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

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@

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 

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

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

Janie-Rice Brother, an architectural historian of the Kentucky Archaeological Survey recently received the UK Department of Writing, Rhetoric and Digital Studies' Campus and Community Excellence in Writing award for her blog titled Architecture and Landscapes from the Bluegrass and Beyond.

Brother has over 15 years of cultural resource experience in the Ohio River Valley, the Mid-Atlantic, and southeast. Prior to coming to UK, Brother spent four years at the Kentucky Heritage Council, the State Historic Preservation Office (SHPO), where she was responsible for review of the above-ground Section 106 projects in the state. While at the SHPO, she oversaw a county-wide survey that culminated in the documentation of over 800 rural and urban resources and numerous public presentations.

Brother studies the landscape of Kentucky and blogs about its vanishing heritage.

By Gail Hairston

(March 31, 2016) — Teachers, parents and schoolchildren in Kentucky and around the world have a new online resource to learn about the history of Lexington’s extraordinary Davis Bottom neighborhood, the “Teaching Through Documentary Art: Lessons for Elementary and Middle School Social Studies Teachers” series.

Inspired by two stunning murals featured in the award-winning documentary “Davis Bottom, Rare History, Valuable Lives,” the innovative lesson plans were developed by archaeologists and educators with the Kentucky Archaeological Survey (KAS), jointly administered by the University of Kentucky’s Department of Anthropology and the Kentucky Heritage Council, and the Davis Bottom History

 American Archaeology, a national magazine, recently highlighted the work on Anthropology graduate student, Stuart Nealis. Nealis is a student of Dr. George Crothers, Director of State Archaeology and the William S. Webb Museum.  

Within the article, Nealis' research on the newly renamed Town Square Bank Mound, a large Woodland-period mound in Northern Kentucky, is mentioned. To read more about Nealis' research on the mound, view the full article from American Archaeology  here.

By Allison Elliott-Shannon

(Oct. 22, 2015) — Open Access is a consistent theme in university libraries across the world, as researchers seek to share and collaborate in new ways. “Open for Collaboration” is the theme of Open Access Week 2015, a global event taking place Oct. 19–25. As scholars, research institutions and funding agencies acknowledge the benefits of open access, they have made an increasing number of scholarly content freely available online for people to reuse and build upon for innovation. 

An advocate for open access, University of Kentucky Libraries has forged collaborative partnerships with various campus units to

By Gail Hairston

(Oct. 6, 2015) — The images of untold thousands of people — many of them children — escaping the horror and despair of the war-ravaged Middle East are seared in the memories of anyone even semi-aware of global events in recent months.

Newscasters and reporters around the world have failed to find the words to adequately describe and explain the tsunami of humanity that washed upon the shores or stumbled across the borders of European nations. So many questions and so few answers.

A panel of nine experts from six disciplines was formed by the University of Kentucky’s International Studies Program and its director Sue