The Department places a strong emphasis on supporting graduate student research, and our selective program means students have ample access to work closely with faculty. Graduate students have recently published work in outlets such as the Journal of Conflict Resolution; International Studies Quarterly; Comparative Political Studies; Political Research Quarterly; Conflict Management and Peace Science; Governance; Presidential Studies Quarterly; Politics, Groups and Identities; Congress and the Presidency; Social Science Quarterly; Michigan State Law Review; and Elon Law Review. Not only are these publications often co-authored with faculty, but our recently established investment plan provides incentives to promote further collaboration. A number of other resources also offer opportunity for students to build their research programs:
Advice on most statistical questions can be handled in the Department, but for many out of the ordinary problems, the Applied Statistics Lab (ASL) is a free service run by the staff in the Dr. Bing Zhang Department of Statistics. ASL staff also offer software feestival workshops in R and SAS.
The Department and the University provide excellent computing facilities. The new Ulmer lab offers graduate students computing resources and a dedicated meeting space. In addition, the Computing Center at the University of Kentucky provides computing facilities for the faculty and students
The department hosts a regular research colloquium during the academic year, giving students and faculty the opportunity to receive feedback on ongoing projects. Graduate students are strongly encouraged to take part in order to ready their work for publication.
The University of Kentucky is a member institution of the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research. As a member institution any faculty member or student may request data from the data archives located at the Consortium headquarters at the University of Michigan.
The Peace Studies program benefits students by enhancing their understanding of personal, social, political, cultural and economic issues that reduce or promote prospects for peace. While the program is geared towards undergraduates, it also benefits our graduate students by bringing in leading IR scholars for talks and mentoring opportunities.
The University of Kentucky Libraries contain over 2.6 million volumes, over 5.7 microfilm units, over 26,000 periodicals and serials, and over 23,000 maps. The social sciences, humanities, and life sciences collections at UK are housed at the William T. Young Library, a state-of-the-art facility that opened in 1998.
To enrich the intellectual life of our department, we regularly bring in leading scholars to present their research and meet with students. Some of the recent scholars we have brought in include: Brandon Bartels (George Washington), Carew Boulding (Colorado), Amber Boydstun (UC-Davis), Steven Brooke (Louisville), Songying Fang (Rice), Matt Gabel (WashU), Jeff Gill (American), Marc Hetherington (UNC), Andy Kydd (Wisconsin), Cyanne Loyle (Indiana), Jennifer Merolla (UC-Riverside), Amanda Murdie (Georgia), John Patty (Emory), Brandon Prins (Tennessee), Maya Sen (Harvard), John Sides (George Washington), and Scott Wolford (Texas).