Justice (CESJ) has released two policy briefs dealing with subjects of heightened interest nationally and in Kentucky — immigration reform and LGBTQ legal protections.

Created last year, the CESJ is an interdisciplinary research center that promotes equality and social justice through collaborative scholarship and education. It also advocates for social justice in public policies and laws. Faculty members from a broad range of disciplines at UK serve as affiliates of the CESJ, and Christia Spears Brown, professor in the Department of Psychology, serves as its director.

The position paper titled "Immigrants Benefit the Community and Economy" was written by Jenny Minier, professor in the 

By Gail Hairston and Alicia Gregory

Jane Calvert, associate professor of history in the University of Kentucky College of Arts and Sciences, is committed to showing the human side of one of America’s Founding Fathers, John Dickinson, through the John Dickinson Writings Project.

As the Dickinson project’s founding director and chief editor, Calvert is collecting, transcribing, editing and publishing the complete writings of Dickinson, who wrote more for the American cause than any other Founding Father.

As a young history professor, disillusioned by American politics and culture of the late 1980s and early ‘90s, Calvert had a lot of questions about her homeland. And being a passionate historian, she naturally turned to history for answers.

In the midst of her dissertation on the history of Quaker society in America, she noticed that the

By Bryant Welbourne and Kathy Johnson

Four University of Kentucky faculty members have been named to the Southeastern Conference Academic Leadership Development Program (SEC ALDP) during the 2017-18 academic year, which also marks the program's 10-year anniversary.

The SEC ALDP seeks to identify, prepare and advance academic leaders for roles within SEC institutions and beyond. It has three components: a university-level development program designed by each institution for its own participants (i.e., fellows); two SEC-wide workshops held on specified campuses for all program participants; and a competitive fellowship designed to provide administrative growth opportunities for former fellows.

This year’s first SEC-wide workshop is under way through Thursday at Louisiana State University and the second will be held Feb. 21-23, 2018, at Auburn University. 

By Jenny Wells

In celebration of the American Chemical Society's National Chemistry Week, the University of Kentucky Department of Chemistry will host a demonstration show for school-aged children and their families this week. The "Reaction Attraction" will begin 7 p.m. Friday, Oct. 27, in Room 121 of the Don & Cathy Jacobs Science Building (JSB).

This public event serves as the department's primary outreach activity during National Chemistry Week..

"Young and not-so-young scientists will enjoy the colors, sounds, smoke and fire at a show guaranteed to entertain and even educate," said Steven Yates, professor of chemistry and Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor. "UK Professor Jack Seleque, a master showman who looks

By Christine Woodward, Zach Griffith, Sophonie Bazile, and Adrian Ho

The editorial collective of disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory is pleased to announce the call for papers for its 27th volume to be published in the summer of 2018. The volume will explore “archives” and the editors seek submissions that look at a range of archives, including national, personal and community archives, to investigate the ways in which documents, images, objects and places serve various purposes and occupy different types of cultural, intellectual and physical spaces. 

The volume will include interviews from four diverse scholars: Karen Till, Kimberly Christen, Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra and Michelle Caswell. Each scholar

By Mack McCormick and Whitney Hale

Poet Jane Gentry was a beloved and influential University of Kentucky educator, mentor to generations of young writers, former poet laureate for the Commonwealth, and a unique Kentucky voice. A retrospective of the celebrated poet’s work, “The New and Collected Poems of Jane Gentry,” edited by UK Professor of English Julia Johnson and published by University Press of Kentucky (UPK), was named this year's Thomas D. Clark Medallion recipient and will be recognized at an award ceremony Oct. 26, at the Filson Historical

By Nate Harling

This year, the University of Kentucky College of Arts and Sciences offers an undergraduate certificate in international film studies.

Directed by French and Francophone Studies Professor Jeffrey N. Peters, the program gives students the opportunity to formalize their film coursework. Requiring 16 total hours of coursework over five classes chosen from the wide array of film classes offered at UK, the program culminates in a capstone project in which students write an additional research paper. The paper synthesizes the analytical skills and historical and formal insights gained over the course of the international film studies curriculum.

Emma Friedman-Buchanan, one of the first students to participate in the new undergraduate certificate in international film studies, is a Lexington native and

By Whitney Hale

Viet Thanh Nguyen. Photo by Matt Meindl.

The University of Kentucky’s Gaines Center for the Humanities and Department of English’s MFA in Creative Writing will welcome to campus 2017 MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Grant recipient and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen. “An Evening with Viet Thanh Nguyen,” this year’s Bale Boone Symposium in the Humanities, will begin 7 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 25, at the Singletary Center for the Arts Recital Hall. This program is free and open to the public.  

By Whitney Hale

Two weeks from today, a new play by Raegan Payne will have its world premiere in Lexington with four performances running Nov. 2-4, at the Farish Theater at Lexington Public Library's central location in downtown Lexington. “Timeless” is a dark sci-fi comedy in which four scientists have discovered the fountain of youth in a new stem cell procedure. In one night they question history, women’s place in science and the value of time as they wrestle with the fate of an overcrowded Earth.

“Timeless” won the biennial Prize for Women Playwrights from the Kentucky Women Writers Conference, chosen by internationally renowned playwright Martyna Majok. Independently produced

By Nate Harling

University of Kentucky linguistics professors Rusty Barrett and Andrew Hippisley have been recognized as Fellows of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA).

The LSA is the nation’s largest organization dedicated to the advancement of linguistics, the scientific study of language. Since 2006, it has named a new class of fellows every year to recognize, in their words, “distinguished contributions to the discipline.”

Barrett and Hippisley find themselves in a select group, as they make up part of a class of only eight fellows, and in elite company with fellows from previous years, including Steven Pinker and Noam Chomsky, both extremely influential figures within the linguistics community and well-respected intellectuals across a number of academic fields.

In 2006, Rusty Barrett, an associate professor in the linguistics department, joined

Associate Prof. of Chemistry Beth Guiton has been appointed to the  Editorial Advisory Board of the Journal of Physical Chemistry for a two year term, beginning January 2018. Guiton's research interests focus on inorganic nanomaterials and in-situ transmission electron microscopy. The Guiton Research Group investigates chemistry at the nanometer length scale, working at the intersection between solid state chemistry and advanced characterization, in particular using in situ microscopy techniques.

For more information about the Guiton Research Group please visit the Guiton Group website.

Guiton received her bachelor's degree from the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom and her master's from Harvard University, followed by a

By Jenny Wells

This weekend, the University of Kentucky Department of Biology will host the second annual BioBonanza, a one-day open house festival, from noon to 4 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 14, at the Don & Cathy Jacobs Science Building (680 Rose St.).

This free public event will showcase interactive displays on research taking place in biology at UK. Attendees will enjoy around 30 hands-on activities carried out by more than 80 volunteers.

Free parking is available in the parking garage on Hilltop Avenue, next to the Jacobs Science Building.

The event is sponsored by Nikon, the UK Graduate School, the Biology Graduate Student Assocation (BGSA) and the UK Office of Community Engagement.

Visit the BioBonanza Facebook page for more information: 

By Gail Hairston

(Left to right) Dan Reedy, Karl Raitz, Dean Mark Kornbluh, Martha Rolingson, Charles Grizzle and Tom Spalding.

The University of Kentucky College of Arts and Sciences celebrated its Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony on Friday, Oct. 6, at the Don & Cathy Jacobs Science Building.

This year's Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony and Reception honored alumni Charlie Grizzle, Martha Rolingson and Tom Spalding, and College of Arts and Sciences faculty members Karl B. Raitz and Daniel R. Reedy. For more about each honoree, see their brief biographies below.

Alumni Inductees

Charlie Grizzle, English, bachelor’s degree, 1973 

Charles "Charlie" L. Grizzle, a native of Argillite, Kentucky, in Greenup County, earned his bachelor

By Tiffany Molina and Gail Hairston

On Oct. 26, the University of Kentucky International Center will welcome Nicholas Kristof, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and well-known columnist with The New York Times. Kristof’s talk, “A Path Appears: How Students Can Change the World,” is sponsored by the Office of the Provost, the College of Arts and Sciences, the Gatton College of Business and Economics, and the School of Journalism and Media.

Kristof’s talk will touch on themes that animate the book he co-authored with his wife, Sheryl WuDunn: “A Path Appears: Transforming Lives, Creating Opportunities.” Kristof and WuDunn say that the purpose of the book is to “provide a unique and essential narrative about making a difference in the world … and a roadmap to becoming a conscientious global citizen.” Kristof will discuss how global problems can seem overwhelming, but there

By Michael Lynch

Young visitors to the 2016 open house enjoy a virtual sandbox, provided by the UK Department of Mining Engineering.

Earth Science Week will be observed nationwide Oct. 8-14, and the Kentucky Geological Survey (KGS) at the University of Kentucky will again promote the appreciation of earth sciences with an open house.

Students, parents, teachers and others are invited to demonstrations and displays on a variety of natural science topics at the KGS open house. This year’s free public event is set for 6-8 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 11, at the Mining and Mineral Resources Building, located at 504 Rose St. on the UK campus.

KGS scientists set up displays