One of the most respected American scholarly authority on Islam, John L. Esposito, will visit the University of Kentucky Wednesday to discuss “The Future of Islam: Assessing the Elements of Reform, Revival, and Fundamentalism in the Muslim World.” The community is invited to attend his presentation at 6:30 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 10, at the Singletary Center Recital Hall.
Lucy Combs and the University of Kentucky were intertwined like few others have ever been, or will ever be. Lucy was an alum of UK and she worked for the university for 45 dedicated years.
Two faculty members in the Department of English have been honored with named professorships.
Join us for the second episode of Office Hours, where we talk to Professor Peggy Keller about school start times, sleep schedules and academic achievement, and Professor Kevin Holm-Hudson about the history of progressive rock. Office Hours is produced by the College of Arts & Sciences and airs on WRFL FM 88.1 every Wednesday from 2-3 p.m.
This podcast was produced by Cheyenne Hohman.
Explaining and understanding Earth surface systems almost always requires some triangulation between three different sets of factors. The first, examples of which are shown on the lower left corner of the triangle below, are general principles and relationships that apply everywhere and always. Second, on the upper point, are environmental factors--characteristics of locations and regions such as climate, geology, etc. On the lower right of the triangle is the third set of factors, related to past events and time available for the system to develop.
This can be generalized as laws, place, and history, as shown below. 
Yesterday I was honored to give the annual Linton Award lecture to the British Society for Geomorphology at the University of Manchester. Many thanks to the BSG for making my attendance possible, and to the U. Manchester geography department for putting on a good meeting. This is the abstract of my talk, entitled Badass Geomorphology:
A briefing and geopolitical account by a former Peace Corps volunteer in Ukraine. Gwen Schaefer, a recent graduate of the University of Kentucky, was deployed to Ukraine this year when Corps personnel were directed to leave the country as the political situation deteriorated. The developments over the summer after she left the county will also be adressed. Schaefer will be starting a new Peace Corps mission to Macedonia in September.
Yesterday I heard a very interesting river restoration workshop at the British Society for Geomorphology meeting. What I’m about to discuss was not the focus of the workshop, but it was triggered by thinking about geomorphology, hydrology, and river science in stream rehabilitation and restoration, which is a big business now.
The stream restoration problem is often portrayed as something like this:
That is, the stream is currently in some kind of degraded, suboptimal, unwanted state. The goal is to restore it to a “natural” or some more desired condition, often conceived as whatever the stream was like before the degradation commenced. There are a number of problems with this, one being that in many cases the pre-existing state is not known. Even if it is, since rivers—like other landforms and ecosystems—are dynamic and changeable, there is no particular scientific reason to believe that, in the absence of human-driven changes, the river would still be now as it was decades ago.
