Events, Interests, and Announcements

See today’s UK Now story..  With awards ranging between $2,500 and $5,000, the ISA-UK Education Abroad Diversity Scholarship is available to qualified students who contribute to UK's overall interest in diversity.

Date: 09/05/2014 - 12:00pm to 2:00pm

Location: Martin Luther King Center (Student Center)

AAAS presents the Carter G. Woodson Lectures Series. 

DaMaris Hill, Assistant Professor of Creative Writing and African American and Africana Studies, will read an excerpt from her novel Willows in the Spring.

https://www.facebook.com/events/666344043462247/

“We Wear the Mask: Black Superheroes Through the Ages”   Sep 6, 2014 – Jan 3, 2015

This exhibit at the Lyric Theater and Cultural Center features a comprehensive timeline highlighting the history of black superheroes illustrated with framed posters, original art, comic books and action figures from the private collection of Frank X Walker & his son Taajwar D’Van Howard. 

Date: 09/12/2014 - 3:30pm to 5:00pm

Location: 238 Classroom Building

Speaker / Presenter: Rashad Shabazz

This talk examines the articulation of carceral power in the kitchenettes and the impact it had on identity formation.  I demonstrate this by highlighting how carceral power was expressed in the geography of kitchenettes.  Kitchenettes were small, tight, cramped spaces that many Black migrants were forced to live in once they arrived to Chicago.  I argue that the expression of police power that was operating in the Black Belt migrated into the homes of Black migrants.  Though not actual prisons, kitchenettes were amenable to the expression of carceral power—particularly containment and restriction—present throughout the Black Belt.  Kitchenettes absorbed the exercise of police power that functioned in the general space of the Black Belt and brought it closer to the skin. https://aaas.as.uky.edu/rashad-shabazz-our-prison-kitchenettes-carceral-power-and-black-masculinity-during-interwar-years

Date: 09/08/2014 - 7:00pm to 8:00pm

Location: MLK Center

Speaker / Presenter:  Michael Twitty

Michael W. Twitty is a recognized culinary historian and independent scholar focusing on historic African American food and folk culture and culinary traditions of historic Africa and her Diaspora. He is a living history interpreter and historic chef, one of the few recognized international experts of his craft— the re-construction of early Southern cuisine as prepared by enslaved African American cooks for tables high and low—from heirloom seeds and heritage breed animals to fish, game, and foraged plant foods to historic cooking methods to the table. He is webmaster of www.Afroculinaria.com, the first website/blog devoted to the preservation of historic African American foods and foodways. He has conducted over 200 classes and workshops, written curricula and educational programs, giving lectures and performed cooking demonstrations for over 100 groups including the Smithsonian Institution, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, Carnegie-Mellon, Thomas Jefferson's Monticello, Library of Congress, the Association for the Study of Food and Society and Oxford University's Symposium on Food and Cookery. https://aaas.as.uky.edu/michael-twitty-kosher-soul-presentation-0

Date: 09/17/2014 - 4:00pm to 6:00pm

Location: William T. Young Library

Speaker / Presenter:  Ezra Greenspan

Writing African American Biography:

The Case of William Wells Brown, Kentuckian
Sept 17, 2014 at 4pm in the William T. Young Library https://aaas.as.uky.edu/writing-african-american-biography-case-william-wells-brown-kentuckian-1

Date:  09/22/2014 - 2:00pm to 4:00pm

Location: Niles Gallery

Speaker / Presenter: Diana Ferrus

Diana Ferrus is a South African writer, poet and cultural activist of mixed Khoisan and slave ancestry. Diana gained international recognition for her poem "For Sarah Baartman," which played a role in the French government’s decision to return the remains of Sarah Baartman to South Africa. Ferrus is a founder of the Afrikaans Skrywersvereniging (ASV), Bush Poets,(all women poets) and Women in Xchains(grassroots women writers). Her publishing company, Diana Ferrus Publishers, in association with the University of the Western Cape, has published life stories of former South African activists. Her most recent book is "I've Come To Take You Home. https://aaas.as.uky.edu/writing-poetry-has-allowed-me-live-cultural-resistance-south-africa

Please Introduce Yourself

from http://beyblade.wikia.com/wiki/File:Hello_my_name_is_sticker_by_trexweb1.jpg

My Name by Sandra Cisneros

In English my name means hope. In Spanish it means too many letters. It means sadness, it means waiting. It is like the number nine. A muddy color. It is the Mexican records my father plays on Sunday mornings when he is shaving, songs like sobbing.

It was my great-grandmother's name and now it is mine. She was a horse woman too, born like me in the Chinese year of the horse--which is supposed to be bad luck if you're born female-but I think this is a Chinese lie because the Chinese, like the Mexicans, don't like their women strong.

My great-grandmother. I would've liked to have known her, a wild, horse of a woman, so wild she wouldn't marry. Until my great-grandfather threw a sack over her head and carried her off. Just like that, as if she were a fancy chandelier. That's the way he did it.

And the story goes she never forgave him. She looked out the window her whole life, the way so many women sit their sadness on an elbow. I wonder if she made the best with what she got or was she sorry because she couldn't be all the things she wanted to be. Esperanza. I have inherited her name, but I don't want to inherit her place by the window.

At school they say my name funny as if the syllables were made out of tin and hurt the roof of your mouth. But in Spanish my name is made out of a softer something, like silver, not quite as thick as sister's name Magdalena--which is uglier than mine. Magdalena who at least- -can come home and become Nenny. But I am always Esperanza. I would like to baptize myself under a new name, a name more like the real me, the one nobody sees. Esperanza as Lisandra or Maritza or Zeze the X. Yes. Something like Zeze the X will do.

Poet Nikky Finney 2011 National Book Award Winner

Greetings, AAS 200.

In 2011, former University of Kentucky Professor and Poet, Nikky Finney won the National Book Award for Poetry. The title of her award winning book is Head Off & Split.

We will discuss Professor Finney's speech in class.  

If you have additional considerations, comments or questions, please post them on our blog.    Be sure to sign in.  The sign in is located in the upper right hand corner of the blog. 

See you soon.

Dr. Hill 

Apps for Class

from http://www.menshealth.co.uk/living/gear/upgrade-your-life-with-apps

Greetings, Students.

We will be using mobile and computer apps (applications)  in our physical and digital classroom environment to help us organize research and original ideas.  We will also be using apps to present information. 

Apps are extremely convenient.  They allow you to access information when one wants to from a phone, ipad, and other digital devices.  Apps are also convenient because one can access an app without being tied to a computer. 

Over the course of the semester, we will be using a number of apps.   They are:

Diigo – www.diigo.com 

Ever Note – www.evernote.com

Aurasma - http://www.aurasma.com

Popplet – www.popplet.com

Please take a moment to explore the apps.  Brainstorm about how you may use them in your academic endeavors.

Sincerely, 

Dr. Hill