POSTPONED

Kiese Laymon is the Libbie Shearn Moody Professor of English and Creative Writing at Rice University. Laymon is the author of "Long Division," which won the 2022 NAACP Image Award for fiction, and the essay collection "How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America," named a notable book of 2021 by the New York Times.

Laymon’s bestselling "Heavy: An American Memoir," won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, the Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose, the Barnes and Noble Discovery Award and the Austen Riggs Erikson Prize for Excellence in Mental Health Media. It was named one of the 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years by The New York Times. The audiobook, read by the author, was named the Audible 2018 Audiobook of the Year. 

Laymon is the recipient of 2020-2021 Radcliffe Fellowship at Harvard. Laymon is at work on the books "Good God" and "City Summer, Country Summer" and a number of other film and television projects. He is the founder of The Catherine Coleman Literary Arts and Justice Initiative, a program based out of the Margaret Walker Center at Jackson State University. The program helps young people in Jackson grow more comfortable with reading, writing, revising and sharing their work. He is the co-host of Reckon True Stories with Deesha Philyaw. Kiese Laymon was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2022.

2025 GAINES LECTURE FOR OUTSTANDING RESEARCH IN THE HUMANITIES

Join the UK Gaines Center on February 20th at 4:00PM for the inaugural Lecture for Outstanding Research in the Humanities, "Integrating the Disabled Girl, Cripping the Health Humanities," featuring Assistant Professor Anastasia Todd, in conjunction with our Year on Health and the Humanities. Register here!

Anastasia Todd is an assistant professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Kentucky. Her research is at the intersection of feminist disability studies and girlhood studies. She is the author of Cripping Girlhood (University of Michigan Press, 2024), which was awarded the 2022 Tobin Siebers Prize for Disability Studies in the Humanities. Her work has been published in Disability Studies Quarterly, Societies, NEOS, Girlhood Studies, and Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy.

Two undergraduate Modern and Classical Language, Literatures, and Cultures majors, Andrew Chan and Grace Yi, will be presenting at the annual meeting for the Southeast Conference of the Association for Asian Studies, which UK is hosting this year. Their presentations will be in the morning of Sunday, January 26, 10:45am-12:15pm at the Gatton Student Center (room TBD), in a panel titled “Conflict and Resistance in Global Asias".

Global Asias Program is sponsoring two panels (eight students) for this annual meeting. Each student is being mentored by a faculty member. All students will also receive a group mentoring session led by Emily Mokros and Joannah Peterson (MCLLC) to familiarize themselves with academic conference presentations.

Global Asias and Asian Film (Sunday, January 26, 9:00-10:30am)

Chair: Akiko Takenaka
Discussant: Michelle Sizemore

• Nate Barker, "Discomforting Realities: The Case of Fan Lixin's Last Train Home" (mentor: Miyabi Goto)
• Maire Birdwell, "Capturing Reality: Ashes to Honey and the Influence of Documentaries on Environmentalist Movements in Japan and Beyond" (mentor: Miyabi Goto)
• Charlotte Lawson, “Whispers of Grief: An Analysis of the Environments in The Murmuring (1995)” (mentor: Miyabi Goto)Jessica Khoury, “Sympathy and Scorn, The Complexity of Close-Ups” (mentor: Miyabi Goto)

Conflict and Resistance in Global Asias (Sunday, January 26, 10:45am-12:15pm)

Chair: Akiko Takenaka
Discussant: Emily Mokros

• Grace Yi, “This Man is Your Friend: The Role of the American Home Front in Redefining Chinese Stereotypes During WWII” (mentor: Akiko Takenaka)
• Andrew Chan, “The Red Guard Party of San Francisco and Its Diverging Doctrine: 1969 Asian American Identity Defined by Difference” (mentor: Akiko Takenaka)
• Malissa Bouakham, “Clustered Legacy: The Developmental Consequences of UXO in Laos” (mentor: Marro Inoue)
• Jeff Edwards, “Dressing for a Gendered Reality: Androgynous Dress as Resistance in Contemporary Japan” (mentor: Joannah Peterson)