Juan Diego Díaz, an assistant professor of music and an ethnomusicologist, reexamines long-held ideas about music of Africa and the African diaspora in Africanness in Action. Using the perspectives of musicians in Bahia, Brazil, he shows how they promote social change and critique racial inequality by creatively engaging tropes about African music and culture.
In The World in the Wave Function: A Metaphysics for Quantum Physics, philosophy professor Alyssa Ney develops a framework initially suggested by Schrödinger — that we, and all objects, are ultimately constituted out of the wave function, and that quantum worlds consist of many more than three dimensions.
An overwhelmed new mom discovers unexpected parallels between life in twenty-first-century America and her grandmother’s account of their family’s escape from the Nazis in this sharp, heartfelt novel. Something Unbelievable explores with piercing wit and tender feeling just how much our circumstances shape our lives and what we pass on to the younger generations, willingly or not.
Alpha Masculinity: Hegemony in Language and Discourse, by Eric Louis Russell, unravels the language mechanisms behind the myth and the reality of the American alpha male. A professor in the Department of French and Italian, the author is also affiliated with the Department of Linguistics and the Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies program at UC Davis.
Dante and Violence by Distinguished Professor Emerita of Comparative Literature Brenda Deen Schildgen, is an examination of violence in the domestic, communal and cosmic spheres in Dante Alighieri's literary works. It demonstrates that the punishments and rewards in Dante’s heaven and hell may be a direct appeal to his readers to recognize the crimes that pervade their world.
How does social spending relate to economic growth and which countries have got this right and wrong? In Making Social Spending Work , distinguished Professor Emeritus of Economics Peter Lindert examines the experience of countries across the globe to reveal what has worked, what needs changing, and who the winners and losers are under different systems.
Conquering the Pacific (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, September 2021), by history professor Andrés Reséndez, recounts the 1564-65 Spanish expedition that was the first to cross the Pacific Ocean from the Americas to Asia and return. The journey began with a secret mission and included mutiny, a shipwreck and an African-Portuguese navigator whose story was almost lost to history.
When Peruvian public intellectual José Carlos Agüero was a child, the government imprisoned and executed his parents, who were members of Shining Path. His memoir, originally published in Spanish in 2015, is translated into English for the first time by Michael Lazzara, professor of Latin American literature and cultural studies, and Charles Walker, professor of history.
During the COVID-19 "shelter-in-place," writers Pam Houston, professor of English, and Amy Irvine began a correspondence based on their shared devotion to the rugged, windswept mountains that surround their homes in Colorado and Utah. Air Mail is part tribute to wilderness, part indictment against tyranny and greed.
Exploring the Berryessa Region tells the story of the southern end of the Berryessa Snow Mountain National Monument, a region rich in geologic and biologic diversity. Authors include the late UC Davis professor emeritus Eldridge Moores and his wife Judy Moores, naturalist Marc Hoshovsky, UC Davis professor emeritus Peter Schiffman and UC Davis alumnus Bob Schneider.
