Walk through an illustrated manual of what goes into designing an exhibition space, sift through catalogs featuring faculty artwork, or get inspired as L&S scholars dig deep into those who’ve influenced our thoughts about art to this day.

Explore new interpretations of classic land ethics, multiple cases of climate action and land sovereignty and witness how past generations reacted to the changing climate. Scholars from across the College of Letters and Science provide insight into how human action and inaction has influenced the natural environment around us.

From early Japanese folklore and Dante’s Inferno to post-Soviet film and modern-day scapegoating in the U.S., humanity has long grappled with its fears through storytelling as well as violence. This collection of books traverses these themes, exploring where human anxiety and fear often take us — to places where we may either imagine a monster or become one.

Through ethnographies, essays and analyses, our scholars demonstrate how music, culture and politics around the world influence one another. In addition to these scholarly works, the list also includes one memoir by an American Blues artist working to escape his father’s shadow, with writing by our very own Julia Simon, and two texts aimed at helping other scholars develop programming and courses for students or communities.

This month we were thinking a lot about connections — the ones we have to one another as well as to our shared histories and lineages. In this collection of books, our authors and scholars mine their own families as their inspiration for memoirs, poetry, fiction and analyses. 

The world feels like it is changing fast, but it doesn’t mean we can’t take time to build our awareness and move forward mindfully. We get to decide where we want to put our time, energy, attention and resources. January is often a time for self-reflection and goal setting, so this month’s list featured books that touch on both. 

As protests and political divides continued to disrupt lives across the U.S., we selected books that grappled with these issues, telling stories of both survival and resistance. Our scholars document and analyze some of the nation’s biggest societal upheavals, putting history — even recent history — into context.

Our scholars bring context and new connections to a topic that can be contentious but is necessary to daily life and humanity's existence —  medicine, health and wellness. From medieval medical tools and methodologies to modern analyses of health care access for women and marginalized groups, this selection of books looks at the medicine through the ages.

This past spring, we were thinking about our built environment and the questions that might help us build better cities in the future. These scholars not only point out what isn’t working in our communities and current infrastructure, they highlight potential solutions — some based on real world examples while others have only been imagined.

From the way we write to the way we socialize and even the way we think, we are greatly influenced by our changing technologies. To help us understand our current moment, we look at books that address how internet culture, video games and the rise of artificial intelligence, or AI, are reshaping our world. 

In honor of Pride Month, we featured works that focus on gender and sexuality and question societal norms. Read about queer theory, the history of hormone replacement therapy and how topics like gender and sexuality are treated in rural areas.

As the U.S. had its 250th birthday, we curated a list of essay collections and interviews that featured the American experience. The list kicks off with a recently published collection by Zinzi Clemmons, associate professor of English and director of creative writing at UC Davis, Freedom: Essays. Check out her essay collection as well as others that explore themes of culture, language, identity and belonging.

College of Letters and Science staff select works from our Bookshelf of L&S authors. Through poetry, explore narratives that traverse hard topics such as mourning and the struggles of motherhood, as well as topics such as a young girl befriending a donkey in a lyrical fable.

In our first edition of "Books of the Month," the College of Letters and Science at UC Davis celebrates L&S authors researching issues related to Chicana/o and Latin American studies in honor of Hispanic Heritage Month. Find more L&S authors on our "Bookshelf."