Dear GWS students, faculty, and friends,

On Monday May 4, 2015, from 3:00-4:30, GWS will host a tribute to Dr. Jan Oaks, followed by a reception from 4:30-5:00 at the Commonwealth House (part of the Gaines Center) at 226 East Maxwell Street.  We are hoping that you will join us for this celebration and acknowledgement of Jan’s life and her generous contributions to students, colleagues, and the university. We would also like to invite you to participate in this tribute by sharing your memories, stories, or thoughts about Jan. We would like to post them, with your permission, on our GWS website. We plan to finalize our program for the tribute byThursday, April 30, so please send us your remembrances to Michelle Del Toro at michelle.deltoro@uky.edu by then, and let us know if you would like to read them at the tribute or have someone read them for you. Your participation would be greatly appreciated. We will also announce the details about donating to the GWS Jan Oaks Award Fund for undergraduates that we are establishing.

Following the reception, we will hold our annual end-of- the- year awards ceremony from 5:00-6:30 and we hope you will join us for that event as well.

Please feel free to circulate this invitation widely. We hope to see you on May 4^th.

The College of Arts and Sciences will present the faculty and teaching awards for the past year on April 22 from 4:00-5:30 in the WT Young Library Auditorium. A reception will follow.  

The recipients of this year's College faculty awards are:

• Beth Guiton, chemisty - Undergraduate Mentoring
• Shaunna Scott, sociology - Distinguished Service or Engagement
• Joseph Straley, physics & astronomy - Distinguished Service or Engagement
• Christia Brown, psychology - Diversity and Inclusion
• Joseph Brill, physics & astronomy - Graduate Mentoring
• Thomas Janoski, sociology - Graduate Mentoring
• Linda Worley, modern & classical languages, literatures & cultures - Graduate Mentoring

The recipeints of this year's College teaching awards are:

• Renee Fatemi, physics & sstronomy - Outstanding Teaching Award
• Moisés Castillo, hispanic studies - Outstanding Teaching Award
• Charley Carlson, psychology - Outstanding Teaching Award
• Anna Voskresensky, modern & classical languages, literatures & cultures -  Outstanding Teaching Award
• Michelle Sizemore, English - Teaching in Large Classes
• Ruth Brown, hispanic studies - Innovative Teaching

Writings composed to reveal and denounce the defects and crimes of women was a recognized genre in the Middle Ages, and it generated both amusement and dismay. While the intertextual richness of misogynous writing has long been established, these texts don’t just faithfully parrot each other—they often play on each other to subversive effect. I’ll look at several French and Italian texts that aren’t so well known even in medieval French and Italian studies, and show how they interact in unexpected ways to nuance their misogynous claims. I’ll also spend some time on modern misogynous genres, surprisingly (if unintentionally) faithful to their medieval antecedents. 

F. Regina Psaki is the Giustina Family Professor of Italian Language and Literature at the University of Oregon. She publishes on Boccaccio, Dante, and medieval courtly genres, translating chivalric romances from French and Italian: Il Tristano Riccardiano (2006),Le Roman de la Rose ou de Guillaume de Dole (1995), and Le Roman de Silence (1991). With Gloria Allaire she co-edited The Arthur of the Italians (2014); with Thomas C. Stillinger she co-edited Boccaccio and Feminist Criticism (2006).

Her current project, The Traffic in Talk About Women: Misogyny and Philogyny in the Middle Ages, explores the lively medieval genres of anti-woman diatribes and defenses of women and shows the range of opinion in medieval writers on the nature and behavior of women (and, in some cases, of men).