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). 

The UK Appalachian Center is happy to welcome Dr.Bill Turner for an Appalachian Forum as part of our speaker series on Civil Rights, Labor and Environmental Social Movements in Appalachia.  Dr. Turner's talk is entitled: Been to the Mountain: Origins of the Civil Rights Movement and will be held in the Whitehall Classroom Building, Room 110 from 4:30 p.m. to 5:45 p.m. on Friday, April 24, 2015.  This is a free event, and all are welcome to meet with our guest from 6 p.m. to 7 p.m. at the UK Appalachian Center after the talk.

UK Students, Staff, and Faculty are welcome to join the UK Appalachian Center for a trip to tour the Benham Coal Museum in Benham, KY on Saturday, April 25, 2015.  The group will meet at the UK Appalachian Center (624 Maxwelton Court) to leave by bus at 8 a.m. and return to Lexington by about 8 p.m.  This tour is an opportunity to learn about the history of coal mining in eastern, KY through exhibits on company towns, viewing a mine portal, and hearing from scholars including Dr. Bill Turner on life in Benham and Lynch, KY throughout time.  This is a free event, and we will accommodate as many as we can!  Please RSVP by email to erin.norton@uky.edu to reserve a space on the bus by Thursday, April 16, 2015. (Please, send 1 RSVP per email.)

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Will Shafer will be presenting an exit seminar titled Investigation into the Competitive Partitioning of Dissociated H2 and D2 on Activated Fischer-Tropsch Catalysts.

Abstract: Fischer-Tropsch (FT) synthesis is a complex catalytic process by which stoichiometric amounts of H2 and CO are converted into hydrocarbons [1]. Though the process has been known and utilized for close to 90 years, the mechanism occurring on the catalyst is still under scrutiny. While some authors prefer a CH2 insertion mechanism [2] and others claim a CO insertion mechanism [3], more draw the mechanism through an enol, by addition through condensation. Controversy has also arisen in the mechanism where certain academics have argued that if CH2 insertion was the favored mechanism, then no oxygenated material could be produced. From this controversy, Dry et al. [4] argued for a mechanism that involves both CH2 and CO as active surface intermediates. Since the rate-determining step remains a point of contention, a number of H2¬/D2 studies have been performed, unfortunately, with no clear conclusion. Most of these studies have examined replacing H2 with D2 ¬in the syngas over Ru [5, 6], Co [7, 8, 9], and Fe [7, 9] catalysts during F-T. However results for these experiments have varied with some displaying an inverse kinetic effect and others have displayed none. This work examines whether preferential partitioning of either H or D on activated FT metals occur; as this could be the reason why so much confusion has arisen in the kinetic isotopic switching experiments with H2 and D2.