This March, Tracy C. Dyson, who graduated from the College of Letters and Science at UC Davis with a doctorate in chemistry in 1997, will travel to the ISS as a flight engineer and member of the Expedition 70/71 crew. The journey marks her third trip to space where she has seen our planet from both inside the International Space Station (ISS) and outside of it during spacewalks.
Malaquías Montoya, a professor emeritus of Chicana and Chicano studies at UC Davis, is being widely celebrated with two major exhibitions at the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art at UC Davis and at the Oakland Museum of California. But he is much more than an artist. Montoya, 85, has influenced several generations of students who went on to make art or make a mark on the world in other ways.
Alumnus Alan Templeton (B.A., art history and psychology, ‘82), a longtime supporter of arts and humanities programs at UC Davis, recently started a program to give an art history graduate student a behind the-scenes-look at the art world. Second year master's student Lawrence Stallman joined Templeton for London Art Week, visiting museums and galleries, meeting with curators, collectors and professors, and attending art auctions at Christie’s and Sotheby’s.
Submissions are being accepted for the 2023 Maurice Prize for Fiction, a $10,000 award for the best novel written by a UC Davis graduate who has not yet published or been accepted for publication by the contest deadline. Submissions are limited to novels; no short story collections.
Kirk Colvin spent a year as U.S. Coast Guard attaché to the American Embassy during the final months of the brutal Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier regime in the 1980s. His time there informed his novel Bloodless Coup, winner of the Maurice Prize for Fiction. The $10,000 prize is awarded to UC Davis alumni and was established in 2005 by bestselling author John Lescroart in honor of his father.
When Wayne Thiebaud arrived at UC Davis in 1961, the university had been an independent campus for only two years. The art department was in an embryonic stage. Then in 1962, Thiebaud had a groundbreaking exhibition in New York and, during the decades that followed, his reputation only grew. Along the way he was joined by other art faculty who soon developed national reputations as well, and UC Davis became nearly as well-known for art as for agriculture.
Jo Ann Stabb, a founding member of the UC Davis Department of Design and a widely recognized scholar of textiles, died Feb. 13 in Walnut Creek, California. She was 80.
“Jo Ann Stabb essentially started the textile and fashion curriculum in the department,” design professor Susan Taber Avila said in a 2017 interview. “She captured the zeitgeist of the wearable art movement and brought that creativity into her teaching. She understood and championed the value of studying actual textiles and artifacts.”
When Shant Garabedian was a student at UC Davis, he and a few others founded the Armenian Student Association to draw attention to the Armenian Genocide of the early 20th century. Garabedian and his wife, Robin, recently made a donation to establish a lecture series as part of the Human Rights Studies program. “This is a way to continue what I started 30 years ago,” said Garabedian.
The annual Templeton Colloquium in Art History at UC Davis this year brings together scholars speaking about the women’s movement and how women were portrayed in the media during 20th-century modernization in Tehran, Cairo, Istanbul and Beirut.
The presenters, coming from around California, Michigan, Indiana and Lebanon, will show the shifting ways women activists and organizers were encouraged to be modern, then criticized and satirized for doing so.
Jack de Golia (BA, dramatic art, ’74) has been working in his "post-career career" as a voice actor since 2009. An audio novel he narrated, Noble Chaos, received a 2020 Best Team Award from Audio Book Reviewers. The book, set at the University of Kansas in 1969–70, brought back vibrant memories for him of his freshman year at UC Davis. He has narrated more than 140 audiobooks, all available at Audible.com.
