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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   This spring’s Anthropology Colloquium/Inclusive Excellence Decolonizing the Academy Lecture is “Yo Amo Mi Pajón: Afro-Dominicanness and the Natural Hair Movement in the Dominican Republic and Beyond” presented by Kimberly Eison Simmons, associate professor of anthropology and African American studies and associate dean of the South Carolina Honors College at the University of South Carolina.   Simmons will speak at 5 p.m. today (Monday), April 3, in Room 118 White Hall Classroom Building on the University of Kentucky campus.   A reserved luncheon is slated with Simmons as the special guest with UK faculty, staff, graduate and undergraduate students from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. Monday, in the Alumni Gallery of the William T. Young Library.   Immediately after Simmons’ lecture, there will be a dinner reception in the lobby just outside

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:

What explains the retrenchment of indigenous rights in Latin America after several decades of social movement growth and of increasing inclusion of indigenous peoples in Latin American democracies? How is the deterioration of indigenous rights linked to political economic transformations such as renewed state dependency on the extraction of oil and minerals? Are left wing administrations more vulnerable to dependency on natural resource

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

In the late summer of 2016, University of Kentucky archaeologist Richard Jefferies and his crew of graduate and undergraduate students returned to Sapelo Island to continue work on the Sapelo Island Mission Period Archaeological Project (or SIMPAP). Over the past 13 years, Jefferies and his colleague Christopher Moore, of the University of Indianapolis, have systematically investigated an expansive area north of the famous shell rings on Sapelo Island (Site 9Mc23). With a combination of extensive shovel probing, unit excavation, and geophysical prospection, the archaeologists have uncovered a wide range of mission-era evidence, including sherds of Spanish majolica pottery, pieces of olive jars, wrought-iron nails, glass beads, a small brass bell, an elegant cloth-covered button plausibly from a vestment, Altamaha sherds, and much evidence of Guale-Spanish
By Samantha Ponder   University of Kentucky alumna Rebecca Adkins Fletcher is one of the editors of the new book "Appalachia Revisited: New Perspectives on Place, Tradition, and Progress," published by University Press of Kentucky (UPK). The book's contributors explore how the Appalachia region has changed in recent years.   "Appalachia Revisited" is the story of how the Appalachia region is being viewed within and beyond its borders. Fletcher and co-editor, William Schumann, gather both scholars and nonprofit practitioners to explore how Appalachia is being observed after some of its most recent changes.   Inside the new book, readers will find a variety of different topics that are being studied, including race and gender,
By Whitney Hale   University of Kentucky Office of Nationally Competitive Awards has announced that six UK students and alumni have been selected as recipients of Fulbright U.S. Student Program scholarships. The UK recipients are among more than 1,800 U.S. citizens who will travel abroad for the 2016-17 academic year through the prestigious program.   The Fulbright U.S. Student Program offers fellowships for U.S. graduating college seniors, graduate students, young professionals and artists to study, conduct research, and/or teach English abroad.   Recipients of Fulbright grants are selected on the basis of academic or professional achievement, as well as demonstrated leadership potential in their fields. The program operates in

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

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