By Megan Foltz

Mark P. Whitaker, a professor in the University of Kentucky Department of Anthropology, was awarded multiple grants to assist in funding an ethnographic workshop on innovative religiosity in postwar Sri Lanka that took place this summer. Whitaker received grants from both the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Wenner-Gren Foundation in support of his work. The workshop brought together 17 anthropologists and religious studies scholars at the campus of the Open University of Sri Lanka in Colombo, Sri Lanka.

Whitaker’s Workshop on Innovative Religiosity posed the question: “Why have innovative religious practices and institutions in Sri Lanka and its diaspora achieved a new prominence since the end of its inter-ethnic civil war in 2009?”

“This gathering of scholars of Sri Lanka’s many politically and sociologically significant religions —

By Gail Hairston

The sweet strains of traditional mountain music still drift on the summer breezes of the Appalachians, reflecting off the hills and flowing through the valleys. 

But before Appalachian mountain music was first preserved on wax discs — as the arid winds of the Dust Bowl blew and the soup lines of the Great Depression grew — the musicians played on handmade fiddles, dulcimers, zithers and mandolins, and heard with the hearts of generations.

Until the mid-19th century, the vast majority of musical instruments responsible for the sound of mountain music — dulcimers, guitars, violins or fiddles, banjoes, zithers and mandolins — were handmade and passed down from one generation to the next. The tunes and musical traditions were the inheritance of a melding of English, Welsh, Irish and Scottish ballads with the customs of Germany,

By Lori Minter

The University of Kentucky has released its Dean's List for the spring 2017 semester.  A total of 6,412 students were recognized for their outstanding academic performance. 

To make a Dean’s List in one of the UK colleges, a student must earn a grade point average of 3.6 or higher and must have earned 12 credits or more in that semester, excluding credits earned in pass-fail classes.  Some UK colleges require a 3.5 GPA to make the Dean’s List.

The full Dean's List can be accessed by visiting: www.uky.edu/PR/News/DeansList/.

UK is the University for Kentucky. At UK, we are educating more students, treating more patients with complex illnesses and conducting more research and service than at any time in our 150-year history. To read more about the UK

By Whitney Hale

The University of Kentucky Office of Nationally Competitive Awards has announced four UK students have been awarded Critical Language Scholarships to study Chinese, Japanese and Swahili abroad. The Critical Language Scholarship (CLS) Program, a program of the United States Department of State, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, offers intensive summer language institutes overseas in 14 critical need foreign languages during the summer of 2017.

The CLS Program is part of a U.S. government effort to expand the number of Americans studying and mastering critical need foreign languages. Participants are expected to continue their language study beyond the scholarship period and later apply their critical language skills

By Gail Hairston

For much of his career, University of Kentucky Professor of Anthropology Christopher Pool has been fascinated by Mexico’s ancient Olmec culture, with its gargantuan heads sculpted in stone and more mundane relics its artisans etched in ceramic.

An expert in Mesoamerica, the evolution of complex societies, political economy and cultural ecology and armed with a voracious curiosity, Pool began his fieldwork at the Olmec site of Tres Zapotes, Mexico, in 1995, some 140 years after a farmworker’s hoe first scraped the top of a buried stone head.

After numerous stone monuments were unearthed at Tres Zapotes, additional evidence of a highly sophisticated ancient culture was discovered. Archaeologists were lured away from Tres Zapotes by the discovery of the remains of several other

By Jenny Wells

Deborah Crooks, emerita associate professor of anthropology in the University of Kentucky College of Arts and Sciences, has been awarded the 2017 Franz Boas Distinguished Achievement Award by the Human Biology Association (HBA). The award honors members of the association for exemplary contribution to human biology in science, scholarship and professional service.

A biocultural anthropologist, Crooks’ research has focused on nutritional anthropology, livelihoods and food/nutrition security, the political-economy of child growth, the biology of inequality and human adaptability in Belize, Eastern Kentucky and Zambia. She combines theory and methods from biological and cultural anthropology to address these issues, using quantitative and qualitative data.

By Sarah Geegan; Savanah Sellars

The University of Kentucky recognized exceptional faculty and teaching assistants at the Outstanding Teaching Awards at the 2017 University of Kentucky Awards Ceremony on Wednesday, April 25, in Woodward Hall of the Gatton College of Business and Economics building. Recipients of the inaugural Inclusive Excellence Awards, in partnership with the Office for Institutional Diversity were also recognized.

Four sets of awards were presented by UK Provost Tim Tracy: the William B. Sturgill Award, the Albert D. and Elizabeth H. Kirwan Memorial Prize, the Outstanding Teaching Faculty and Teaching Assistant Awards and the Inclusive Excellence Award.

“Now — more than ever — the success of our students is fundamental to the success of our society,” Tracy said. “Not just their economic success, but their cultural, artistic and

By Gail Hairston

University of Kentucky graduate student in anthropology, Mary Elizabeth Schmid, won the Eric R. Wolf Prize from the Society for the Anthropology of Work for her paper "Tomatoes and Temporality: Political Economies of Time in the Fresh-Market Tomato Industry in the Southeastern U.S." The award is presented by the American Anthropological Association.

Schmid's dissertation research is making original contributions to a number of fields. Her findings contest the stereotypes about Latino workers in southeastern agriculture and global circulations of labor and commodities. She is studying binational Latin@ family agricultural enterprises in Mexico and the southeastern U.S.

Schmid is finding that women have an important role in these production and marketing networks, a contribution often overlooked in the literature. Latin@ entrepreneurs are

By Gail Hairston

University of Kentucky Associate Professor of Anthropology Carmen Martínez Novo has been awarded an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Fellowship for the year 2017-2018.

She will use it to complete her new book, tentatively titled “The Decline of Indigenous Rights in Latin America.” Martínez Novo will address the following questions:

By Lori Minter

A record number of students made the University of Kentucky Dean's List for the fall 2016 semester. The 7,408 students were recognized for their outstanding academic performance.  That's an increase of more than 200 over the previous record reached in fall 2015 when the number of students on the UK Dean's List surpassed 7,000 for the first time.  Last semester's Dean's List includes over 700 more students than the spring 2016 semester's list.

To make a Dean’s List in one of the UK colleges, a student must earn a grade point average of 3.6 or higher and must have earned 12 credits or more in that semester, excluding credits earned in pass-fail classes.  Some UK colleges require a 3.5 GPA to make the Dean’s List.

The full Dean's List can be accessed by visiting www.uky.edu/PR

By Gail Hairston

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has launched a major initiative to transform the culture of graduate education and to implement changes that will broaden the career preparation of a doctoral student beyond a teaching career. The University of Kentucky and 27 other colleges and universities received a total of $1.65 million in grants to plan the transformation.

UK’s program, Careers Beyond the Professoriate, will provide resources and support to humanities and social science graduate students who are interested in exploring diverse career paths. Careers Beyond the Professoriate is supported by the College of Arts and Sciences and a NEH Next Generation Humanities PhD

By Gail Hairston

Two University of Kentucky graduate students in the College of Arts and Sciences Department of Anthropology have been awarded National Science Foundation (NSF) grants, and an anthropology alumna will be conducting her research at University of Cambridge.

Daniel Joseph, a fourth year doctoral student from Les Cayes, Haiti, was awarded an NSF Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant (DDIG) to conduct research on people of Haitian descent, many of whom had lived their whole lives in Dominican Republic until their deportation in recent years. Joseph is conducting cultural anthropological research in the refugee camps in Haiti, near the border of Dominican Republic. He hopes to understand how identity plays into these historical relations of race, colonialism and entwined economies. For more information about Haiti and Dominican Republic, visit 

One of the benefits of a large research university is the opportunity it provides undergraduates to study a wide variety of disciplines while working with nationally recognized scholars. In order to promote these types of educational experiences for students, the Office of Undergraduate Research offers Research and Creativity Grants during the summer term.

“Receiving this grant has changed my life in more ways than one,” said Michael Steenken, anthropology senior and 2016 Summer Research Grant recipient. “I have been given the opportunity to explore my curiosities and passions with the guided help of various professionals. I have had the ability to fall even more in love with the area of study that has always fascinated me. I have been able to gain a basic foundation in how to conduct academic research.”

Under faculty advisor David Pollack, Steenken’s research

By Kevin Kiernan

George Crothers, a University of Kentucky expert in prehistoric archaeology, has spent the better part of 30 years in the shadow-draped, surreal underworld of Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave system, searching for prehistoric as well as historic treasures of humanity’s adventures underground.  

Although it’s one of those never-quite-finished projects — there are hundreds of miles of underground labyrinths and chambers, after all — the UK associate professor of anthropology in the College of Arts and Sciences said much of his work and an extensive trail

By Gail Hairston, Weston Loyd

(April 22, 2016) — The University of Kentucky Graduate School has adopted an online service, Versatile PhD, that will benefit students, faculty and alumni seeking careers in the humanities and social sciences.

“A growing number of graduate students are drawn to careers outside of traditional academic paths. In a survey of UK graduate students conducted earlier this year, 82 percent of the respondents indicated they are planning or considering alternate-academic or non-academic careers,” Morris A. Grubbs, assistant dean in the Graduate School and director of graduate