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student success stories

Sarah Gooch

UK junior Sarah Gooch is one of only 161 recipients of the National Security Education Program Boren Scholarship. The Boren Scholar, from Georgetown, Ky., will use the $20,000 scholarship to study and teach in Japan in the fall.

Robert Wagoner

Robert Wagoner was an undergraduate and graduate student in Classics at the University of Kentucky. He earned a BA in Classics and Philosophy in 2002, and an MA in Classics and a Graduate Certificate in Latin Studies in 2004. As a graduate student at UK, Robert pursued both Greek and Latin studies.

Reed DeMarco

Reed DeMarco was born outside of Detroit, MI and earned his B.A. in Classics from Wayne State University in Detroit in 2007. He was then awarded a teaching assistantship for his graduate studies at the University of Kentucky, finishing his degree in 2009. After Kentucky, Reed moved back to Michigan to pursue a teaching certification at Grand Valley State University in Grand Rapids.

Erika Peck Bucciantini

When my students ask me why I became a Latin teacher, I often tell them it was fate. This, obviously, is the short answer I give during class time when they have asked an off-topic question to avoid conjugating deponent verbs or learning about gerunds and gerundives. The truth of the matter is that I have grown to love the Latin language and couldn’t imagine my life without it.

RJ Parsons

RJ “Publius” Parsons came to the University of Kentucky after several years in which he taught high-school music and Latin in Miami, Florida, and Glendale, California. He has done extensive research into impressionistic music theory, medieval polyphony, and renaissance counterpoint most recently creating a musical score of sacred motets written by the sixteenth-century Flemish composer Noe Faignant.

Jonathan Meyer

Jonathan Meyer studied classics and religion at Calvin College (Grand Rapids, MI) and Yale Divinity School before coming to the University of Kentucky. He has also participated in the summer Latin program directed by Reginald Foster (OCD). He has taught students in Latin and Greek at the high school and college levels and has assisted in graduate courses dealing with biblical studies, religious history, and ancient Greek history.

William Little

Hailing from Carmel, CA, William Little completed his undergraduate studies at Harvard University in 2010 and subsequently earned a Master’s Degree in Medieval Studies at Fordham University, where he wrote a thesis exploring the practice and use of Biblical exegesis at the eleventh-century court of Matilda, Countess of Tuscany. His interests lie in the intellectual and literary history of the Latin Middle Ages, in particular Biblical exegesis and the reception of classical texts (especially poetry).

Donald Handshoe

Donald Handshoe, a senior and a double major in Classics and Anthropology, divides his time between his studies and his work, both of which as it turns out have to do with archaeology, his passion.

Joey Bradley

In the words of the late Steve Jobs, "You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards." In retrospect, it may seem odd that a Russian degree received from UK in 2001 led me to software development. However, the instruction at UK prepared me to think different. In my opinion, writing computer code required the same thought process as communicating in Russian.
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