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Bale Boone Symposium
This is a historical list of the Bale Boone Symposium in the Humanities topics.
2006: The Idea of "The Athens of the West":
Kentucky and American Culture, c. 1792-1852
Kentuckians often are affected by negative stereotypes of themselves and their state, stereotypes that have very serious consequences, economic as well as cultural. Our symposium seeks to counteract these negative stereotypes by investigating and publicizing a period in our history when Kentuckians were at the forefront of American culture in a wide variety of fields (education, politics, medicine, architecture, music, religion, agriculture, and other fields): the period from roughly 1792 to 1852. Co-sponsored by Transylvania University, the symposium will occupy the week of October 8-14, and will include concerts, exhibitions of books, documents, and medical instruments, a cemetery tour and lecture on historic ghosts, and other activities located on UK's and Transylvania's campuses and throughout the community. It will culminate in a two-day conference allowing for intensive discussion and the generation of new scholarship on various aspects of Kentucky history and culture in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The symposium will be of special interest to K-12 history teachers, post-secondary teachers of Kentucky and American history from across the state, as well as to anyone who is intrigued by Kentucky history. The University Press of Kentucky plans to publish a volume of essays from the symposium, and so extend the effects of the symposium in improving the self-image of Kentucky and Kentuckians well beyond 2006 and those who can attend the symposium in person.
2005: Growing Kentucky:
New Directions for Our Culture of Land and Food
Co-sponsored by Partners for Family Farms, a community non-profit organization, and UK's College of Agriculture, the symposium consisted of two days of workshops, with an evening of literary readings in between. We brought together local farmers and farming organizations, agricultural experts from many fields, writers whose work has centered on agriculture, and humanities scholars with an interest in local rural communities. Plenary lectures were given by Michael Pollan, Alice Waters, and Jon Carloftis; the evening of readings between workshop sessions was given by Wendell Berry, Barbara Kingsolver, and Davis McCombs. As the Dean of Agriculture later remarked, authors Berry and Kingsolver were treated as rock stars by the ecstatic audience. We hope that this symposium, by bringing together and energizing many crucial players, from poets to farmers to landscape preservationists to farmers market specialists, all with the enthusiastic support of the College of Agriculture, will mark a turning point in the history of Kentucky agriculture, and indeed the history of the state. Ann Yonkers, a symposium panelist and founder of the farmers' market at Dupont Circle and four other markets in the DC Area, wrote that this symposium was a "marvelous gathering of minds and hearts. . . . I've been going to conferences for twenty years and I think 'Growing Kentucky' was the most creative of any I ever attended. What made it unique was first, the vision of bringing together communities that normally don't talk, the humanities and the School of Agriculture, and then creating a structure where a new and creative conversation could take place."
2004: Place, Community, and the Writer's Life:
A Conversation with Kentucky's Three Yale Younger Poets
Featuring Tony Crunk, Maurice Manning, and Davis McCombs
This symposium celebrated the remarkable fact that three Kentucky poets won the Yale Younger Poets Award, America's most prestigious award for poets under 40, in a single decade. It featured a book-signing on the Friday night by all three poets at a local independent book store specializing in poetry and local authors, followed on Saturday by a day-long discussion of poetry and poetry workshops for local poets, again from both the community and the university. A reading by all three poets filled Memorial Hall that Saturday night. James Baker Hall, Kentucky poet laureate and legendary teacher of Kentucky poets for decades, was the master of ceremonies. Wendell Berry, Bobbie Ann Mason, Gurney Norman, and Ed McClanahan were all on hand, and the evening proved to be something of a passing of the torch from one generation of Kentucky writers to the next.
2001: Making Art with Yvonne Jacquette
Using the successful format of earlier symposia, we invited University of Kentucky art students and faculty to join members of Lexington's vibrant arts community to participate in two events with Yvonne Jacquette, a prominent New York painter, whose works concentrate on depictions of urban or rural landscapes seen from above. Her lecture, co-sponsored by UK's Art Museum, was entitled "Multiple Views from the Flying Carpet with Yvonne Jacquette." Ms. Jacquette also led a workshop for local painters, art students, and Gaines Fellows entitled "Exquisite Corpses: Making Art with Yvonne Jacquette."
2000: A Celebration of Food and Culture
with Phyllis Pray Bober
We expanded the symposium this year with the addition of a major culinary event, held for community members every year since, and now named in memory of the late Professor Bober, one of America's pioneer scholars of the history of food. The lectures that year were given individual names because the general title above applied to the Symposium that was then designed in three parts: a day-long workshop, a public lecture, and the Feast, which was explicitly tied to the topic of the symposium. The lecture was titled "From Garum to Bioengineered Polenta: Cultural Issues in Cookery and Agriculture," and the two workshop discussions were "Culture and Cuisine" and "Current Issues in Food and Agriculture." The Feast was our first, a fully authentic Roman Feast, open to all members of the Lexington community. This was one of the first local events to center on local food and sustainable agriculture, and was a precursor to the 2005 symposium, "Growing Kentucky."
1999: Documentary Film Workshop with Fred Wiseman
Following the pattern from previous years, we invited Frederick Wiseman, probably America's premier documentary film maker to be the keynote speaker for the 1999 symposium. The event included screenings not only of his films, but also films of prize-winning Kentucky documentarians Walter Brock and Eren McGinnis. Film makers and fans of documentary films came from all over Kentucky for the screenings and a day-long workshop with Fred Wiseman focusing on issues in documentary film-making.
1998: A Celebration of Poetry
This, the First Annual Bale Boone Symposium in the Humanities, set a pattern that lasted through 2001: the bringing to Kentucky of an outstanding figure in the arts, and the creation of a series of events (readings, performances, workshops) that serve as forums to bring university and community members interested in a particular art form together in a professional setting, and create extended opportunities for working with a nationally-known arts figure. This year, the symposium was titled "A Celebration of Poetry," and the featured guest was Tony Crunk, Kentucky poet and recent winner of the Yale Younger Poets Award. He worked closely with community and university poets in a day-long workshop and gave a reading in the evening. This event strengthened bonds between university poets and their counterparts in the community and energized both groups.
Early 1990s
Prior to 1998, the Bale Boone Symposium concentrated on legal and medical ethics and culture.
Last Site Update: November 10, 2009