English | UC Davis College of Letters and Science

1996 - Stephen McFeely

Stephen McFeely (M.A. English, ’96) was co-writer, with Christopher Markus (M.A., English, ’96), of the just-released movie "Avengers: Endgame.” The two met at UC Davis in the creative writing program. They've written scripts for the "Captain America" films, the "Chronicles of Narnia" movie franchise, and won an Emmy for their screenplay of HBO movie, "The Life and Death of Peter Sellers."

Alumni News

English Professor Gives Folger’s Annual Shakespeare Birthday Lecture

Gina Bloom, UC Davis English professor, will give the 2019 Shakespeare Birthday Lecture at the Folger Shakespeare Library. Her talk, “Rough Magic: Performing Shakespeare With Gaming Technology,” will take place April 22 at the Folger Theatre in Washington, D.C. The birthday lecture has been held nearly every year since 1932.

Arts

Faculty in History and English Named Guggenheim Fellows

Two UC Davis College of Letters and Science faculty members have been awarded 2019 Guggenheim Fellowships. History professor Ari Kelman and English professor Elizbeth Carolyn Miller will receive the prestigious awards. They are among 173 winners in the U.S. and Canada selected from 3,000 applicants.

Society and Culture

Marina Kuznetsova, photo, author, UC Davis English graduate

2011 - Maria Kuznetsova

The debut novel by Maria Kuznetsova (M.A., English, '11) was published in March 2019 by Spiegel & Grau/Random House. OKSANA, BEHAVE! is a coming-of-age story about a young woman whose family has emigrated from Ukraine to Florida. Kuznetsova, a native of Ukraine, also received an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Her writing has been published in The Threepenny Review, The Normal School, The Bennington Review, The Iowa Review and Indiana Review.

Alumni News

Professor Promotes Good Writing With Class, Philanthropy and Scholarship

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.”

Society and Culture

Picture of Nebraska state poet Matt Mason, UC Davis graduate, English, '94

Creative Writing Alumnus Picked as Nebraska State Poet

Matt Mason (M.A., English, ’94) has been named state poet of Nebraska. Mason’s duties during his five-year term will include giving public presentations and readings, leading workshops and discussions, and providing outreach at schools, libraries and literary festivals across the state.

Alumni News

Portrait photos of five faculty named UC Davis Chancellor's Fellow

Five New Chancellor’s Fellows Make Their Mark

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.

College News

Book about Mining’s Effect on Literature Garners Support from NEH

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.

Society and Culture

Long-Lost 17th-Century Poet Gets Digital Treatment

For a long time, analyzing a literary work consisted of creating a “definitive edition,” which might be supplanted a decade or two later. Or maybe never. English professor Frances Dolan is part of a project that offers a new approach for literary analysis, one better aligned with the high-speed information exchange possible today.

Arts

English Professor Explores Rediscovered Writer for Groundbreaking 'Digital Collaboration'

Frances Dolan spent much of last year in the company of Hester Pulter, a little-known 17th-century British writer. Dolan, distinguished professor of English in the UC Davis College of Letters and Science, has done extensive research and writing for The Pulter Project: Poet in the Making, a “digital collaboration” launched in November.

Arts