The Department of Religion, Culture and Society in the College of Letters and Science at UC Davis is now accepting graduate applications for the 2026-2027 academic year. The admitted scholars will be the first cohort in the newly announced master’s program.
Every day faculty and students from the College of Letters and Science at UC Davis are highlighted in the news media, having their research featured and commenting on the most pressing issues facing the world. Check out some of these news media highlights from the past month.
Welcome to Books of the Month, where once a month, L&S staff select works from our Bookshelf of authors within the College of Letters and Science at UC Davis. This month, in honor of the Taproot New Music Festival, we explore music from around the world. Through ethnographies, essays and analyses, our scholars demonstrate how music, culture and politics influence one another.
The Bezos Earth Fund has announced a $2 million grant to the University California, Davis, the American Heart Association and other partners to advance “Swap it Smart” as part of its AI for Climate & Nature Grand Challenge. The funding will support research that could help redesign foods, for example optimizing for flavor profile, nutritional properties and lower costs and environmental impact.
Composers and musicians will come together this fall to build community and experiment with new sounds at the Taproot New Music Festival at UC Davis. Curator Sam Nichols says “there is a sense of adventure” to the festival, which promises to provide audiences with a sense of what is happening now in the genre. The first concert kicks off Oct. 25, followed by a full weekend of events Nov. 6 - 9, 2025.
Richard Robins is among the 2025 honorees of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP), the world’s largest association of social and personality psychologists.
Sameer Iyer, an associate professor of mathematics at the College of Letters and Science at UC Davis, recently received a $400,000 grant from the National Science Foundation’s Faculty Early Career Development Program to advance his theoretical work on two enigmatic aspects of the Navier-Stokes equations: the boundary layer between an object and a fluid, and the large time dynamics of a fluid’s flow.
Òscar Jordà has been named a Fellow of the Econometric Society for his innovative method of analyzing dynamic systems and his contributions to the field of economics across his career.
Maceo Montoya’s latest release, Imaginative Possibilities: Conversations with Twenty-First-Century Latinx Writers (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2024), co-authored with poet Javier O. Huerta, has won an American Book Award. Professor Montoya is a writer and visual artist teaching in the Department of Chicana/o/x Studies, the Department of English and the Creative Writing Program, all in the College of Letters and Science at UC Davis.
Using a global network of telescopes, astronomers have detected the lowest-mass dark object yet found in the universe. The work is described in two papers published Oct. 9 in Nature Astronomy and Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
