Ronald Whitney-Whyte (B.S., design, ’75) has made a planned gift of $1 million to the College to support undergraduates majoring in design. Whitney-Whyte’s gift will establish two endowed funds, one to provide students with supplies and the other to support scholarships for junior and senior design majors.
With the United States taking its place as a global power after World War I, scholars began exploring questions that would develop into a discipline known as American studies in the 1930s. Over the next several decades, American studies programs were created across the United States, including in 1969 at UC Davis. The program, a department in the College of Letters and Science since 2016, is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. It is the only Department of American Studies in the University of California system.
Seven assistant professors in the College of Letters and Science have been named to UC Davis’ newest class of Hellman Fellows. The Hellman Fellows Fund provides grants to more than 100 junior faculty members annually at all 10 UCs and four private institutions. The fellowships of up to $50,000 are intended to give early-career faculty extra support for their research.
UC Davis anthropologist Jeffrey Kahn’s book on Haitian boat migration to the United States is the co-winner of the 2019 Avant Garde Book Prize from the Haitian Studies Association. The award selection committee called Kahn’s book, "Islands of Sovereignty: Haitian Migration and the Borders of Empire" (Chicago University Press, 2019) a “timely and important contribution” to the field.
New measurements of the rate of expansion of the universe, led by astronomers at the University of California, Davis, add to a growing mystery: Estimates of a fundamental constant made with different methods keep giving different results.
The UC Davis College of Letters and Science has established a new prize to recognize and support faculty whose research, teaching, and service exemplifies the transformational intellectual and human value of the liberal arts and sciences. For 2019-20, the prize will include a privately funded award of $10,000.
The UC Davis Department of English Creative Writing Reading Series starts Nov. 18 with Jos Charles, whose poetry collection feeld was a 2019 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and longlisted for a National Book Award. The series, co-sponsored by the UC Davis Library, continues in 2020 with a wide range of writers, including poets who are also visual artists, novelists and non-fiction writers exploring immigration, race, love, pop culture and language.
The new Bulosan Center for Filipino Studies at UC Davis is getting $1 million in state funding to expand research on one of the nation’s largest and fastest growing Asian American communities.
A new institute at UC Davis will advance the fundamentals of data science and prepare students to solve data analysis and machine learning problems in diverse fields.
This is the 30th anniversary of "Prized Writing," an annual collection of writing by students from across the UC Davis campus. All of the works are done for classes, with about 20 selected from 500 submitted. A celebration of three decades of the publication takes place Oct. 16.
Published in 1969, the Slant Step Book celebrated a thrift store find that became, and remains, a part of UC Davis art department lore. The Slant Step is a green linoleum-covered plywood stool with a slanted – and seemingly nonfunctional – step that has inspired artists for decades.