Edmond Dédé's four-act opera, “Morgiane," written in 1888, is the oldest known opera composed by an African American. Sally McKee, now a retired history professor at UC Davis, helped unearth his story in a biography on Dédé in 2017. Now, in 2025, the work is finally being performed in full.

When Bayleigh Baldwin, a linguistics major and Letters and Science student ambassador, first arrived at UC Davis, she didn’t really know what it meant to be at a research university. Now a senior, she is interviewing with graduate programs across the country where she might launch her research career.

English Professor Gina Bloom dives into how ModLabs’ Shakespeare video game, "Play the Knave," knocks Shakespeare off a pedestal and gives students creative control over his plays. The game, released in 2020, is currently being adapted for virtual reality headsets.

Academic advisor Colin Goulding recently led a cross-campus effort so new transfers could plan their classes before fall registration closed. For this work, UC Davis honored Goulding with this year’s Outstanding Campus Collaborator Academic Advising Award.

The Global Tea Institute celebrates its 10-year anniversary this year. In the last decade, what started as a group of 12 like-minded scholars gathering together has turned into a hub for the study of tea across the disciplines. Every year its annual colloquium brings between 400 and 800 people from all over the world to UC Davis. 

For Katie Cohen, part of undergrad life is made up of “the grind.” Now in her second year on campus, Cohen, a sociology major and L&S Ambassador, has also learned that friendships are what make for more than just the basic college experience.

The Davis Humanities Institute is on track to start anew. By fall 2025, it will become the campus hub for making connections and sharing ideas across the arts, humanities and beyond. Its goals include making a deeper impact on campus and in the community, providing more research opportunities for undergraduate students and supporting cross-collaborations between disciplines within the College of Letters and Science as well as other colleges within UC Davis.

Emily Marwedel is a service desk analyst with L&S IT. In 2018, she and colleagues at UC Davis Health co-founded Womxn in Tech at UC Davis, a group dedicated to ensuring that issues surrounding women in technology are reviewed and discussed with a focus on making continuous improvements towards equity.

By creating a board game designed to simulate a wildfire evacuation, UC Davis Associate Professor Thomas Maiorana and his team hope to help communities at-risk for wildfires think-through evacuation strategies in a low-stress environment, long before their lives are in danger. The prototype, "Tomales Resilience," was recently tested in the community that inspired it.

The National Endowment for the Humanities awarded a $500,000 grant to launch and fund the UC Davis Center for Artificial Intelligence and Experimental Futures (CAIEF). CAIEF will promote the democratic governance of AI systems by engaging diverse stakeholders in processes of creative worldmaking — crafting the world of tomorrow, together.