Liza Grandia, associate professor in the Department of Native American Studies and an internationally acclaimed public scholar, was barely drinking age when she stopped the World Bank and an international oil company from building a pipeline through the rural regions of Guatemala. The lesson Grandia learned then — that one is never too young to become engaged in public scholarship — is something that she emphasizes to her students at UC Davis.
Lucy Corin, a UC Davis Department of English professor of creative writing, has received a Guggenheim Fellowship. She plans to use the fellowship to work on her next novel, tentatively titled Les and Rae. She is one of eight fiction writers to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship this year.
“(The book) is about a couple who respond to current cultural pressures differently — one joins an underground gun group and one sneaks away into the woods at the edge of their neighborhood,” she said.
Two College of Letters and Science faculty members have been recognized for their outstanding global engagement work with Chancellor’s Awards for Excellence in Teaching of Study Abroad Awards: Jaimey Fisher, professor of German and cinema and digital media, and David Masiel, continuing lecturer in the University Writing Program.
In rural Nigeria in 2014, 276 teenaged girls were abducted from their school by the militant Islamist group, Boko Haram. A few escaped, some were later released, but nearly a decade later about 100 are still missing.
Liza Grandia, associate professor of Native American studies, and Keith David Watenpaugh, professor and director of human rights studies, have been honored by the International Association for Research on Service-Learning and Community Engagement (IARSLCE) for research and partnerships with a tangible impact on the daily lives of people in countries such as Guatemala and Syria.
Albert J. McNeil, UC Davis professor emeritus of the Department of Music and an original faculty member and chair of the Department of African American and African Studies, died on Nov. 29. He was 102. At UC Davis from 1969 to 1990, McNeil transformed the University Chorus from an occasional course to a full public performance group and also created the Chamber Singers.
Chemistry professor Delmar Larsen has been awarded one of four 2022 Chancellor’s Innovation Awards. The awards, presented June 16, recognize faculty, community partners and industry leaders developing innovative solutions to improve the lives of others and address important needs in our global society.
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.
Isao Fujimoto, a beloved senior lecturer at University of California, Davis, known for his intense energy, curiosity and ability to bring people together across diverse communities, has died.
Fujimoto, 89, came to Davis in 1967 and helped found the Asian American Studies and Community Development programs through which he mentored generations of students and faculty.
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.”
