How many languages do you speak? Benjamin Kinsella is fluent in English, speaks Spanish, and now also knows touch of Guaraní. He graduated from UK in December of 2012, and worked with Professor Haralambos Symeonidis of the Hispanic Studies Department on a linguistic atlas project, Atlas Lingüístico Guaraní-Románico.
Widely seen as a life-changing experience, education abroad has been perceived as one with added financial burden. However, Education Abroad at UK is seeking to dispel the myth that money is necessarily an obstacle; rather, they want students to know money does not have to be a barrier.
Annual Luckens Prize Lecture in Jewish Studies
Tania Tulcin, Yeshiva University
"Looking Down from the 'Tip of the Yud': Judah Leib Gordon's Critique of Rabbinic Culture in Late Imperial Russia."
Monday, January 28, 2013
7:00 pm
W.T. Young Library, Auditorium
The Mark and Ruth Luckens International Prize for Jewish Thought & Culture: The Luckens Prize is awarded to the best unpublished original essay by a graduate student or recent PhD. The Luckens Prize is administered by the University of Kentucky Jewish Studies Program and carries a prize of $1000, made possible by a generous gift from the late Dr. Mark Luckens.
Most of us heard that the world was going to possibly end on December 21st, 2012, and that it was predicted by the traditional Mayan calendar. In this podcast, Rusty Barrett, a linguist and scholar of Mayan culture and history, explains the superstitions and misunderstandings surrounding December 21st, and a little bit about how the Mayan calendar works.
Wednesday December 5, 2012 at 4.30 at Niles Gallery Benjamin Kinsella, will present his undergraduate Honors Thesis and share the results of his research on the use of prepositions in Spanish with the movement verb ir. (see attached poster)
Based on the data of the ALGR (Guarani-Romance Linguistic Atlas) and under the supervision of Prof. Haralambos Symeonidis, Kinsella has identified evidence of the influence of Guarani on Spanish/Portuguese in the Guaranitic area in South America and for the first time presents his original research on linguistic maps.
The presentation will be in Spanish.
Gwendolyn Schaefer knew she wanted to study abroad in the Middle East, but the Arab Spring presented a potential threat to her personal security. Her first two choices were Egypt and Syria, but both were deep in the throes of political unrest. Eventually, she landed in Amman, Jordan through Education Abroad at UK with AMIDEAST.
Israel’s democracy has been often described in academic literature as “unique”, “extreme” or “a significant exception”. Nevertheless it is almost impossible to properly understand the Israeli political experience without recourse to comparative research. In this talk, Harel-Shalev analyzes minority-majority relations in Israel by comparing Israel to other deeply divided societies that have chosen to pursue the democratic path. The lecture will analyze strategies that divided democracies utilize to cope with the complexities of minority-majority relations, while sustaining democratic processes, in the face of religious, ethnic, and national conflicts. Specifically the lecture will focus on the Arab minority in Israel and compare it to other homeland minorities in deeply divided societies, including the Muslim Minority in India, the Albanian minority in Macedonia, the Turkish minority in Cyprus, and the Tamil minority in Sri-Lanka.
Harel-Shalev is the author of The Challenge of Sustaining Democracy in Deeply Divided Societies - Citizenship, Rights, and Ethnic Conflicts in India and Israel - Lexington, 2010. Her book has won the Israeli Political Science Association (ISPSA) prize for the best book of 2010. A second edition of the book is about to be published in India by Foundation Books and Cambridge University Press, India, 2012/2013. Harel-Shalev specializes in Comparative political studies; Ethnic conflicts; Gender studies; Indian politics and society; and - Israeli politics and society.
Fall of 2012 was the perfect time to conduct a class about American electoral politics - so it was taken up as the topic for Currents, a class offered to incoming Freshmen. The course explores the 2012 election from a variety of academic perspectives - including, but not limited to, philosophy, economics, history, and, of course, political science. In this podcast, five Currents students shared their experiences with the class.
Hanks' presentation will focus on the role that hyper-nationalism has played in archaeology since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The speaker has been leading collaborative field research since 2005 with several Russian universities at Bronze Age (2100-1700 BCE) sites in the Southern Ural Mountains region. These sites, and the archaeological evidence associated with them, have become a popular resource for what has emerged as a dynamic socio-political discourse on the prehistoric and mythic past (proto-Slavs and Indo-Aryans). Such views contrast sharply with the archaeological evidence from recent field research. The important question of how these issues may continue to influence politicized perspectives of the past, and the negative effect this may have on programs of education and cultural heritage, will be examined.
Houle's presentation will examine ethnographic and archaeological data gathered this past summer in the Altai region of western Mongolia and contrasting this with data from the Khanuy Valley region of north-central Mongolia, the region he worked in previously.
