Gaines Center Spring 2024 Newsletter

GAINES CENTER for the HUMANITIES

Spring 2024

IN THIS ISSUE 3

Letter from the Gaines Director

6

The Monsters & Myths of Substance Abuse: An Exhibit

11

The 2024 Breathitt Lecture with Joshua Cola

13

Celebrating our Seniors: Gaines Class of 2024

27

The 2024 Lafayette Seminar: Myths, Monsters, and the Metaphysical

30

The 2024 New York Art Experience!

44

Making the Humanities Hands-On: The Gaines’ Humanities Laboratory

46

Unwrapping the Humanities: Alumni Spotlight on Stephen Parsons

53

Save the Date: Announcing the 2024 Bale Boone Symposium

54

Remembering Whitney Hale

Cover photo: Kate Walker interacts with Danica Hak’s set design at “Resonance,” a dance performance designed and choreographed by Danica. Both are senior fellows.

This page: Junior and senior fellows and alumni at the 21C Museum Hotel gallery in Cincinnati during a field trip to visit their “Super Natural” exhibit

Letter from the

GAINES DIRECTOR Dear Friends of Gaines, My year as Director of the Gaines Center is drawing to a close and this is my last note to you. Our most exiting year-end news is the announcement of Dr. Michelle Sizemore as the new Director. She noted at our Board meeting last week that this is her “dream job.” It is a testimony to our success here on Maxwell Street that there was an exceptional short list of candidates presented to the Provost. I am looking forward to handing over the reins to Dr. Sizemore as soon as possible. The Provost has arranged for us to overlap in June and Chelsea, Catherine and I are eagerly anticipating the transition and the start of a new era (each of us for slightly different reasons, I expect!).

I will leave it to the newsletter to detail all the accomplishments of the Spring semester. There were two highlights for me. The first was the Junior fellows’ project on The Monsters and Myths of Substance Abuse. They advertised widely on campus and off to solicit “stories” about addiction and recovery that ranged from creative pieces to social science research. The resulting ensemble is open for viewing in the Commonwealth House through May 28th. It is an intensely moving set of statements that I encourage you to visit. The second was the time I spent participating in all twelve Senior “thesis defenses.” I went in as a skeptic regarding the value of the thesis in the 21st century.

How wrong I was! It was only my idea of a thesis that was outdated. The presentations by the Senior fellows gave meaning to the value of interdisciplinary, humanities informed, creative scholarship. I won’t tell you my favorite here, but I can be bribed in person!

At this point, I want to share with you some of the comments I made to our UK Humanities Foundation Board last week, reflecting on my year here, recounting the year’s successes, and looking toward the future. I have learned that the Gaines Program and the Gaines Center are thriving. Our programs, events, and student achievements are numerous and impressive. I know that for most of you the focus and raison d’etre for our work here is the students and the Fellowship. That is clear and a given. But I also want to remind you of the importance of the Gaines Center as a site of humanities support and humanities outreach at UK. It makes me proud every time I see our logo on an interesting event on campus because we have been able to provide a little funding. Or to see my colleagues from across campus using our buildings for meetings,

classes, events, recitals, exhibits, and retreats. In a more instrumental sense, we fill a humanities niche on campus and in the community that is needed and appreciated. And the incredible performance of our students coupled with this outreach redounds to our reputation and, importantly, our support in (and for) the University and the community.

In a more instrumental calculation, and as a reformed administrator, I also think it is ever important for our University and community friends and partners, and especially the Provost’s office (which provides a significant portion of our operating budget), to literally see us. The more of a visible support base we can create in the University and in the community the better off we will be and the more good we can do. And to be honest, it does not cost very much. We can support everything we do in this realm for ten years for the cost of one lab startup in a bench science. Catherine and I did some seat-of-the pants accounting on the number of people we reached, who helped us, who got money from us, who taught for us, who used our spaces this year alone. Here are our figures: General community members involved in the Bale Boone and Breathitt Lectures, the Junior’s addiction exhibit, and the Lafayette Seminar (1,500); Faculty who served on thesis committees and as our faculty of record all for the cost of a mug (82); Faculty who taught for us for nominal cost (10); Mini-grant recipients (ranging from $500-$1500), many of whom had programs serving many others, and posters advertising our support (17); and finally the hundreds of University colleagues who used our facilities, from (at least) Archaeology, Math, Music, Fine Arts, Gender and Women’s Studies, Social Theory, History, Geography, the Writing Center, the Kentucky Foreign Language Conference, English, Religion, Ed Policy, and more. I think of all those connections as the roots of Gaines in the University and the community, deeply entangled with our intellectual enterprise and flowering in our programs, our projects, and most importantly in the incredible accomplishments of our students.

And finally, I can’t leave without thanking all of you out there for your support of the Gaines Center and the Gaines Fellowship Program. We know we could not do any of this without your support. I look forward to hearing about your continued support and all the good things that will be taking place under our new Director.

Three directors, three cohorts, and several alums enjoyed our senior scarf ceremony and annual picnic

The Monsters & Myths of Substance Abuse

an interdisciplinary exhibit imagined, created, and curated by the Gaines junior fellows

During the spring semester, visitors to Gaines’ Commonwealth House experienced a moving, emotional, and comprehensive exhibit highlighting stories of addiction and recovery related to drugs and alcohol: the product of the Gaines junior community engagement (jury) project.

Born out of conversations surrounding ethical ways to engage with the broader community, and made possible by a competitive grant from the Women in Philanthropy, the “Monsters and Myths of Substance Abuse” exhibit was entirely student directed. While Gaines staff provided oversight where appropriate, the fellows managed the budget, found videographers, recruited artists, curated the work, and more, and the exhibit provides a superb opportunity to witness what our students have accomplished to bridge the gap between community and campus.

"The rest of the junior fellows and I [were] really passionate in our planning about emphasizing accessible language and using the platform of Gaines to cultivate interconnectedness locally," said junior fellow and exhibit co-chair, Anna Benton.

"With subject matter so close to the hearts of many, it is crucial to allow STEM and the fine arts to work in harmony and show that the disease of addiction is not a choice—addiction's impacts do not discriminate, and neither do we."

Artists were invited to a private viewing of the exhibit

One of the many exhibit pieces

The fellows aim to dispel the myths surrounding substance use disorders by bringing together a diverse community of artists, researchers, community members, and advocates who share a connection to addiction in order to spark meaningful discussions on addiction, and transform negative stigmas into a more compassionate and holistic perspectives. The carefully curated multidisciplinary selection includes “traditional” works of art alongside STEM research posters, spoken word poetry, contemporary dance, sculpture, and even an interactive coloring book.

Junior fellow Ella Brown-Terry interacts with the coloring book

Anna continues, "Multidisciplinary approaches are the best way to address complex issues of the humanities because they are most representative of their nuance; after all, we don’t come to an immediate understanding of these issues based on only one perspective. This exhibition began as a spreadsheet shared between the 12 fellows nearly six months ago, and I never could have anticipated the palpable emotion and vulnerability it has pulled from every guest—including myself. When the installation process was finally complete I was overwhelmed by the deeply gratifying work we had accomplished."

“

Exhibitors found the works to be powerful and moving

Dr. April Young and I have piloted an undergraduate class in the College of Public Health titled Substance Use: A View through the Public Health Lens. As is often the case when a class is offered for the first time, we were faced with assignment plans that had to be changed quickly (i.e. a movie that was unavailable for our class etc.). On one such occasion, I found the announcement of “The Monsters and Myths of Substance Abuse: A Multidisciplinary Showcase on Addiction and Recovery” and changed a video assignment to an assignment in which students were to attend Monsters and Myths of Substance Use and participate in a discussion board in which they described the most impactful part of the showcase and discussed how the showcase highlighted content from our class.

I just finished grading this assignment and wanted to share how meaningful the students found this experience. I was so touched by the parts of the showcase that students felt displayed class concepts in such powerful ways. I'm also interested to learn if this showcase would be accessible in future semesters.

We will teach our class again in Spring 2025 and I would love for those students to have this experience.

”

Angela Carman, DrPH

Although the exhibit closes to the public at the end of May, it will live on permanently in the form of a digital catalog, accessible via the Gaines Center website.

ANostalgia Hit of

Mark McCloud’s Through the Looking Glass

and Blotter Art in the 1990s

by RILEY DROPPLEMAN Gaines Fellow, class of 2024 At first glance, the artwork looked normal: a complex arrangement of illustrations from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Alice appears to be emerging from a portal into Wonderland, and she is surrounded by whimsical characters like Humpty Dumpty and the White Rabbit. The artwork also has a reverse side, one that displays the image from the opposite perspective. We see Alice leaving through the portal, and we are left behind in the real world. Upon closer inspection, the art possessed a grid of small perforations, 16 by 16, which made 64 small squares.

At this year’s Breathitt Lecture, senior Art History student Joshua Cola discussed an often overlooked and forgotten form of art known as blotter, whose origins are traced back to the American counterculture movement of the 1960s. Typically used for the delivery of the illicit drug LSD, blotters are perforated pieces of paper that can be imprinted with designs often referencing pop culture icons and symbols of the counterculture like peace signs, Jimi Hendrix, and the Grateful Dead. The audience was treated to colorful, zany, and beautiful iconography printed on blotter paper, which until recently, was not considered to be a form of art. Through his presentation, Joshua Cola opened our eyes to the validity of blotter as a real, interesting artform.

The creator of the Alice in Wonderland artwork, Mark McCloud, was the subject of the presentation.

McCloud, possessing fond memories of the age of counterculture, began collecting blotter art from the 1960s. He also printed his own blotter, without any intention of using it for LSD usage, as a way to explore the pop art history of blotter creation. McCloud placed his collection on display in his home in San Francisco, giving the exhibit the cheeky name, the Institute of Illegal Images. The name alone prompted several investigations of McCloud by the FBI and the DEA, and McCloud was placed on criminal trial for his collection, numbering over 30,000 artworks. However, McCloud was able to justify his exhibit and defend his collected and created blotter as art rather than vehicles for illicit drugs. One of these criminal trials inspired the creation of the Alice-inspired blotter, entitled Alice Through the Looking Glass.

Joshua Cola presented a fascinating discussion regarding the reframing of certain images as artifacts and art. He led the audience, one dominated by students no older than 24, through the world of 1960s America. Songs that I listen to, such as “White Rabbit” by Jefferson Airplane, were framed in a new light through Joshua’s historical context surrounding counterculture. Suddenly, the world of psychedelic experiences and cultural liberation burst open before my eyes in bright technicolor. Much like the white rabbit with Alice on her adventure through Wonderland, Joshua brought the audience on a journey through a world foreign to me and my generation. By the end of it, my mind was swirling with dreamy images of surreal blotter art, and Joshua completely convinced me and my fellow audience members of the importance of blotter as an artform and vestige of 1960s society. I left the presentation dazzled by the world of Wonderland, Mark McCloud, and blotter.

front and back views of Mark McCloud’s Alice in Wonderland blotter art

If you missed Joshua's lecture, CLICK HERE for our recording of the event

2024 BREATHITT LECTURE FEATURING JOSHUA COLA

celebrating our

SENIORS

Ellie Browning

Thesis

"Move the Table Thesis Chair: Bryan Hains

After Gaines?

"I am looking forward to entering the fine dining industry while prioritizing self-education on the wide range of topics I have found passion for throughout my life

Community & Leadership Development Nicholasville, KY

Best Gaines Memory

"I've loved the field trips! Beginning of year retreat has been my favorite both years, but the Supernatural field trip may have topped it. I love the opportunity to do informal learning together because we bond so much outside of the class too.”

Eriel Burns

Political Science Clarksville, TN

Thesis

Best Gaines Memory

"A Closer Look at the Humanistic Aspects of the Opioid Epidemic and its Implications for Pharmaceutical Ethics and Law."

"The obstacle course at our fall orientation in our junior year.

Thesis Chair: Natalie Nenadic

After Gaines?

"I will apply to law school this fall and matriculate in Fall 2025. I will also submit some of my thesis research for publication and apply for legal internships.

Isha Chauhan

Thesis "Personal Narratives as Mechanisms for Exploring the STEM Undergraduate Research Experience" Thesis Chair: Chad Risko

After Gaines?

"After graduation I will be pursuing DVMPhD at Cornell University in Wildlife Conservation and Zoology!"

Biology La Grange, KY

Best Gaines Memory "I loved the field trips and the Bale Boone Symposium because they were so intellectually stimulating and really great experiences to connect with the community."

Joseph Cox

Interiors; Historic Preservation Campbellsville, KY

Thesis

Best Gaines Memory

"The Fruits of our Labor Thesis Chair: Hannah Pittard

"Our recent trip to Cincinnati. I didn't sleep the night before and instead stayed up making final edits to my thesis. At sunrise I submitted a project I've dreamed of for years, walked a mile to Bingham Davis, and filled another day creating art with the most unanticipated and natural friends I've ever had."

After Gaines?

"Post-graduation I plan to join the design industry and further develop my skills in the arts."

Leena Haider

Thesis "Who Can You Count On? Banking While Female: Exploring Money, Community, and Self Help" Thesis Chair: Kristin Monroe

After Gaines?

"I'll be studying for my LSAT while working at the Fayette County Clerks office"

History Lexington, KY

Best Gaines Memory "Definitely the spontaneous get togethers we’d have whether breakfast at the Gaines house or meeting up to work, people that I was friends with became even closer friends.”

Danica Hak

Interiors Bowling Green, KY

Thesis

Best Gaines Memory

"Resonance: The Interdisciplinary Design and Site Specific in an Iterative Lens."

Thesis Chair: Ingrid Schmidt

After Gaines?

"Working as a full-time interior designer at RossTarrant! "

"The retreat is always my favorite event of the year! I love bonding with all the fellows and all the team bonding exercises; it helped me get to know the junior fellows more."

Shria Holla

Thesis

"Two Perspectives on Immigrants in the Labor Market: The Immigration Act of 1990."

Thesis Chair: Christopher Bollinger

After Gaines?

"A Critical Language Scholarship studying Hindi in Jaipur, India. Then, a Research Assistant position at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago."

Mathematical Economics Richmond, KY

Best Gaines Memory "Eating ice cream with all the fellows at the fudge shop in Berea during our junior year orientation"

Jessica Miller

Environmental & Sustainability Studies; English; International Film Studies Ashland, KY

Thesis

Best Gaines Memory

After Gaines?

"Having my thesis defense and being a little surprised that my novel wasn’t half bad. We’re all more capable than we think"

"Ships Passing in the Night: A Novel" Thesis Chair: Shauna Morgan

"I’ve found full-time employment at a library. I’m planning on writing more, publishing the novel I wrote as my thesis, and making community wherever I wind up.”

Joshua Miller

Merchandising, Apparel and Textiles; Management McHenry, IL

Thesis

Best Gaines Memory

"STAR FEVER" Thesis Chair: Mika Pryor

After Gaines?

"I hope to secure full-time employment in Merchandising or Purchasing while starting my first-ever business, JOSHUA MILLER, a women's workwear brand inspired by my senior thesis."

"The Breathitt Lectures! It's always amazing to get to hear from an extraordinary artist on how they approach their craft. I always walk away from these evenings feeling inspired and motivated to be the best that I can be"

Nicholas Relich

Economics; Political Science Richmond, KY

Thesis

Best Gaines Memory

After Gaines?

"Being out at Shaker village was really great--the campfire, walks, ducks, etc. I also really liked going to Camp Nelson with Dr. Taylor and the whole unit in junior year.

"Navigating the Crooked Road: A Case-Study into the Appalachian Regional Commission’s Strategy to Promote Economic Development through Cultural Tourism" Thesis Chair: Ken Troske

"I will be working as a research assistant with the Federal Reserve Board in DC!"

Gretchen Ruschman

Thesis

"Navigating Religious Attitudes towards Assistive Reproductive Technology."

Thesis Chair: Caroline Buchanan

After Gaines?

"I’ll be moving to England to study at the University of Cambridge!"

Agricultural and Medical Biotechnology Lexington, KY

Best Gaines Memory "The retreat in Berea where we got to bond with the junior and senior cohorts."

Kate Walker

Dance Lexington, KY

Thesis

Best Gaines Memory

After Gaines?

"The Cincinnati trip! It was a special opportunity for all fellows to be together. It was stress relieving trip for me. It was fun to explore a new city, see beautiful art, and eat great food together! "

"The Intersection of Kinesthetic Empathy and Observation in Concert Dance Performance."

Thesis Chair: Susie Thiel

"Post-graduation I will audition for dance companies in pursuit of a performance career, alongside working as a yoga instructor! "

Even as we say goodbye to our seniors, we look forward to welcoming our new Gaines Fellows for Fall 2024. Here's just a little bit about them...

12

FROM

7

FELLOWS SELECTED

65

3.96

APPLICATIONS

COLLEGES

AVERAGE GPA

MONSTERS, MYTHS, & THE METAPHYSICAL

by ALYSSAH ROBINSON Gaines Fellow, class of 2025 The 2024 Lafayette Symposium: “Monsters, Myths, and the Metaphysical” provided a unique experience for the Gaines Center to introduce members of the Lexington community to many aspects of the metaphysical of which I, and others, were completely unaware. On Thursday April 11, the Metaphysical Showcase at the Kentucky Theatre highlighted all things mystical. Through reiki mini sessions, spell jars and crystals, rune readings, aura photography, tarot card readings, an authors’ table, and the history of Kentucky fortune tellers the Gaines Center provided participants and attendees with a well rounded look into the metaphysical community in Lexington. The showcase gave attendees the opportunity to encounter both hands-on interaction and learn about the stories of those working in the metaphysical--and all free of charge.

The showcase provided me with the unique privilege of working with Reinette Jones, the Notable Kentucky African Americans Database, and University of Kentucky’s Libraries. I was able to present Jones’ research on fortune tellers in Kentucky during the early 1900s. This was my first time presenting in such a manner and I thank the Gaines Center for giving me this platform.

As the Metaphysical Showcase wrapped-up, many attendees jined us for a free screening of the movie, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, with moderator Jeanmarie Rouhier-Willoughby, which provided a fascinating look into the cult classic movie and the evolution of onscreen vampires.

The second day of the Seminar took place at the Carnegie Center, where attendees enjoyed minilectures on “The Evolution of the Sexy Vampire” by Jeanmarie Rouhier-Willoughby from the UK Department of Modern and Classical Languages and “The Local Folklore of Mothman” by Eleanor HaskinsWagner from the Capital City Museum in Frankfort. We learned that the first vampire killers were actually “four-eyed” dogs--known as “Saturday dogs” because

they had to be born on a Saturday. And those four eyes? Not four actual eyes but, in fact, a reference to the distinctive eyebrows seen on certain breeds of dog. Eleanor Hasken-Wagner’s mini-lecture on “The Local Folklore of Mothman” took us back to the very first sighting of this legendary creature, and culminated with explanations of modern-day interpretations of Mothman as a meme, a gay icon, and the topic of a large festival in Point Pleasant, West Virginia. These captivating lectures were paired with great conversation and food provided by Chef Tanya Whitehouse from the UK Food Connection. Chef Tanya provided delicious, on-theme refreshments, including rose and cardamom lovecakes and ghost chicken wraps.

To round off the two-day event, Marley Knockers Paranormal treated attendees to the Historic Lexington Ghost Walk. The tour took us to houses and buildings in and around the Gratz Park known to have ghost sightings or activity. From the Union and Confederate President’s houses facing each other across a street, the mysterious male figure in the top right window of the Carnegie Center, or the multiple dead bodies resting in a building on Transylvania University’s campus, the ghost walk showcased the rich and ghostly history of Lexington.

The 2024 Lafayette Symposium offered a fascinating look into the realms of myths, monsters, and metaphysics through scholarly discourse, cinematic exploration, and a wealth of immersive experiences.

Below: a selection of Gaines’ auras, by Rays Aura Photography

THE 2024

NEW YORK ART EXPERIENCE

Joseph

Kate

Gretc hen

a c i s s e J

Ellie

a u h s o J

Danica

s a l o h c i N

Leena Eriel

a i r h S a h s I

art

OBJECTS

Ebony G. Patterson . . . . they were just hanging out . . . you know . . . talking about . . . ( . . . when they grow up . . .)

The Dean Collection, courtesy of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys.

Kehinde Wiley Portrait of (Alicia Keys Dean) The Dean Collection, courtesy of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys.

Pablo Picasso Head of a Sleeping Woman Estate of John Hay Whitney

Yoshikawa Masamichi Gorgeous Effigy (Kayō) Gift (to the Metropolitan Museum of Art) of Halsey and Alice North

Fernando Laposse Lovebird

What do circus arts, monuments, and ancient scrolls have in common? These are all topics covered in our Humanities Laboratory class, taught for the first time in Spring 2024

The inaugural Gaines Humanities Laboratory course had hefty goals: to give non-Gaines students a taste of the immersive, team-taught Gaines seminar experience, and to challenge students to learn and experience the hands-on humanities work that scholars across campus and community are engaged in: a deep dive into what humanities in action can look like in contemporary society.

In Philosophy of the Circus, taught by Dr. Meg Wallace (Philosophy), students engaged in interdisciplinary research and educational projects involving the circus arts. UK’s circus lab (yes, there is such a thing) includes six aerial dropline points ready for use with various aerial apparatuses – silks, trapeze, lyra, rope, etc. – as well as an array of mats, juggling props, and other circus equipment. Circus Arts are rich with potential for deep discussions about an array of philosophical topics in aesthetics, ethics, social and political philosophy, personal identity, mind, metaphysics, epistemology, and so on. And, they’re intrinsically interdisciplinary, so students with interests and majors outside of philosophy can easily find a way in.

Students in the Gaines Humanities Laboratory engaged in circus arts (juggling, aerial arts, acro-balancing) and reflected on how such physical skills are connected to philosophy and the humanities and interdisciplinary academics more generally.

Dr. Daniel Vivian (Historic Preservation) led our humanities students through an in-depth discussion of memorials and monuments as tangible reminders of historical events and figures, asking who determines what is memorialized, and how? Students learned not only how monuments and memorials are created and approved, but also generated their ideas for their own memorials.

Bringing a successful semester to a close, Dr. James Brusuelas (Digital Restoration Initiative) undertook an ambitious project. Students were introduced to the ground-breaking and internationally recognized “virtual unwrapping” technology of the Educe Lab, most recently in the headlines for Dr. Brent Seales’ unwrapping of the Herculaneam Scrolls (see our alumni spotlight next to read more about that).

Students created their own papyrus manuscripts, destroyed them in any which way possible, then “unwrapped” and restored those manuscripts using the technology available.

We’re proud of the success of this inaugural class. Not only did students participate in truly challenging and innovative work, but they were also able to see humanities career options in action and develop practical, transferrable skills which increase their career readiness in transdisciplinary ways.

“I liked how I got three classes in one. Although there was not a lot of time for each, I still feel like I got an in-depth understanding of what the full length class would be like. I enjoyed getting the experience of three very different courses in one semester.”

“What I liked about this course is that, for a total of three months, I got to learn three different topics from three different professors in the humanities. I was able to find a variety of things that really intrigued me.“

“EMBRACE THE PEOPLE AND THE OPENNESS THAT THE PROGRAM IS BUILT ON.”

When I was first asked to interview Dr. Stephen Parsons, former Gaines fellow and current Project Lead for the Vesuvius Challenge, I was over the moon. Back in October 2023, I had read about the Herculaneum scrolls for the first time in a news story, and I became very interested in the subject despite it being far removed from my field of study. Thus, I took this opportunity with Stephen to learn more about the fascinating work that his team is facilitating at the University of Kentucky’s heritage science lab, EduceLab, and around the world, especially as it relates to his interest in advancing the global community through problem solving and innovative technologies. This conversation aims to illuminate Stephen’s academic journey, his contributions to his field, and his takeaways and memories from his time as a Gaines fellow – please enjoy.

– Alycie Caya

A: We’ll start at the very beginning – can you introduce who you are, where you grew up and what kinds of things you were interested in as a kid?

S: Yeah – I’m Stephen Parsons and I’m from Lexington. I’ve always been interested in science and in trying to find ways of applying that to something that’s interesting. I had no idea for a long time what that would look like, and I’m just sort of making it up as I go. But I went to Bryan Station High School and then UK as an undergraduate for degrees in International Studies and Computer Science, and I graduated in 2016.

A: Computer science and international studies…Why did you choose that unique path?

S: I wanted to do computer science because I found it interesting. Since I discovered it in high school, I really enjoyed thinking through the puzzles one thinks through doing computer science. So I found it compelling and I knew I probably wanted to do something in that area, but I also wanted to apply it to something useful in the world. And like I said, I didn't know what that meant for a long time, and as an undergraduate I studied international development specifically. I thought I might work on technology for developing countries or for low-income people anywhere. I actually started my undergraduate pursuits doing biomedical engineering – I was interested in creating lower-cost medical devices. I ended up switching majors a few times and settled on computer science, but still had that outlook. And then I stumbled into the scrolls, basically.

A: Right, so you were involved with the Scrolls as an undergraduate?

S: Yeah, I was a Chellgren fellow, which – a requirement of that program is to do undergraduate research, and I wanted to be pushed into doing that – so yes, I reached out to Dr. Seales at that time, and I did a project with him on a different manuscript, but that introduced me to this world.

A: So, you were a Chellgren fellow– how did you find out about Gaines, and what did you think about the program going into it? Were you nervous, excited?

S: I know I was excited – actually the first time I heard about Gaines was a fellow or former fellow that came to my high school and talked about it. I didn't know at that time that I’d be going to UK, and I knew so little about being an undergraduate that a lot of what Gaines had to offer went over my head.

So I had heard of it, but it left my mind for a few years. Then as an undergraduate, I became interested because it looked like a fun opportunity to find ways of applying science to the humanities or to other pursuits, and I liked the fairly open-ended nature of it; it sounded like a fun challenge to be an engineer in that cohort given that frequently it’s a lot of humanities people. So I wanted to find ways to combine the two.

A: I’m in the same boat – I’m international economics, and I’m the only econ person in my cohort.

S: Yeah, a bit of it was a challenge for me but also I just wanted to expand my own horizons and the people I got to talk to.

A: Did you enjoy being around people from other disciplines? How was that experience for you?

S: I loved it. It was the best part of my undergraduate career. It was amazing that we spent a lot of time together, and I just loved being in a group of people from different fields.

“I COULD GO ON FOREVER ABOUT GAINES--IT WAS ONE OF MY FAVORITE EXPERIENCES OF MY TIME IN UNDERGRAD” A: Let’s jump into your work on the scrolls. For people who don’t know much about them, can you explain what they are and why they’re important to history and other disciplines?

S: So the lab here at the University of Kentucky works with many different manuscripts from all over the world from different time periods with different contexts and different significance. Most of my work for the last few years and certainly the work that’s the subject of recent announcements has been the Herculaneum scrolls specifically.

The Herculaneum scrolls are the only library from Classical Antiquity that survived in place. Most of the texts we have from ancient Greek and Roman civilizations were handed down and copied many times over history, so they’re heavily modified. Most of them were lost completely, and those that we do have were altered many times before they reached Medieval times or certainly modernity.

So this library was buried by Mount Vesuvius in the year 79 at the same time that Pompeii was buried.

Pompeii has become the more well known of the cities in the region, but Herculaneum is a nearby city that was also buried. In Herculaneum, there was a villa with a library in it, and it was buried and the scrolls were pretty much cooked, or what we call carbonized, which literally is the same process as making charcoal, and buried under 80 feet of mud and ash. That obviously damaged them pretty significantly, but it’s also the only reason we have them, the only reason why the library survived – most libraries from that time, everything would just decay. Papyrus is an organic material that will decay in 50 or 100 years if you leave it on a shelf. So now what we have is all these extremely fragile blackened lumps.

I laughed, thinking how simultaneously comical and miraculous it was that these precious texts survived in the state that they did. Stephen explained that early on, it wasn’t even known that they were scrolls. They were treated as fire fuel by excavators, and many were burned or thrown away.

A: You already mentioned you were introduced to the scrolls as a Chellgren fellow. Can you describe the evolution of your involvement with the scrolls?

Stephen explained that after he graduated, he worked at Microsoft in Seattle for a while before returning home.There, he had lunch to catch up with Dr. Brent Seales,who offered him a job as a staff member in his lab, which is when he started working with the Herculaneum scrolls.

S: Since I had moved home with no plan and I was dealing with this difficult family situation, he essentially offered me short-term, part-time, flexible work, and I started working on the Herculaneum scrolls, got hooked, and here I am today. I did that work as a staff member for about a year and a half, and ended up deciding that if I was going to do multiple years of effectively graduate research, then I should probably get a PhD out of it, so I officially became a PhD student and continued that work.

A: So then your dissertation ended up being on the Herculaneum scrolls?

S: Yes. My dissertation focused largely on one specific sub-problem, and I graduated last year. Of course, also last year, something we didn’t plan for was that we ended up launching this contest, which has changed everything – the Vesuvius Challenge. So that has been this incredible journey that we did not see coming.

In Stephen’s words, the Vesuvius Challenge is a global research contest that EduceLab here at UK launched in partnership with Nat Friedman, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and investor. Friedman had found the work being done and wanted to know how he might accelerate the progress of the research problem.

S: So we all sat down together and designed this contest where we essentially took the contents of my dissertation work and released them to the world as a baseline, and we invited the world to improve on the methods and help us read more of these scrolls. We’ve been running this contest for a year now… and 5 days… and it’s been incredible. We’ve had thousands of people involved, we’ve raised a lot of money and given out a lot of prizes for different research milestones, and this past weekend we

just had a big celebration event in Los Angeles commemorating the awarding of the grand prize from last year. That milestone resulted in multiple complete passages of text being revealed from inside one of these scrolls for the first time. In October 2023, when we issued a prize for the first person to find 10 letters inside the scroll, we had the prize winners and a lot of our scholarly partners here at UK to celebrate. And not very long after, we went from about 10 letters to 2,000, is what we have now.

A: This challenge seems so young at only a year old – what do you anticipate and hope will come of it as time goes on?

S: We want, ultimately, to read the contents of every scroll in the Herculaneum collection.

I asked if he thought it was possible. He answered almost immediately.

S: Yeah, I do. I would not have answered that confidently a few years ago. But I’ve had a gradual build in confidence as we’ve developed these methods and seen that they work, at first on really small cases, and then slowly growing the cases where we can get these methods to work. At this point, we still haven’t run out of ideas, and I feel confident we’ll make it work.

A: That’s so exciting. I can’t wait to see where things go. I’m sure we’ll be reading about it in the news again soon.

S: Yeah, to even imagine what’s going to come in the next year or years is hard for me to wrap my head around.

A: You mentioned that people from all over the world are working on this. I’m interested to know how interdisciplinary this process is. How does this work involve different disciplines, especially transnationally?

S: It’s very interdisciplinary – in particular, the scholarship has to be. We work really closely with the scholars of this material, who are very very specialized. They’re called papyrologists, and they specifically study manuscripts written on papyrus. So our job on the computer science end is to produce something that resembles text; we’ll take a damaged manuscript, put it in a CT scanner, and then we do our work that is this virtual unwrapping process, the result of which is an image that shows text. But none of us reads the language that we’re working with typically.

Stephen explained that his team works with scholars that are highly specialized, having spent their entire academic career studying,for example, not just Greek, but Greek of a specific time period in Herculaneum. There is a lot of back and forth in the reading process, as scholars may require clarification aboutspots on the images that are unclearor ambiguous sincethey can’t actuallyhold up the document in front of them.

S: Going forward, I think there’s going to be even more collaboration because, by doing their reading, they help us develop better data that we use for machine learning, which is a big part of this process.

A: It sounds like this requires a lot of teamwork and constantly improving processes – how did Gaines, as an interdisciplinary experience, prepare you as a learner and a researcher to be doing this sort of work and to be asking the questions you’re asking?

S: This is kind of funny, but one of the ways that Gaines prepared me the most for this work now is very specific to that interdisciplinary work and it is navigating the nature of my work, which is that different stakeholders often have different goals. Gaines helped me learn how to navigate that and try to work out or negotiate agreements that make different parties happy, which is an important part of that scrolls work. An example is that on my thesis committee, I picked people from very different disciplines. And I learned in that process they had really different pictures in their minds of what my thesis would be, and I got to navigate that and figure out, “How do I make a thesis that my whole committee will be happy enough with to pass me?” And I’m doing similar work now, really.

“I’VE FOUND THAT THERE IS A LOT MORE CREATIVITY IN THIS TECHNICAL WORK ... THAN I MIGHT’VE THOUGHT.”

“SPENDING TIME WITH THE OTHER FELLOWS WAS ONE OF THE BEST PARTS OF MY EDUCATION, AND SOME OF THEM ARE STILL MY BEST FRIENDS.” I could go on forever about Gaines– it was one of my favorite experiences of my time [in undergrad]. I had so much fun – we were given so much room to be creative in those classes in a way that I really enjoyed and is not typical for either the computer science or the international studies classes I was taking. I remember we had a poetry unit where I wrote a poem in code. I just wrote a computer program that tried to tell a story and it was kind of gimmicky, and I wasn’t really sure when I wrote it if I’d get away with it, but it was really well received, and I have multiple memories of exploring different ideas in these classes and feeling very welcome to do so.

A: Writing a poem as a computer science major in general, first of all, I feel like is unheard of.

S: Right, that’s not something I was doing in other classes. And I’ve found that there is a lot more creativity in this technical work that I’m doing than I might’ve thought.

A: The last question I want to ask is if you have any advice for future Gaines fellows or any student researcher in general in regards to being creative and being an interdisciplinary thinker?

S: I think for Gaines fellows, I would say really embrace that environment where you get to explore ideas. I felt in my classes, my jury project, and my thesis that I was given a ton of freedom to explore what I found interesting in a way that did not fit other classes I was taking. Also, just spending time with the other fellows was one of the best parts of my education, and some of them are still my best friends.

In a month I’m going on a weekend trip with some of them, and they’re still from all different disciplines and I love that now in my adult life, I have relationships with these people who continue to bring new perspectives to my life. So I would just embrace the people and the openness that the program is built on.

To Stephen – thanks so much for this wonderful conversation; I know that everyone at the Gaines Center is rooting for your continued success. To all, thank you for reading, and if you enjoyed the topic, I highly recommend checking out the Vesuvius Challenge official website at scrollprize.org, which tells a detailed history of the project and contains an abundance of links, images, and videos to explore. You can also read about UK’s EduceLab at educelab.engr.uky.edu.

ANNOUNCING THE 2024 bale boone symposium october 17, 2024

emily st. john mandel

REMEMBERING GAINES WRITER, WHITNEY HALE

by Jay Blanton, Director of Public Relations at the University of Kentucky Gaines Fellow, Class of 1987

Long-time friend and colleague of the Gaines Center for the Humanities, Whitney Hale, lost her battle with cancer at the end of January. Whitney exemplified passion, purpose, commitment and quality in nearly 20 years of service to her alma mater. She loved the arts, and her coverage of those areas along with design, libraries, the humanities and competitive scholarships rightly drew plaudits and praise from across the campus. Whitney loved her work and her university. She was for many years the unit’s grammar maven. She established and then, with devotion, ran our internship program, mentoring dozens of young people.

Whitney diligently remembered birthdays and milestones, passing around cards and making sure important moments were not missed. Whitney had high expectations for her unit, her colleagues and her university, but no more than what she expected of herself. She wanted all of us – particularly UK – to aspire to more, to give voice to the voiceless and greater access to those who far too often are underrepresented. She understood the transformative power of an education as well as a unit like ours: one created to promote and communicate, or defend and advocate, for an institution’s values. I have a few memories, to be candid, of when I didn’t meet Whitney’s high expectations. Often, it involved defending someone or some effort that she felt had been wronged. She never hesitated to let me know. And while it stung at times, it always made me think. And I ultimately knew that it came from a place of conviction and integrity.

A favorite writer of mine draws the distinction between what he calls resume virtues and eulogy ones. To be sure, Whitney was an accomplished person. She was a great student, who was involved in leadership roles at UK. She was an outstanding communications professional, who worked tirelessly and with attention to detail and quality in covering units and initiatives across campus. But I expect our memories of Whitney will most often revolve around personal virtues -- integrity, her compassion for others – and as her friend and colleague Jenny notes – her desire to see more voices represented and at the table. She loved her university. Even more, I think, she loved her friends and, clearly, they loved her. Resume virtues are things in which to take pride. Eulogy virtues are what people remember. Whitney will be remembered.

A few pieces by Whitney: ‘Juneteenth Means Everything to Me’: UK Scholar Melynda Price Discusses Importance of Juneteenth Holiday UK Senior Hadeel Abdallah Named Rhodes Scholar Opportunity Chaser, UK Grad Montre’ale Jones Designs Own Path to Achieving Success