Submit Your Honors Program Application Today
Incoming Fall 2024 First Year Students
The application for Bellarmine's Honors Program is available to admitted students for the fall of 2024 through March 1st.
Incoming Transfer Students
To be considered for admission into the Honors Program in the fall, please submit your application by August 1. To be considered in the spring, please submit your application by December 1.
Current Bellarmine Students
Bellarmine students currently enrolled and interested in joining the Honors Program are welcome to apply. To be eligible you must be a first year or sophomore student.
Zackary Ross, Honors Program Director
Ph.D., University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, 2014
Office: Library B04A
Email: zross@bellarmine.edu
Phone: 502.272.8431
Dr. Zackary Ross is Director of the Honors Program, Fine Arts & Communications Division Chair, and Associate Professor of Theatre. He has a Ph.D. in Theatre from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, a master’s degree in Educational Theatre from New York University, and is an honors graduate of Lewis and Clark College’s theatre department in Portland, Oregon.
In addition to his experience as an educator, Zack is an active theatre artist. As a director, his most recent productions include Asking Strangers the Meaning of Life, Commedie of Errors, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, Blithe Spirit, and 44 Plays for 44 Presidents. As and actor, he has appeared most recently in Frederick Knott's Wait Until Dark, The Neo-futurists Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind, Christopher Durang's The Actor’s Nightmare, and Wendy Kesselman's adaptation of The Dairy of Anne Frank. His dramaturgy credits include The Illusion freely adapted from Pierre Corneille’s L’Illusion Comique by Tony Kushner, Iphigenia and Other Daughters by Ellen McLaughlin, and Buried Child by Sam Shepard.
Zack's research interests include theatrical adaptation, contemporary drama, theatre and social change, early modern drama, and trauma studies. Recently, Zack published a chapter entitled “Too Much Memory: Interrogating the National Trauma of the War on Terror” in Reflecting 9/11: New Narratives of Crisis, Disaster and Change (2016).
Courtney Keim, Honors Program Assistant Director
Ph.D., University of Memphis
Office: Library B04B
Email: akeim@bellarmine.edu
Phone: 502.272.8019
Dr. Courtney Keim is an Associate Professor of Psychology and Assistant Director of the Honors Program. She received her B.A. in Psychology from Christian Brothers University and her Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology, with a concentration in Industrial & Organizational Psychology, from the University of Memphis. Her research focus is on organizational wellness and psychologically healthy workplace practices. Dr. Keim teaches courses such as Honors Introductory Psychology, Personality Psychology, Professions in Psychology, Introduction to Industrial and Organizational Psychology, and Organizational Behavior and Leadership. She also supervises psychology internships, advises student theses, and enjoys mentoring students.
Dr. Keim is President of the Kentucky Psychological Foundation, where she leads initiatives in diversity, equity, and inclusion, psychologically healthy workplaces in Kentucky, student mentorship programs, and highlighting psychological research. In addition, Dr. Keim has consulted with many organizations, including departments within Louisville Metro Government, Norton Behavioral Medicine, and Maryhurst.
Dr. Keim enjoys cooking with her husband and daughter, practicing yoga, baking all kinds of sourdough breads and goodies, and watching sports.
Diana Vetter Moore, Graduate Administrative Assistant
Ph.D., University of Kentucky
Office: Library B17
Email: dvetter@bellarmine.edu
Diana Vetter Moore is a graduate of Transylvania University and the University of Kentucky where she received her Doctor of Musical Arts in vocal performance. Dr. Moore is passionate about music education and vocal health and serves as an adjunct faculty member at Bellarmine University and Bluegrass Community and Technical College. Her hobbies include hiking, traveling, house plants, and making crafts. Diana is excited to be joining the Honors Program as a Graduate Administrative Assistant as she pursues her Ph.D. in Leadership in Higher Education.
Emily Bingham, Ph.D. Visiting Honors Faculty Fellow
Ph.D., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1998
Office: Library B17
Email: emily@emilybingham.net
Website: http://emilybingham.net
What do we want from history? A reassuring narrative of triumph? A guide to the future? Something complex that, acknowledging the limits of knowability, binds the present and past into a web where we can find connection and understanding across time and space and identities? Born in Louisville, Dr. Bingham holds a B.A. from Harvard University and earned her Ph.D. at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Tying together her work is the effort to see the impact of ideas in United States history and society on real (non-famous) people and social structures. She has written and taught about conservative southern regionalism, Enlightenment liberalism, gender and labor, the purpose and meaning of childhood, sexuality, and an 1850s blackface minstrel song that is with us still. People are wired to connect to stories, and Bingham uses biography and cultural history to follow ideas through human decisions and identities, just as they course through each of us. Dr. Bingham’s first teaching job in Louisville was at Bellarmine College in 1998; she has also taught at Centre College, University of Louisville, and St. Francis High School. She is excited to offer honors seminars and guide thesis projects and otherwise support Bellarmine undergraduates. When not in researching in the archives or writing books, she is biking in the parks, walking in the woods, dreaming of Italy and Italian food, and enjoying time with her husband and three children.
Select Publications and Presentations
- My Old Kentucky Home: The Astonishing Life and Reckoning of an Iconic American Song, Alfred. A. Knopf, 2022.
- “Forget About It: Slavery in Stephen Foster’s ‘My Old Kentucky Home, Goodnight!” Memory Studies Association, Charlottesville, VA, June 18-21, 2020.
- “’Let’s Buy It!’: Tourism, Race, and Marketing Early Twentieth-Century Kentucky,” Ohio Valley History 19 (Fall 2019): 27-56.
- “A Race about Race” Louisville Magazine, May 2019
- “’Old Kentucky Home—Let’s Buy It!’ Nostalgia and Tourism as Economic Development in Jim Crow Kentucky,” Southern Historical Association, Louisville, KY, November 9, 2019
- “Can We Talk About Stephen Foster?” Irish Arts Center, New York, September 27, 2018
- Irrepressible: Henrietta Bingham’s Jazz-Age Life, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015.
- “Nobody’s Bizness if I Do: Henrietta Bingham: Jazz Hound, Bloomsbury Muse, and Queer Culture Vixen,” Elizabeth Sackler Center for Feminist Art, January 24, 2016
- “Kentucky in Bloomsbury:Henrietta Bingham, Black Culture, and the Southern Gothic in Jazz-Age London,” Varieties of Southern Religious History Regina Sullivan and Monte Hampton, eds., University of South Carolina Press, 2015.
- “Kentucky in Bloomsbury: Henrietta Bingham and the 1920s,” Eighth Conference on Southern Women’s History, Southern Association of Women’s Historians, Columbia, SC, June 6, 2009.
- “American, Jewish, Southern, Mordecai: Constructing Identities to 1865,” in Jewish Roots in Southern Soil: A New History, edited by Marcie Ferris and Mark Greenberg, University Press of New England, 2006.
- “Thou knowest not what a day may bring forth:Intellect, Power, Conversion, and Apostasy in the Life of Rachel Mordecai Lazarus (1788-1838),” in Rethinking Religion in the American South, edited by Donald G. Mathews and Beth Barton Schweiger, University of North Carolina Press, 2004.
- Mordecai: An Early American Family, Hill and Wang, 2003.
- “The Female Academy and Beyond: Three Mordecai Sisters at Work in the Old South,” in Neither Lady, Nor Slave: Working Women in the Old South, edited by Susanna Delfino and Michele Gillespie, University of North Carolina Press, 2002.
- The Southern Agrarians and the New Deal: Essays After I’ll Take My Stand, ed. with Thomas Underwood, University Press of Virginia, 2001.