Peter Hays, English professor emeritus, retired nearly 15 years ago, but the Hemingway scholar is anything but retiring. During the last few years he has written several books and many articles, and each fall teaches a freshman seminar on Ernest Hemingway’s short stories.
“The actual subject of the seminar is reading and writing,” Hays said. “So often students don’t really read, they skim, and they can’t do that with Hemingway. They need to read beyond the surface. Whether they remember anything about Hemingway is inconsequential — it’s all about reading and writing.”
Five faculty in the UC Davis College of Letters and Science — an artist, a poet, a psychologist, a mathematician and a physicist — have been named to the 2019 class of Chancellor’s Fellows, the university’s annual honors program recognizing associate professors for high achievement in the quality and excellence of research and teaching.
“Breathin’: The Eddy Zheng Story,” an award-winning documentary about a teenager tried as an adult who served 20 years in prison, will be shown at UC Davis on Jan. 31. Director Ben Wang, who earned a degree in Asian American studies from UC Davis in 2004, and Zheng will attend and take part in a discussion.
No animal alive today looks quite like a duck-billed platypus, a semi-aquatic, egg-laying mammal hailing from eastern Australia. But about 250 million years ago, something very similar swam the shallow seas in what is now China, finding prey by touch with a cartilaginous bill. The newly discovered marine reptile Eretmorhipis carrolldongi from the lower Triassic period is described in the journal Scientific Reports Jan. 24.
Four recent graduates of the UC Davis College of Letters and Science are getting close-up views of California government in action this academic year as Capital Fellows.
When doctoral music composition students at UC Davis hear their music played for the first time, they hear it played by professionals who are champions of new music with years of performance experience.
“It’s an absolute luxury to have these professional musicians play our work,” said student Jonathan Favero. “In many programs you have to beg, borrow and steal to find players.”
The Daedalus Quartet will premiere a new work by UC Davis Department of Music chair Laurie San Martin as well as pieces by doctoral music composition students in two January concerts.
The Creative Writing Reading Series at UC Davis continues in 2019 with three diverse and accomplished authors: a 2018 National Book Award finalist; a writer who has produced short stories, a memoir, a novel and graphic novel; and a winner of the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence.
The series is organized by the Department of English creative writing program in the College of Letters and Science. All readings are at 7 p.m. in the Peter J. Shields Library and are free and open to the public.
Around the time of his death in 2016, artist Rick Bartow and his estate donated 45 of his works to the C.N. Gorman Museum at UC Davis. Many of those pieces go on display for the first time in “Comings and Goings: Works on Paper by Rick Bartow” opening at the museum Jan. 7.
Ellen Hartigan-O’Connor and Lisa Materson, collaborators in research and teaching of women’s and gender history at UC Davis for 10 years, were keenly aware of many fascinating stories about women in history, as uncovered by female historians. But getting those stories into the big narratives of history was more than one or two people could accomplish. Then Oxford University Press asked the scholars, both associate professors of history in the College of Letters and Science, to create a women’s history handbook.
Håkon Hope, professor emeritus of chemistry at UC Davis, died Nov. 22 at his home in Davis. He was 87.
Hope was a leading researcher in X-ray crystallography, and was known for his pioneering work developing low-temperature methods in biological macromolecule crystallography. His work is widely recognized as resulting in a complete transformation of the practice of biocrystallography. Hope joined the Department of Chemistry in 1965, retiring as professor emeritus in 1993.
The National Endowment for the Humanities awarded a fellowship this week to English professor Liz Miller to support her work on a book about industrial mining and its effects on 19th- and early 20th-century literature. The $60,000 award, announced Dec. 12, will enable Miller to spend the 2019 calendar year writing Extraction Ecologies and the Literature of the Long Exhaustion, 1830s-1930s.
A spectacular new hydrothermal vent field, named JaichMatt, has been discovered during an expedition in the Gulf of California led by Robert Zierenberg, professor emeritus.
Study finds that a gene for lighter skin spread rapidly among people in southern Africa in the last 2,000 years. University of California, Davis, researchers and colleagues report that the gene was introduced from eastern Africa to southern African populations. Strong positive selection caused this gene to rise in frequency among some KhoeSan populations.
