UC Davis Library Graduate Student Prizes Announced
College of Letters and Science graduate students Mikhaila Redovian and Kirsten Schuhmacher were recently announced recipients of the 2025 UC Davis Library Graduate Student Prize. In its second year, the Library Graduate Student Prize is awarded to graduate student researchers who have used the library to create outstanding, publicly engaged scholarship.
Redovian and Schuhmacher, both Ph.D. candidates in the Department of English, used library resources to help research, curate and design "Worlds Encompassed: Premodern Making and Mingling." The installation was on display at Shields Library last year from April through September 2024. An online exhibit is ongoing.
Library resources essential to research
Worlds Encompassed was largely inspired by Associate Professor of Chinese Yuming He’s class “The Culture of the High Middle Ages.” It is split into five sections: objects in circulation, peoples and other beings in representation, cartographical thinking, the rise of vernacular languages and literatures, and the workings of technology. It features a selection of rare books and materials from UC Davis Shields Library’s Archives and Special Collections as well as student and faculty work.
"Working in and with Archives and Special Collections revealed a richness that could have filled numerous exhibits, and every act of curation felt both like opening and closing a door to another world," Redovian said. "Working collaboratively across academic disciplines and with expert librarians pushed the project to engage with more questions, more sources, and more histories than I could have ever hoped for or expected when the project was initially proposed, and the final products are much more robust as a result."
The exhibit dispels the commonly held misconception of the premodern period as Eurocentric. By using images and texts from the library’s Archives and Special Collections, “Worlds Encompassed” illustrates the true cosmopolitan nature of the premodern period.
While objects in the display cases were facsimiles of older objects and texts, the library’s collection has a plethora of resources from and about this time period. For example, the Tabula Peutingeriana, a collection of 4th Century journals and texts from Padua, Italy, is estimated to be from 1195-1231. The collection also includes a copy of Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies from 1632 and a facsimile of an ancient Mexican codex, Codex Nuttall, from 1902.
"By bringing the content and context of these deeply multicultural, cosmopolitan archival sources online, we were able to further consider questions about what access means when considering archival materials and the broader context necessary to understand them, as well as how that information is transmitted," Redovian said.
Ph.D. candidates from public health sciences, Maria Cruz, and ecology, Tara Pozzi, were also awarded the 2025 UC Davis Library Graduate Student Prize. Cruz's project looks at how first responders can better address the needs of the Spanish-speaking Latine community during times of crisis. Pozzi's looks at factors that motivate environmental justice groups to form connections and networks to further their goals.
Check out the ‘Worlds Encompassed’ online exhibit.
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