A discussion led by Dr. Erika Lee on the history of xenophobia in the U.S., based on her book, America for Americans: A History of Xenophobia in the United States

Registration required to attend:

https://uky.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_NLPNRefEQiOPxnaaPwp1tg

Erika Lee is vice president of the Organization of American Historians and a Regents Professor, Distinguished McKnight University Professor, the Rudolph J. Vecoli Chair in Immigration History, and director of the Immigration History Research Center at the University of Minnesota. She is an active public intellectual who is a sought-after speaker in the media, nationally and internationally. She’s the author or co-author of award-winning books in U.S. immigration and Asian American history, including “America for Americans”; “The Making of Asian America: A History”; “Angel Island: Immigrant Gateway to America” with Judy Yung; and “At America's Gates: Chinese Immigration during the Exclusion Era, 1882–1943.”

This is the opening program for the Commonwealth Institute for Black Studies at the University of Kentucky. This major inaugural event will feature an address from Henry Louis “Skip” Gates, Jr., the American literary critic, professor, filmmaker, public intellectual, and host of "Finding Your Roots," a groundbreaking genealogy series on PBS. He also serves as the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University.

The Commonwealth Institute for Black Studies is a multidisciplinary research institute housed in the College of Arts & Sciences' Department of African American and Africana Studies (AAAS). It is a cutting-edge research think tank for Black Studies research, including issues of race and racism. 

Register Here

An Evening with Poet Li-Young Lee: April 8, 2021 @ 7pm

Li-Young Lee is the author of five books of poetry, including his newest collection, The Undressing which is forthcoming in 2018. His earlier collections are Behind My Eyes; Book of My Nights; Rose, winner of the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award; The City in Which I Love You, the 1990 Lamont Poetry Selection; and a memoir entitled The Winged Seed: A Remembrance, which received an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation and will be reissued by BOA Editions in 2012. Lee’s honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Lannan Foundation, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, as well as grants from the Illinois Arts Council, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.

Event co-sponsored by the Confucius Institute and the Gaines Center

Check out his Poetry Foundation feature for poems and more information: 

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/li-young-lee

(registration link below)

https://uky.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_H4mH8o1PTrChwbSjjpKr9A

An Evening with Madeline Ffitch: March 25, 2021 @ 7pm

Madeline Ffitch writes and organizes in Appalachian Ohio. She was a founding member of the punk theater company, The Missoula Oblongata, and is the author of the story collection, Valparaiso, Round the Horn. Madeline has been awarded residencies at Yaddo and at the MacDowell Colony. She is the author of Stay and Fight from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Check out more of her writings on her website: 

https://www.madelineffitch.com/stories

(registration link below)

https://uky.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_0LIsHzHFQeCdyU65kh8jVQ

We cannot understand where humanity has been and where we are going without Black Studies.



The newly established Commonwealth Institute for Black Studies is a multidisciplinary institute that is a think tank for Black Studies research, including issues of race and racism. Housed in the College of Arts & Sciences' African American and Africana Studies (AAAS) program, the multidisciplinary institute will establish research clusters across campus and promote UK's growing research and scholarship on topics of importance to global and local histories, such as race in the Americas, African cultures and global impact of Black people from antiquity to the future. Many of the research clusters are concerned with conceptions of race in the future, contemporary conceptions of race, slavery and the quest for freedom, the long legacy of racial discrimination and violence including the struggle for civil rights.



Join Anastasia Curwood, history professor and director of the AAAS program, and DaMaris Hill, English professor and interim director of the AAAS program through spring 2021, in conversation with A&S Interim Dean Christian Brady as they discuss immediate and long-term plans for the Institute.

Register Here