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by Erin Holaday Ziegler
Jeff Rice will join the faculty of the University of Kentucky this fall as a pioneering recipient of the Martha B. Reynolds Endowed Professorship for Digital Media in the College of Arts and Sciences' Division of Writing, Rhetoric and Digital Media (WRDM).    Formerly an associate professor of English and director of the Campus Writing Program at the University of Missouri, Rice has published over 20 articles and chapters in new media, composition, pedagogy and rhetoric.    "We're moving away from studying a subject in the classroom and toward a product with media like websites and video," Rice said. "It's more than lecture, lecture, lecture."   Rice's research and curriculum ideas are like Web pages filled with multiple narrative strands — similar to the multiple tabs you might have up on your screen right now — along with an

"They’ve taken the real Martin Luther King and gone—and we have to reclaim him," said University of Kentucky professor Adam Banks, evoking a Langston Hughes poem to describe the ways media commentators have sampled soundbites from King and ignored the movement he led and the causes he stood for.
 
Banks, an Associate Professor of Writing, Rhetoric and Digital Media in UK’s College of Arts and Sciences, is using King and the Civil Rights movement to kick off "The Digital Griots Project," an idea designed to bring African American communities in Lexington and Syracuse, N.Y., together in dialogue by linking oral traditions, literacy and technologies.

Amy Anderson

Graduate Student Spotlight By Saraya Brewer
Photos by Mark Cornelison

Amy Anderson’s academic history has taken a sharp turn since her early undergrad pre-medical path. “We had to kill things in our lab class and that was the end of that,” she laughed. “I always liked to write – I went straight back to the English Department.”

Though she has studied English for close to a decade now, Anderson is quick to admit that her “academic ADD” still stands: “I can’t focus on a time period. I’m interested in anything you put in front of me.” 

Her broad and varied interests make Anderson the perfect candidate for the brand new division of the University of Kentucky English department: Writing, Rhetoric and Digital Media. Anderson says she was excited about rhetoric, which is