"Drusilla Dunjee Houston: Matriarch in the West" Thursday Feb.17 at 6:30 pm ET via zoom

Join us this Thursday, February 17 at 6:30 PM ET via zoom for our second lecture in the Bluegrass Classics Lecture Series, Drusilla Dunjee Houston: Matriarch of the West. Dr. Peggy Brooks Bertram shares with us her experiences learning and writing about this almost forgotten figure of African American History. The author of "The Wonderful Ethiopians of the Cushite Empire" (1924). This lecture has been generously sponsored by the Gaines Humanities Center and is part of the 2022 Mini Grant Series. To register: https://uky.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZIkdeytrjksGdx_1jxT7sFP6cuHWma_XGFj

Dunstan is the NCSU Assistant Director of the Office of Assessment. Her research examines dialect as an element of diversity that shapes the college experience, particularly for speakers of non-standardized dialects of English. Dunstan and Jaeger (2015) found that students from rural, Southern Appalachia felt that their use of a regional dialect put them at a disadvantage in the college classroom. The students interviewed by Dunstan reported that “they had been hesitant to speak in class, felt singled out, dreaded oral presentations, tried to change the way they talked, and felt that they had to work harder to earn the respect of faculty and peers”. In addition to speaking about her work with Appalachian college students, Dunstan would accompany members of the Department of Linguistics to a meeting with the UK office of Academic and Student Affairs to discuss how to meet the needs of all UK students, regardless of linguistic background.

This talk is made possible by generous support from our friends in Modern and Classical Languages, Literatures and Cultures; English; Gender and Women’s studies; Sociology; Writing, Rhetoric and Digital Studies; African American and Africana Studies; and the College of Arts and Sciences.

Heartbreak and HIstory: Mourning the Devastation of Notre-Dame

Monday, April 22nd, 12:30 to 2:00, Room 330D, Gatton Student Center

On Monday, April 22nd, UK faculty, students, and community members are invited to join us for a public forum to share our sorrow and concern about the devastation caused to one of the world's great religious and cultural monuments, the Cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris, France.  Presentations will discuss the religious and artistic significance of Notre-Dame, the challenges involved in its restoration, and campus community members' personal memories of the cathedral.

Sponsored by the College of Arts and Sciences, Departments of HIstory, Modern and Classical Languages, Literatures and Cultures, and Department of Historic Preservation.

For more information, contact Professor Jeremy Popkin, Department of History, popkin@uky.edu

Virgil, Wordsworth and the anxieties of translation:  literalism, lake poetry and lyric revision

Stephen Hinds (University of Washington, Seattle)

In his current book project, Poetry across Languages: Studies in Transliteral and Transcultural Latin, Stephen Hinds moves between periods to explore the cross-linguistic and intercultural relations of poetic writing in Latin within antiquity, between antiquity and modernity, and even within modernity.  Throughout, he is concerned to treat the ‘classical tradition’ as process rather than as product, involving many micro-negotiations of authors and readers across language and culture.

William Wordsworth (1770-1850), who in his fifties began and then abandoned a translation of the Aeneid, had a long and sometimes anxious history of engagement with the classical tradition.  The ebb and flow of that engagement can be dramatized by sampling (via the monumental Cornell edition of Wordsworth) the poet’s own first drafts, revisions and deletions, and the editorial and commentatorial interventions of friends and family.  After a look at some moments in Wordsworth’s Aeneid (vigorously criticized by his great contemporary Samuel Taylor Coleridge), this paper focusses on the post-Virgilian Laodamia and, more briefly, on the Greek-inspired Dion (grounded in one of Plutarch’s Lives).  Trace-elements of Wordsworth’s distinctive poetic of lake and landscape will come into play at different points throughout.