Hannah Arthur Bell graduated in 1999 from the College of Arts & Sciences with a major in English and a minor in Russian Studies.  During her sophomore year, Hannah traveled with her father to St. Petersburg, Russia, to see one of his plays performed at the University of St. Petersburg.

Hannah had no prior knowledge of Russia, but immediately fell in love with the art and culture of St. Petersburg; so much so that she talked her mother and grandmother into returning with her on a group tour that next spring.  

Hannah quickly became determined to focus the last 4 semesters of her college curriculum to "all things Russia".  It was during her 2nd language course, headed by Professor Jeanmarie Rouhier-Willoughby, that she decided to spend the summer in Vladimir to attend the KORA exchange program at the State University.  Two months' immersion with side trips to Suzdal,

Marcello Lippiello earned his MA in Classics and the Graduate Certificate in Latin Studies at the University of Kentucky, both in 2005.  Highlights included the opportunity to prepare an original Latin translation of Plato's Lysis (under the excellent guidance of Professor Minkova) as part of his MA exams, as well as a number of experiences teaching introductory level Latin and leading group discussions for Professor Rabel's Ancient Stories and Modern Film course.  Marcello's experiences in the Institute for Latin Studies and in teaching during this time helped him to discern a calling to a career as a teacher of the Classics.

More opportunities to teach would follow at Duke University, where Marcello enrolled as a doctoral student in Classical Studies in 2005.  While at  Duke, he taught Introductory Latin, Intermediate Latin (mainly focusing on

Antoine Haaker was born in Boulogne-sur-mer (France) and did his undergraduate studies in Classics at the University of Lille. During the summer, he once travelled to Rome in order to attend the Latin course of Father Reginald Foster. Father Foster is a Carmelite who used to work in the Vatican at the Latin letters office where official documents of the Church are written in or translated into Latin. For Father Foster Latin is still a living language, and this is how he teaches it. He speaks it in front of his students and proposes to read passages from the whole range of Latin literature, from antiquity down to the twentieth century.

“My professors in France hardly read aloud the texts we were translating in class, let alone speak Latin. Besides, they only dealt with strictly ancient Roman literature. So, going to Rome and meeting Reginald Foster was an eye-opener.”

Rachel Philbrick was born and raised in Cambridge, Mass., and attended high school at the Commonwealth School, a small, private institution in Boston’s Back Bay. Commonwealth’s small size fostered a stimulating intellectual environment, encouraging interactions between students and faculty. It was here that Rachel first encountered Latin, studying it for four year and travelling, in her junior year, to Italy with her Latin class.

From there, Rachel entered Cornell University as a biology major. In her sophomore year, she added Latin as a second major under the mentorship of Prof. Michael Fontaine and, in May 2007, completed degrees in both Latin and Biology & Society. She spent the summer of 2006 in Rome, Italy, studying at Fr. Reginald Foster’s Aestiva Romae Latinitas, where she encountered a vibrant intellectual community akin to that she had enjoyed in high

Miller came to the graduate program in classics at the University of Kentucky in the autumn of 2006, drawn by the Institute for Latin Studies and the allure of learning to use Latin as a language rather than seeing it as a puzzle or a code standing between an author and a reader.  Though taught as an undergraduate in the passive style that characterized nineteenth and twentieth century Latin pedagogy in America, and having used those same techniques in his own secondary school teaching, Miller quickly came to appreciate Kentucky's active methodology, an approach in line both with Latin teaching strategies of centuries past and with best practices current in modern foreign language education. 

He did not realize, however, that the Institute would not only teach him the language inside and out but would also expose him to a much broader range of genres and styles than is

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.appalachiancenter.org and clicking on the "Abstract

By Erin Holaday Ziegler

The University of Kentucky Confucius Institute will welcome a renowned international education expert to campus next week to discuss the current state of Chinese education in the U.S. and around the world.

University of Vermont emeritus professor of education Juefei Wang will give a talk titled “Chinese Education in a Changing Society” at 3 p.m. Tuesday, Dec. 6, in the William T. Young Library.

The esteemed professor and program director of the Freeman Foundation founded the University of Vermont Asian Studies Outreach Program and served as its director for 14 years.  In that role he created a statewide program for Asian studies in schools in Vermont, organized more than 1,000 teachers, school administrators, and high school and college students to visit China, Japan, and

Joseph Tipton is currently a predoctoral fellow in the Department of Classics at the University of Pittsburgh. In addition to teaching courses in Greek history, ancient mythology and classical literature, he is writing his dissertation which deals with the philosophical commitments underlying the Athenian democracy in the Periclean period as evidenced in philosophical, historical and dramatic texts.

Joseph was a graduate student in the Classics program at the University of Kentucky from 2001 to 2003. During these two years he pursued both Greek and Latin studies in the department. He appreciates most the work he did in the Institutum Studiis Latinis Provehendis. In the Institutum he gained not just a command of the language, but also an insight into the nuances of the language that has proved invaluable in subsequent work. He has also gained an understanding

By Erin Holaday Zielger

The United States celebrates International Education week this week, but UK has escalated its presence and connectivity across the globe since Provost Kumble Subbaswamy established the Internationalization Task Force in February 2007.

"Our students, regardless of whether they come from rural Kentucky or from outside the U.S., are increasingly aware of the importance of being ready for the global marketplace," Subbaswamy said.  "Thus, it is our responsibility to make sure that UK provides them ample opportunity to become ‘world ready.’ Our internationalization efforts are aimed at achieving this strategic goal."

International Education Week is an opportunity to celebrate the benefits of international education and exchange worldwide.

Matt Wells presented a paper titled “How to Be an Exemplary Official: Didactic Life Narrative in the Jin shu.” 15th Annual Southeast Early China Roundtable, University of the South, Sewanee, October 7-9, 2011.

Jeanmarie Rouhier-Willoughby and Matt Wells participated in an Asian studies meeting up in Louisville for all of the Asian Studies faculty across the state, hosted by the Crane House.  

EVENT - David Hunter & Catholic Studies - Sinai Monk to Visit
The Cottrill-Rolfes Chair of Catholic Studies, through the good offices of Dr. David Bradshaw, Philosophy Depaetment chair, will be sponsoring two lectures in early November.  The speaker will be Fr. Justin Sinates, a monk of St. Catherine's monastery in the Sinai Desert, Egypt, and a native of Texas.  St. Catherine's was founded in the sixth century by the Byzantine emperor

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 organization working

By Erin Holaday Ziegler

The University of Kentucky's College of Arts & Sciences continues to expand its language offerings this year, as the UK Board of Trustees approved a Chinese studies major in early fall 2011 on the heels of Japan studies last year.

"We've gotten a lot of positive student response," said Matt Wells, professor of Chinese and director of Undergraduate Studies for the new major. "The program offers four years of Chinese language, study abroad opportunities and an interdisciplinary curriculum covering modern and pre-modern Chinese culture."

A major couldn't come too soon, as the number of students studying Chinese has experienced 20-30 annual growth, according to Wells. "We have more students in our 101 classes now than there were in 101, 201

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 really changed in recent years,"

Russian studies, 2008

During my four years at the University of Kentucky, I discovered my passion in life. My freshman year, I signed up for a Russian language class, and just fell in love with the language, the culture, and the literature of the Russian people. I had the incredible opportunity to take language classes from full professors, one of whom is the head of the department! I have since learned that a professor teaching an introductory language course is a rarity, as they are generally taught at universities by lecturers or graduate students, as well as an incredible treat. My first year teacher could answer any possible question I had in a completely logical way, and her enthusiasm for the subject was absolutely contagious. I am now teaching my own first year Russian class at Indiana University in Bloomington, and one of my goals is to impart the very clear

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 David G. Hunter, Cottrill-Rolfes Chair of

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 

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

When the University of Kentucky established the Committee on Social Theory in 1989, it was one of the first of its kind.

The committee, in the College of Arts and Sciences, provides one of the most engaging teaching, research and learning experiences at UK, including 75 affiliated faculty from 17 departments and schools across campus. 

The 2010-2011 school year has been a record-breaking one for the Classics Division of the Department of Modern and Classical Languages, Literatures and Cultures. Four students have been recognized for their achievements: 

Rachel Philbrick, a graduate student in classics at the University of Kentucky, has been awarded one of only 33 Jacob K. Javits Fellowships from the U.S. Department of Education. The Javits Fellowship is awarded to students of superior academic ability who plan to undertake graduate study in the selected fields of arts, humanities and social sciences.

As part of the Javits Fellowship, the U.S. Department of Education awards fellowships to students on the basis of demonstrated achievement, financial need and exceptional promise. The selection is made by a panel of experts appointed by the Javits Fellowship Board. The Javits Fellowship covers study at the doctoral and Master of Fine Arts level in selected fields of arts, humanities and social sciences