At the beginning of the Fall 2011 semester, we met with all of the new faculty hires in the College of Arts and Sciences. This series of podcasts introduces them and their research interests. Steve Davis is an assistant professor in the Department of History. Davis’s area of focus is the history of South Africa, particularly the history of the anti-apartheid struggle. He examines the uses and misuses of oral history in state narratives by comparing interviews with ex-combatants with the official narratives of the state.

Alan Brown is a Spanish professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies for the Department of Hispanic Studies. In this podcast, Professor Brown discusses his new position in the department, his current research, and opportunities for students to connect to the community through the Department of Hispanic Studies.

Solar energy has been around for a while now, but John Anthony, Michel Jabbour and Chi-Sing Man are part of a team that was recently awarded a National Science Foundation grant to develop new ways to catch and convert light to electricity. Anthony, a chemist, describes the project, and his collaboration with mathematicians Jabbour and Man.

At the beginning of the Fall 2011 semester, we met with all of the new faculty hires in the College of Arts and Sciences. This series of podcasts introduces them and their research interests. Liang Liang is an assistant professor in the Department of Geography. Liang specializes in bioclimatology and landscape phenology and is particularly interested in the variations of plant life cycles across time and space. He studies how the timing of springs, such as the greening of landscapes or flowers blooming, are simple and sensitive indicators of climate change. His current research examines how genetic factors in plants and climatic factors work together to determine the timing of phenologies on a large spatial scale.

At the beginning of the Fall 2011 semester, we met with all of the new faculty hires in the College of Arts and Sciences. This series of podcasts introduces them and their research interests. Susan Odom is an assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry. Odom, an organic and materials chemist, studies lithium ion (Li-ion) batteries to try to make them safer and increase their longevity. In her lab at UK, she synthesizes organic molecules and polymers and incorporates them into Li-ion batteries to see if they improve the batteries' performance.

At the beginning of the Fall 2011 semester, we met with all of the new faculty hires in the College of Arts and Sciences. This series of podcasts introduces them and their research interests. Francis Musoni is an assistant professor in the Department of History. Musoni's area of focus is African history, particularly addressing mobility and migration in southern Africa. Currently, Musoni researches the movement of illegal migrants from Zimbabwe to South Africa.

At the beginning of the Fall 2011 semester, we met with all of the new faculty hires in the College of Arts and Sciences. This series of podcasts introduces them and their research interests. Jeremy Crampton is an associate professor in the Department of Geography. Crampton's interest is in the critical representation of space, particularly through mapping and geographic information systems (GIS). At UK, Crampton hopes to establish a critical center for GIS and associated mapping technologies.