Academics

Brandon Trapp 19 Interviews Dr. Kerri Hauman Listen on Soundcloud Transcript SPEAKER 1: Welcome to another campus conversation. Discussions with Transylvania University faculty, highlighting their interests, passions, and pursuits. Here is Brandon Trapp. BRANDON TRAPP: So I’m here with Dr. Kerri Hauman. And we’re going to talk today about the digital liberal arts. So first I want to ask, what is digital liberal arts? KERRI HAUMAN: It’s a loaded question. Of course, academics never like to give straightforward definitions of anything. When I think about the digital liberal arts, I sort of think about it as almost a silly thing, like a silly title, because the digital is already in the liberal arts. And we’re not, like when we’re just talking about liberal arts education without any sort of adjective or other word tacked on the front there, I think the digital is already there. But I think we name it that, because the technology is often sort of invisible, right? There are different course management systems, like Moodle and other things, that are being used. And so the digital is there. But they sort of blend into the background of the larger activity of higher education. And they’re not necessarily the focal point of it. And so I think that’s part of the reason why we give it that full label of digital liberal arts to sort of call to attention the digital that’s there already. I think also,

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Anna Brailow ’17 interviews Professor Martha Billips Listen on Soundcloud Transcript [MUSIC PLAYING] NARRATOR: Welcome to another Campus Conversation, discussions with Transylvania University faculty highlighting their interests, passions, and pursuits. Here is Anna Brailow. ANNA BRAILOW: I’m here with Dr. Martha Billips, and we are talking about Kentucky women. Your work has been published in a collection called Kentucky Women– Their Lives and Times, a work to which 17 scholars have contributed their writing on influential women from across the state. What do you feel is it that makes this work so essential among literature about Kentucky’s history? MARTHA BILLIPS: I do think it is essential. In part, of course, because of the focus on women. But it also has the broad focus chronologically about women from settlement times till the contemporary times. It has a broad cross-section of geography, as the introduction makes clear, from the mountains to the [INAUDIBLE]. So it’s very, very deliberate. And it offers in one place essays on a variety of important women across the Commonwealth, and that is unprecedented. We have only one previous book, interestingly, written by a former Transy professor. [INAUDIBLE] was a Transy professor, Kentucky Women from 1977, I think. So that’s the only other book devoted solely to Kentucky women, a wide assortment. The other reason I think this is important– it’s part of a series on Southern women writers’ lives. And the fact that Kentucky was not represented

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Brandon Trapp ’19 interviews Associate Professor of Biology Dr. Sarah Bray and Senior biology student Jaylen Beatty Listen on Soundcloud Transcript [MUSIC PLAYING] SPEAKER 1: Welcome to another “Campus Conversation,” discussions with Transylvania University faculty highlighting their interests, passions, and pursuits. Here is Brandon Trapp. BRANDON TRAPP: I’m here with Professor of Biology Dr. Sarah Bray and senior biology student Jaylen Bailey. And we’re here to talk about their research in invasive plant species. So first I want to ask, what does that mean? I’m assuming it’s not plants coming down from space with laser guns taking over Earth. SARAH BRAY: Yeah. Usually, a lot of times when I introduce my research to new groups of people, I put in really bad B-run kind of sci-fi movies like that, invasions of the whatever. So when we talk about invasive species, what we really mean is an organism that is brought to a new location where it has not previously been. Sometimes, those introductions are not a problem. And they’re just a minor component of the system. But we call them invasive when they start to displace native members of the community. And my training is in plant and microbial ecology. And so I’m really interested in invasive plants. So in this part of the country, people are usually aware of kudzu. The vine that ate the South is probably the famous one. Since I’ve come to Kentucky, I’ve been working

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