A creative writing professor at the University of Kentucky has been named a finalist for the 2011 National Book Award in Poetry. English professor Nikky Finney was named for the prestigious award for her recent work, “Head Off & Split,” on Oct 12.

“Head Off & Split” was published by Northwestern University Press in February of this year, and Finney has been touring with the book since late winter. 

"As an artist and a daughter of the South, and as someone who honors my feelings as often as I can, I don't have to acquiesce to the polite expectations of the moment," the Provost’s Distinguished Service Professor has said. "I have watched black people forgive and forget over and over again … I too forgive, but I don't forget … My responsibility as a poet, as an artist is to not look away."

Finney, a

By Katy Bennett, Student Activities Board

“Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in words,” a famous poet once said. Come hear from poets who call Kentucky home at the third installment of the James Baker Hall Writer’s Series at 6 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 13, in the Student Center Small Ballroom. This event is free and sponsored by the Student Activities Board.

James Baker Hall was a renowned Kentucky writer, UK faculty member, intense Wildcat fan, and ultimately an interesting person. This series is dedicated to writers who have been raised or influenced by living in Kentucky and designed as a memorial to Baker Hall. This week the series will feature poets Erik Reece and Maureen Morehead.

Reece is a writer of prose and poetry and is the author of two acclaimed books and numerous essays and articles

By Erin Holaday Ziegler

The University of Kentucky's Committee on Social Theory will welcome a former faculty member and active debater in spatial science and geographic thought to campus for its Fall Distinguished Speaker and Founders Forum this week.

John Paul Jones III, dean of the University of Arizona's College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, will deliver the committee's annual lecture titled, "The Politics of Autonomous Spaces" at 4 p.m. Friday, Oct. 14, in the West End Boardroom on the 18th floor of Patterson Office Tower.

Jones' visit and participation in the annual series is unique, as he was an esteemed professor and colleague on the faculty of UK's Department of Geography from the fall of 1991 to summer

By Jonathon Spalding

What do you think of when you hear the word “diversity”? Whatever it may be, chances are you learned of the word at a young age and it has been drilled into your head ever since. Generally, we think of diversity as one-dimensional, in only one context: the diversity of peoples. For Cadet Jay Hurst, senior Army ROTC Battalion Commander, diversity has evolved into a more personal endeavor.  

Jay graduated from high school in northern Virginia where his family was stationed; but with roots in Anderson County, Ky., he felt a definite gravitation towards the University of Kentucky and the Army ROTC program.

“I didn’t feel any pressure from my family to join ROTC,” said Jay, the son of a UK graduate and U.S. Army veteran, “I wanted to help people, especially while I am young.”

This past summer, Jay graduated from the U.S. Army

by Beth Connors-Manke

“I graduated, saw news about the war, but I was very far from it.”

This is how Assistant Professor of Philosophy Natalie Nenadic describes the beginning of her involvement in the groundbreaking lawsuit Kadic v. Karadzic, which gained recognition for sexual atrocities as acts of genocide.

The war Nenadic had seen in the news was the dissolution of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, in which Serbian forces carried out “ethnic cleansing” through a system of concentration camps for torture, mass killings, and mutilations. This campaign included mass rapes and murder of women.  

Nenadic had recently received her B.A. from Stanford University when she was contacted by ethnologist and philosopher Asja

By Whitney Hale

The University of Kentucky Gaines Center for the Humanities will present the 2011 Bale Boone Symposium in the Humanities Oct. 10-12 on the topic of religion. The free public symposium, "Religion in the 21st Century," will give the public an opportunity to explore the connections between religion and such topics as history, science and politics.            

Three presentations on religion are scheduled for the 2011 Bale Boone Symposium. The event will open with the session "Are Faith and History Compatible?" featuring speakers Bart Ehrman, the James A. Gray Professor at the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and 

By Whitney Hale, Erin Holaday Ziegler

Bluegrass audiences can learn more about the art of throat singing, a form of overtone singing practiced by the Tuva people of southern Siberia, at several events being presented at the University of Kentucky this week. Arts patrons can take in a lecture, demonstration and concert by the renowned Tuvan acoustic quartet Huun Huur Tu centered on the art of throat singing as part of the 2011 ArtsAsia Festival.

On Saturday night, Oct. 8, Huun Huur Tu will take the stage at the Singletary Center for the Arts for a concert. The descendants of isolated Siberian herdsmen make

The University of Kentucky's ArtsAsia Festival breaks new ground this year with a two-day conference on Chinese art, design, film and architecture.

The ArtsAsia Festival's annual academic symposium, titled "Contested Ground: Visual Culture in China after 1989," takes place Oct. 14-15 on UK's campus.

The symposium keynote lecture by Eugene Wang, the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Professor of Asian Art at Harvard University, will take place at 5 p.m. Friday, Oct. 14, in the Singletary Center for the Arts President's Room.

Wang will discuss "After-Shock and After-Image: A Chinese 'Neo-realist' Painter's Engagement with the Real in the Postmedium and Post-Earthquake Situation."

According to Wang, a new dilemma confronts the Chinese “neo-realist,” painters who came of age in

By Whitney Hale

The University of Kentucky Department of Theatre will transport audiences to China in their opening production of the season, "The Monkey King: Havoc in Heaven." This family-friendly production will storm the Guignol Theatre stage Oct. 6-16.

"The Monkey King" is a classic tale of mayhem and adventure in a family-friendly setting. The performance highlights a beloved Chinese character, the Monkey King, as he raids the Grand Banquet of Immortal Peaches in search of extra lives. As a result, the central character finds himself in hot water with the Emperor and only Buddha can bail him out of his predicament. UK Theatre's "The Monkey King" will come to life through puppetry, dance, combat and colorful costumes.

by Erin Holaday Ziegler

Chad Montrie, professor in the Department of History at the University of Massachusetts-Lowell, will be visiting the University of Kentucky to discuss the history of environmentalism and its connection to the modern-day struggle against mountaintop removal (MTR) on Oct. 20.

His talk, titled, "Confronting Environmental Mythology, Making a New Environmental Movement," will take place at 3:30 p.m. on Oct. 20 in the Niles Gallery of the Lucille Caudill Little Fine Arts Library.

Montrie will examine common notions about the origins and development of environmentalism in the United States, highlighting militant opposition to strip mining in Appalachia during the 1950s and 1960s as a precursor to contemporary efforts to end (MTR).

Montrie suggests that acknowledging underground miners’ critical involvement in that preceding

by Colleen Glenn

Congratulations are in order for Ramesh Bhatt, who has recently won a three-year National Science Foundation grant worth $432,751. Bhatt, a professor of Psychology at the University of Kentucky, will use the support to expand his research on the development of social functioning in infancy.

 “Bodies provide a lot of information that facilitates social functioning in adults,” Bhatt says. “However, not much research has addressed the development of knowledge about bodies. The proposed research will let us examine questions such as whether babies know how bodies are organized in terms of the relative proportions of various parts.”

For example, Bhatt will analyze how infants from 3 to 9 months of age react to systematic changes to body and face images, documenting which aspects of bodies and faces infants scan. The results will help Bhatt

By Whitney Hale

In honor of Hispanic Heritage Month, University of Kentucky faculty and students, as well as international guest artists, will take center stage in a tribute concert honoring the late Spanish poet and dramatist Federico García Lorca. "Llanto por Federico García Lorca," presented by UK's School of Music and Latin American Studies Program, will begin 7 p.m. Friday, Sept. 30, at the Niles Gallery, in the Lucille C. Little Fine Arts Library and Learning Center. The event is free and open to the public.

The concert "Llanto por Federico García Lorca" will feature

By Erin Holaday Ziegler

Four years of college is four years of finding yourself socially and [sometimes] academically for many students enrolled at the University of Kentucky. The city in which a student goes about pursuing the next chapter of his or her life doesn't always come into play.  However, a new course at UK wants to change that.

UK geography professor Richard Schein hopes to shed some local, Lexington light on students this fall with a Community 101 class being offered to university students through UK's College of Arts & Sciences.

"We've been an urban society since the 1920s," said Schein. "It's important for our students to become urban citizens, understanding gentrification, immigration, school districts and other city

James Baker Hall was a renowned Kentucky writer, UK faculty member, intense Wildcat fan and ultimately an interesting person. In his honor, the Student Activities Board and the College of Arts and Sciences have partnered to host the James Baker Hall Writers Series. This series is dedicated to writers who have been raised or influenced by living in Kentucky and designed as a memorial to James Baker Hall. The second installment of this series is from 5:30-7 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 29, in the Student Center's Worsham Theater. This event is free and sponsored by SAB.

This week, the series features authors Kelly Norman Ellis, Ellen Hagan and Nikky Finney. Expanding from the slam poetry movement, the writers will be reading their work and sharing

By Erin Holaday Ziegler

University of Kentucky English professor Frank X Walker is not one to sit still. And the new director of both the African American Studies & Research and the Africana Studies Programs doesn't expect his students to either.

"I'd really like to make this a strong travel study program," Walker said of the newly combined African American & Africana studies minor in the College of Arts & Sciences. "And not just

University of Kentucky spinoff CoPlex Therapeutics announces global license with Hawthorn Pharmaceuticals to develop a treatment for Alzheimer’s

Story by Carl Nathe and Deb Weis

photos courtesy of UKCED

front page image left to right: Bert Lynn, Mark Lovell, John Beran

CoPlex Therapeutics has signed an exclusive global license agreement with Hawthorn Pharmaceuticals to develop and commercialize hawAD14, a preclinical oral small molecule candidate for the treatment of Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative diseases.

According to a released statement from Hawthorn Pharmaceuticals, a commercial-stage specialty drug company, research indicates hawAD14 significantly decreases production of amyloid beta (Aβ) the major component of senile plaques and alters proteins associated with hyperphosphorylation

The lecture, "Sexualizing Black Female Bodies, Constructing Culture and Nation in the French Caribbean," is part of the African American and Africana Studies Program's Carter G. Woodson Lecture Series and will be held at 4 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 29, in Room 249 of the Student Center. Admission is free and open to UK students, staff, faculty and the public.

Jacqueline Couti, an assistant professor of French and Francophone Studies in the Department of Modern and

On March 30 and 31, 2012, Tim Sundell and Stefan Bird-Pollan will convene an aesthetics conference at UK with four invited speakers, graduate student commentators, and a round table. The conference brings to a conclusion a year of aesthetics courses given by the two philosophy professors.

>>Listen to a podcast with Sundell and Bird-Pollan discuss the conference

The idea arose at a meeting of the undergraduate philosophy club in which, when asked about his area of research, Sundell’s discussion of the problem of aesthetic disagreement generated prolonged and enthusiastic questioning from the audience. Bird-Pollan, who also has an interest in aesthetics, recognized in Sundell’s presentation a version of Kant’s antinomy of taste

By Krystal Delfino

photos by Dana Rogers

When asked what his goals in life were growing up, Major Kris Morlen  says that he had always knew he wanted to serve in the military in some way, even when he was a young child. But, what would inspire such a strong desire in a little boy?

“I guess it was just the patriotic movies…A steady diet of John Wayne and Clint Eastwood, and G.I. Joes. It just appealed to me.”

The good versus evil dynamic was something that spoke to Morlen’s noble senses, and so he joined the military in 1986. However, he did not realize from the beginning that this would become a lifelong passion for him.

“I figured it would just be another chapter of my life, and then I’d go on to do other things. Get my college education…”

In 1988, Morlen began attending college at Indiana University Southeast. Very

Dean's Channel: Geography Professor Rich Schein discusses Community 101 from UK College of Arts & Sciences on Vimeo.

Community 101: Geography Professor Rich Schein discusses a new A&S course that connects students to Lexington through history, culture, modern issues, and most importantly, why all of this should matter to UK students.