Promoting the Humanities throughout Campus and the Commonwealth

Our Year on Origins

Coinciding with the United States’ quarter millennial, the Gaines theme for 2025-2026 explores the meaning of origins through the prism of disciplinary viewpoints offered by the humanities, the arts, and the sciences. The Gaines Fellows seminar highlights the multiplicity of beginnings not only for Lexington and the United States but also for current technologies, social institutions, political movements, the planet, humans, and other species as the city and nation commemorate—and reckon with—our 250th anniversaries

Gaines Newsletter: Fall 2025

News and Upcoming Events

The 2026 Clark Lecture The Shape of What's Gone: Craft, Labor, and the American South with Kimberly English

Apr 23, 2026

Artist and educator Kimberly English explores how cloth can be used to interrogate American mythologies of labor, heritage, and belonging, particularly as they take shape in the South. Working with inherited textile structures such as overshot and coverlet drafts, the artist reconfigures pattern through interruption, distortion, and negative space, treating absence as both a formal strategy and a historical condition.

a gaines center for the humanities mini grant event Denim Day Fashion Show: Awareness, Advocacy, and Action Registration Now Open

Apr 18, 2026

Rock your denim and join us for a powerful day raising awareness, standing up, and making change happen! Clothing is not consent. Join us for an evening of fashion, storytelling, and change as we challenge harmful myths and support survivors.

The 2026 Lafayette Seminar in Public Issues Humanities in Action: Origins and New Directions Registration Now Open

Apr 16, 2026

The Gaines Center for the Humanities will host the 2026 Lafayette Seminar, “Humanities in Action: Origins and New Beginnings,” from 3.00pm until 5.00pm on Thursday, April 16, in the Hardymon Theater, Davis Marksbury Building.

now accepting applications Gaines Humanities Cooperatives

Apr 14, 2026

The Gaines Center for the Humanities is excited to introduce “Gaines Humanities Cooperatives”—an initiative that fosters new and emerging working groups on Humanities-focused research, pedagogy, advocacy, and public scholarship. Envisioned as a generator of community across departments and colleges, Gaines Cooperatives assist in the formation of these university networks by providing funding, space, and other institutional support for coalescing around common interests and goals.

The 2026 Breathitt Lecture with Beaux Hardin Black Que(e)ries: Bridging Communities through Poetic Origins from Black Archives Registration Now Open

Apr 9, 2026

Beaux Hardin, a University of Kentucky College Arts & Sciences senior, has been selected to give the 31st annual Edward T. Breathitt Undergraduate Lectureship in the Humanities. Hardin’s lecture will discuss poetry as a creative medium that invents new language, ultimately connecting people from around the world and creating an immaterial space that redefines identity.

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