2025 GAINES LECTURE FOR OUTSTANDING RESEARCH IN THE HUMANITIES

Join the UK Gaines Center on February 20th at 4:00PM for the inaugural Lecture for Outstanding Research in the Humanities, "Integrating the Disabled Girl, Cripping the Health Humanities," featuring Assistant Professor Anastasia Todd, in conjunction with our Year on Health and the Humanities. Register here!

Anastasia Todd is an assistant professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Kentucky. Her research is at the intersection of feminist disability studies and girlhood studies. She is the author of Cripping Girlhood (University of Michigan Press, 2024), which was awarded the 2022 Tobin Siebers Prize for Disability Studies in the Humanities. Her work has been published in Disability Studies Quarterly, Societies, NEOS, Girlhood Studies, and Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy.

Two undergraduate Modern and Classical Language, Literatures, and Cultures majors, Andrew Chan and Grace Yi, will be presenting at the annual meeting for the Southeast Conference of the Association for Asian Studies, which UK is hosting this year. Their presentations will be in the morning of Sunday, January 26, 10:45am-12:15pm at the Gatton Student Center (room TBD), in a panel titled “Conflict and Resistance in Global Asias".

Global Asias Program is sponsoring two panels (eight students) for this annual meeting. Each student is being mentored by a faculty member. All students will also receive a group mentoring session led by Emily Mokros and Joannah Peterson (MCLLC) to familiarize themselves with academic conference presentations.

Global Asias and Asian Film (Sunday, January 26, 9:00-10:30am)

Chair: Akiko Takenaka
Discussant: Michelle Sizemore

• Nate Barker, "Discomforting Realities: The Case of Fan Lixin's Last Train Home" (mentor: Miyabi Goto)
• Maire Birdwell, "Capturing Reality: Ashes to Honey and the Influence of Documentaries on Environmentalist Movements in Japan and Beyond" (mentor: Miyabi Goto)
• Charlotte Lawson, “Whispers of Grief: An Analysis of the Environments in The Murmuring (1995)” (mentor: Miyabi Goto)Jessica Khoury, “Sympathy and Scorn, The Complexity of Close-Ups” (mentor: Miyabi Goto)

Conflict and Resistance in Global Asias (Sunday, January 26, 10:45am-12:15pm)

Chair: Akiko Takenaka
Discussant: Emily Mokros

• Grace Yi, “This Man is Your Friend: The Role of the American Home Front in Redefining Chinese Stereotypes During WWII” (mentor: Akiko Takenaka)
• Andrew Chan, “The Red Guard Party of San Francisco and Its Diverging Doctrine: 1969 Asian American Identity Defined by Difference” (mentor: Akiko Takenaka)
• Malissa Bouakham, “Clustered Legacy: The Developmental Consequences of UXO in Laos” (mentor: Marro Inoue)
• Jeff Edwards, “Dressing for a Gendered Reality: Androgynous Dress as Resistance in Contemporary Japan” (mentor: Joannah Peterson)

Dr. Valerie Peters | Peters Lab

Bio:
Dr. Valerie Peters is an associate professor of Community Ecology in the Department of Biological Sciences at Eastern Kentucky University. Her research focuses in the areas of agroecology, conservation biology, insect community ecology, plant-animal interactions and tropical ecology. Dr. Peters current research is supported by an NSF CAREER grant, with five years of funding to conduct research and educational outreach in Costa Rica that focuses on the conservation of >700 species of native tropical bees and the pollination services they provide. Dr. Peters is originally from Pennsylvania and graduated with her B.S. in Biology from Pennsylvania State University. After graduating, she wanted to gain a better understanding of real-world issues in conservation biology before deciding on a specific topic for her PhD research. To reach this objective, she decided to combine her passion for ecological science with poverty eradication, and worked for five years, first as an Americorps Volunteer and later, as a Peace Corps Volunteer. As a Peace Corps Volunteer, her work pioneered the successful protection of over 20,000 hectares of land leading to a reserve now known as the La Botija National Park which represents one of the few protected areas in southern Honduras. After Peace Corps, she received her PhD in Ecology from the Odum School of Ecology at the University of Georgia. Her PhD work focused on understanding how to best manage diverse coffee agroforests for bird and bee communities, and was conducted in Costa Rica with funding from the Earthwatch Institute.

Abstract:
Land-maxing in cultivated ecosystems will require a science-based selection of tree species in order for the land to be effective in achieving its multiple goals; e.g. biodiversity conservation and ecosystem integrity, alleviating malnutrition and global inequalities of wealth, and the mitigation of climate change. Plant species are not all equivalent in the number of species they support, and land managers have hundreds or thousands of plant species to choose among. The analysis of ecological networks can be used to quantitatively identify species that are posited to have the strongest impacts on network structure and stability based on their topological role. Once identified, experimental tests of these species’ efficacy in conservation and restoration applications are needed to confirm theory. 

Tropical bees and the pollination services they provide are a critical conservation target yet remain relatively understudied. We empirically quantified tropical bee/butterfly-plant and bee-plant interaction networks and identified the topological roles of all plant species. These networks were constructed across home gardens in a lowland tropical rain forest life zone (years 2017-2019), in 10 agroforestry systems in a tropical premontane life zone (year 2022), and across 30 home gardens spanning an elevational gradient from 200-1500m elevation encompassing three life zones: tropical dry forest, tropical premontane and tropical montane (year 2023). Plant species identified as holding core topological roles from these previous studies are now planted in an experimental restoration study, with data expected to be collected over the next two years.

Watch the seminar here!

Dr. Denis Walsh

Bio:
Denis Walsh is Professor in the Department of Philosophy and the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Toronto. He completed a PhD in Biology at McGill University, Montreal and a PhD in Philosophy at Kings College, University of London. He is author of Organisms, Agency and Evolution (2105 Cambridge University Press)

Abstract:
Philosophers of biology and evolutionary biologists have recently begun to propound the view that organisms are agents and that understanding their agency should have a substantial impact on our understanding of the dynamics of evolution. This suggestion has been met with a fair degree of scepticism and consternation. The objective of this talk is to offer an overview of organismal agency. Questions to be discussed include: In what sense are organisms agents? In what ways might organismal agency alter our conception of evolution? How does organismal agency relate to proposals for an extended evolutionary synthesis? Is the agential perspective consistent with gene-centred modern synthesis thinking about evolution?

Watch the seminar here!