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student success stories

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.

Hannah Bell

Hannah Arthur Bell graduated in 1999 from the College of Arts & Sciences with a major in English and a minor in Russian Studies. During her sophomore year, Hannah traveled with her father to St. Petersburg, Russia, to see one of his plays performed at the University of St. Petersburg.

Antoine Haaker

Antoine Haaker was born in Boulogne-sur-mer (France) and did his undergraduate studies in Classics at the University of Lille. During the summer, he once travelled to Rome in order to attend the Latin course of Father Reginald Foster. Father Foster is a Carmelite who used to work in the Vatican at the Latin letters office where official documents of the Church are written in or translated into Latin.

Rachel Philbrick

Rachel Philbrick was born and raised in Cambridge, Mass., and attended high school at the Commonwealth School, a small, private institution in Boston’s Back Bay. Commonwealth’s small size fostered a stimulating intellectual environment, encouraging interactions between students and faculty. It was here that Rachel first encountered Latin, studying it for four year and travelling, in her junior year, to Italy with her Latin class.

Miller Krause

Miller came to the graduate program in classics at the University of Kentucky in the autumn of 2006, drawn by the Institute for Latin Studies and the allure of learning to use Latin as a language rather than seeing it as a puzzle or a code standing between an author and a reader.

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