Julie Cravotto, an aspiring policymaker with dreams of resolving California’s housing crisis, is the recipient of the 2019 Herbert A. Young Award for outstanding senior in the UC Davis College of Letters and Science.

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.

John Crowley, award-winning author of Little, Big, the four-book Aegypt series and other novels, will give a talk on Thursday, April 11, at UC Davis on “Transformations of History in Fiction.” Crowley will deliver this year’s Department of History Lunn Lecture at 4:10 p.m. in the Buehler Alumni Center’s AGR Hall.

Two faculty in the UC Davis College of Letters and Science were honored Thursday for their efforts to create new global learning opportunities for students — both on campus and abroad. Rachel Jean-Baptiste, an associate professor of history, received a Chancellor’s Award for International Engagement. Margherita Heyer-Cáput, a professor of Italian, received an inaugural Excellence in Teaching in Study Abroad Award.

When Marianna Daniel returned to college after more than a half-century, she faced language, health and mobility challenges. But the immigrant Californian surmounted them all to finish her second bachelor’s degree — this one in history from UC Davis — at age 84.

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.

Clues to historian Fernando Purcell’s deep connections to UC Davis are spelled out in block lettering at his home in Chile: “ORCHARD PARK,” “DAVIS CA BLVD” and “BAUER AVE” read the American-street-style signs on his family vineyard in Colchagua Valley, about 6,000 miles from campus.

Maureen (Pacheco) Maycheco (B.A., history ’06) launched a new podcast this fall with friends and colleagues at One K Creative, a creative agency in Boulder, Colorado. The podcast, Good and Social, is a series of conversations with social and environmental innovators from across industries.

by Ellen Hartigan-O’Connor and Lisa G. Materson

Hand-written notes on a teenager’s calendar. Remembered whispered confidences. Letters of support signed by wealthy acquaintances. Letters of non-support signed by wealthy lawyers. Therapist records. Rate My Professor scores. The recent Kavanaugh hearings, and the broader #MeToo movement in which it unfolded, were less a contest of he-said/she-said and more a battle over evidence.

The California History-Social Science Project, headquartered at UC Davis, will share a national K-12 teaching award with the California Department of Education for helping to write the state’s new framework for history-social science instruction in the public schools. The American Historical Association recently announced that it will award its Beveridge Family Teaching Prize to the co-winners.