By Jonathon Spalding

University of Kentucky history professor, Jeremy Popkin, was recently appointed a fellowship for the 2012-13 academic year by the National Humanities Center.

“The National Humanities Center is an ideal environment for scholars,” Popkin said, “It is set up to encourage the exchange of ideas.”

More than $1,500,000 in individual fellowship grants will allow scholars to take a yearlong leave from their regular academic duties to pursue research at the center, located in North Carolina. Popkin is one of 33 fellows who will have the opportunity to work on an individual research project and share their ideas in seminars, lectures and conferences.

“I’m looking forward to the rare opportunity to spend a year thinking and writing about a problem that has intrigued me since I was an undergraduate,” Popkin said.

By Sarah Geegan

The University of Kentucky College of Arts and Sciences will present the Distinguished Professor Lecture, featuring History Professor Ron Eller at 7:30 p.m., Thursday, April 12 in the William T. Young Library auditorium.

Eller's lecture, "Seeking the Good Life in America: Lessons From the Appalachian Past," will discuss what the future holds for Appalachia, using the history of the region as a foundation.

Eller, a professor in the Department of History, is originally from West Virginia. Having  spent more than 40 years teaching and writing about the Appalachian region, he also served as the director for the UK Appalachian Center for 16 years. Eller has also served as

By Whitney Hale

Choice magazine has named two books published by the University Press of Kentucky (UPK) as Outstanding Academic Titles in its January issue. "After the Dream: Black and White Southerners since 1965" and "How Kentucky Became Southern: A Tale of Outlaws, Horse Thieves, Gamblers, and Breeders," written by UK alumna Maryjean Wall, made the list of titles the publication recommended to its readership.

Choice's "Outstanding Academic Titles, 2011" reveals the best in scholarly titles reviewed by Choice magazine for the year. The honor brings with it extraordinary recognition from the academic library community as more than 35,000 academic librarians, faculty and decision makers use reviews in Choice magazine and from 

By Sarah Geegan

Students in professor Randolph Hollingsworth's research seminar expanded the boundaries of a typical history class as they examined the complexities and influences of Kentucky civil rights era women. By participating in digital dialogues, contributing to online databases and engaging in community service, the students experienced history by thinking outside the book.

"We don't have many scholarly books covering the wide-ranging history of women in Kentucky," Hollingsworth said. "One thing that we've found is that women are simply absent in many historical records. Sometimes it's a willful absence, and people choose not to include them. But then other times, it's just neglect."

The course aimed to begin filling this historical void. Students served as history-detectives,

By Whitney Hale

The upcoming University of Kentucky Libraries Annual Dinner will recognize this year's Medallion for Intellectual Achievement recipient, chemist John Anthony, and will feature guest speaker, Alan C. Lowe, director of the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum. The dinner, which is open to the public, will be presented 7 p.m. Friday, April 13, at the Hilary J. Boone Center.

Alan C. Lowe, UK alumnus and native of Paris, Ky., has been the director of the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum since 2009. Lowe began his career with the National Archives where he helped assemble records to

By Whitney Hale

Who do you think you are? That is precisely the question an NBC TV show of the same name answers for interested celebrities. Gerald Smith, associate professor of history at the University of Kentucky and general co-editor of the Kentucky African American Encyclopedia Project, will join the TV show on this quest to answer just that question for former Pittsburgh Steeler Jerome "The Bus" Bettis. The episode of "Who Do You Think You Are?" featuring Bettis will air at 8 p.m. Friday, March 9, on NBC (local residents can see the show on local affiliate WLEX 18 and Insight Cable channel 8).

On Friday's episode,

By Kathy Johnson

University of Kentucky educators and others will be honored with teaching and public service awards today in UK's second annual Founders Day Award Ceremony at 4 p.m. in Worsham Theater in the UK Student Center.  Members of the campus and local communities are invited.  A reception will follow in the Martin Luther King, Jr. Cultural Center.

The university was created by legislative act on Feb. 22, 1865. While Founders Day has been celebrated in various ways over those years, the Founders Day Award Ceremony was established last year to recognize outstanding teaching, research and public service among faculty.

The Provost's Awards for teaching and service, the Sullivan Medallions for community service, the Sturgill Award for contributions to graduate education, and the Kirwan Prize for outstanding research will be presented

By Whitney Hale

University of Kentucky's Nicole Schladt, an international studies and gender and women's studies sophomore, and Sarah Smith, a history junior, have been awarded two of six English-Speaking Union (ESU) Scholarships presented by the English-Speaking Union Kentucky Branch. The scholarships will cover Schladt and Smith's expenses for summer study at the University of Oxford and University of Cambridge respectively.

The Kentucky Branch of the English-Speaking Union awards a limited number of scholarships to qualified Kentucky college students for courses offered at institutions in the United Kingdom. Scholarship awards include tuition,

By Gail Hairston, Amy Jones, Kody Kiser

Six University of Kentucky professors were honored last night by the UK Alumni Association for the excellence they demonstrate in the classroom.

Click here for a transcription of the video above.

This year’s recipients of the 2012 Great Teacher Awards are:

By Kathy Johnson

The University of Kentucky Appalachian Center, Appalachian Studies and the Graduate Appalachian Research Community are making a call for papers for the 2012 UK Appalachian Research Symposium and Arts Showcase. The topic of the work must be related to Appalachia, original, and produced in the last three years. 

The deadline for submitting an abstract of work online is midnight Dec. 15. The submission can be made by going to the GARC tab on www.

By Erin Holaday Ziegler

A visiting Fulbright Scholar will give an insider's perspective on the past, present and future of Iraq at the University of Kentucky tomorrow.

Mohammed Saeed, a Fulbright Scholar in the Department of Statistics pursuing a master's in public health in UK's College of Public Health, will discuss the "Recent History of Iraq, U.S. Involvement and War and Current Issues" at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 29, in the William T. Library. There will be a reception in the Keeneland Room after Saeed's talk.

Saeed was born and raised in Baghdad and arrived at UK in 2010 after receiving a Fulbright scholarship. 

The visiting scholar plans to discuss the Iraq-Iran War; the Gulf War; life under Saddam Hussein's

By Whitney Hale

The University of Kentucky Special Collections Library invites the public to an exhibition and symposium celebrating the opening of the papers of Appalachian author Harriette Simpson Arnow. The event will take place at 4 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 17, in the Great Hall, of the Margaret I. King Building. The exhibition of work will run through February 2012.

Harriette Arnow’s papers at UK Libraries provide a broad look at a writer’s life and work.  Included are materials that document her writing process, from first-draft manuscripts on dime store tablets, through various iterations and drafts, to printer page proofs. Also included are correspondence with family, editors, publishers and literary agents. Researchers will find mail from

By Guy Spriggs

On October 24, 2011, UK history professor Jeremy Popkin was named as the 2011 recipient of the American History Association (AHA) J. Russell Major Prize for the best book in early modern French history. His award-winning winning book – “You Are All Free: The Haitian Revolution and the Abolition of Slavery” – was published by Cambridge University Press in 2010.

The award will be officially announced in the November issue of “Perspectives on History,” and Popkin will receive the prize on January 6, 2012 at the AHA Annual Meeting in Chicago.

Popkin’s book explains the background to the epoch-making revolutionary decrees of 1793 (in the French colony of Saint-Domingue—today’s Haiti) and

By Erin Holaday Ziegler

The University of Kentucky College of Arts & Sciences will host a trailblazing American diplomat next week to continue the college's Year of China initiative.

Former U.S. Ambassador Julia Chang Bloch will speak on “Leadership and Education in a Globalizing World: China’s Challenge” at 5 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 10, in Room 118 of the White Hall Classroom Building on UK's campus.

Bloch’s talk, which is free and open to the public, is sponsored by the "Passport to China: Global Issues & Local Understanding" course taught by UK sociology Professor Keiko Tanaka.

Ambassador Bloch, the first Asian-American ambassador in American history, has had a broad career in U.S. government service. She is currently president of the U.S.-China Education Trust, a nonprofit

By Erin Holaday Ziegler

The University of Kentucky will host 40 of the world's experts in early modern France at an interdisciplinary conference this week.

The 30th Annual Conference of the Society for Interdisciplinary French Seventeenth-Century Studies (SE17) will begin Thursday, Nov. 3, with scholarly papers and discussion. The meeting will be held in the Blue Grass Room of the Hilton Hotel in downtown Lexington and is free and open to the public.

Jeffrey Peters, the director of UK's Division of French and Italian Studies, organized the three-day scholarly get-together.

"The nature of literary studies has

University of Kentucky history professor Jeremy Popkin has been named one of six finalists for the 2011 Cundill Prize in History for his recent publication of "You Are All Free: The Haitian Revolution and the Abolition of Slavery."

Popkin will compete for the world‘s largest nonfiction history book award, which offers the winning author a $75,000 grand prize.

Popkin's "You Are All Free," released by Cambridge University Press in September 2010, provides a gripping historical account of the Haitian Revolution and the abolition of slavery in the now disaster-torn country. 

Popkin, a renowned French Revolution scholar, tells a dramatic story, employing a wide range of sources, affording him the opportunity to capture Haiti's complex history

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 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 Erin Holaday Ziegler

Because the Russian Empire had 18 million men-in-arms, 5 million prisoners-of war and 2 million deaths during World War I, University of Kentucky College of Arts & Sciences history Professor and department Chair Karen Petrone just couldn't believe that no one remembered World War I in Russia.

"I spoke to colleagues in Russian history who told me that World War I memory was not a category in the Soviet Union, and that there was nothing about it in governmental archives," Petrone said. "Scholars believed that World War I memory did not exist."

While Petrone didn't necessarily set out to prove her fellow researchers wrong in 2002, she was inspired by the work of

by Erin Holaday Ziegler

The University of Kentucky College of Arts & Sciences has chosen the following professors as new department chairs: associate professor Deborah Crooks, Department of Anthropology; associate professor Jeff Clymer, Department of English (to begin spring 2012; associate professor of English Marion Rust will be interim chair of the Department of Anthropology for the fall 2011-2012 year); associate professor Karen Petrone, Department of History; professor David Leep, Department of Mathematics; professor