Art history professor Katharine Burnett examines how art collector Pang Yuanji's taste has had a long-standing and ongoing impact on Chinese art museum collections and research around the globe. Burnett analyzes the approach that Pang used to build a collection, how that compared to other collectors, and how this knowledges helps in understanding current Chinese art history.
Native American studies professor emeritus Stefano Varese combines personal and family recollections with incisive accounts of academic, political and institutional experiences in his book The Art of Memory. The memoir offers a remarkable account of his life as a foremost Latin American ethnographer and a leading expert in Indigenous cultures, peoples and cosmologies.
La Gente by Lorena Márquez, assistant professor of Chicana/o studies , traces the rise of the Chicana/o Movement in Sacramento and the role of everyday people in galvanizing a collective to seek lasting and transformative change during the 1960s and 1970s. In their efforts to be self-determined, la gente contested multiple forms of oppression at school, at work sites, and in their communities.
The breathless pace of China’s economic reform has brought about deep ruptures in socioeconomic structures and people’s inner landscape. Anxious China by Li Zhang, professor of anthropology, offers an in-depth ethnographic account of how an unfolding “inner revolution” is reconfiguring selfhood, psyche, family dynamics, sociality and the mode of governing in post-socialist times.
In Race, Class, and Social Welfare: American Populism Since the New Deal, Professor Erik Engstrom and Distinguished Professor Emeritus Robert Huckfeldt — both in the political science department — examine the racial divisions that have fractured the potential for a unified progressive populist movement in the United States.
Knowledge Discovery in the Social Sciences: A Data Mining Approach by Xiaoling Shu, Professor of Sociology, introduces readers to methods for analyzing big data. Her research focuses on the impacts of marketization and globalization on gender inequalities, subjective sense of well-being, and gender, family, marriage, and sexual behaviors and attitudes.
Environmental Justice in a Moment of Danger by American studies professor Julie Sze, examines mobilizations and movements from protests at Standing Rock to activism in Puerto Rico in the wake of Hurricane Maria. The book looks at dispossession, deregulation, privatization and inequality with cautiously hopeful stories.
The Genius Checklist: Nine Paradoxical Tips on How You Can Become a Creative Genius. Dean Keith Simonton, distinguished professor emeritus of psychology, examines the key factors in creative genius and finds that they are more than a little contradictory. Simonton, who has studied creativity and genius for more than four decades, draws on both scientific research and stories from the lives of famous creative geniuses.
When doctoral music composition students at UC Davis hear their music played for the first time, they hear it played by professionals who are champions of new music with years of performance experience. Collaborating with professional players from around the country, the composers become part of a contemporary music world network.
In The Simpsons’ Beloved Springfield: Essays on the TV Series and Town That Are Part of Us All , Karma Waltonen, University Writing Program continuing lecturer, and Denise Du Vernay explore the many ways in which The Simpsons reflects everyday life through its exploration of gender roles, music, death, food politics, science and religion, anxiety, friendship and more.
