This month's Books of the Month list features works authored or edited by faculty, focusing on gender, sexuality and societal norms. Learn more about queer theory, the history of hormone replacement therapy and how topics like gender and sexuality are treated in rural areas.
From the way we write to the way we socialize and even the way we think, we are greatly influenced by our changing technologies. This month we look at books by scholars from Science and Technology Studies, the Department of Cinema and Digital Media, the Department of English and the University Writing Program.
An author blending fact and fiction in her second novel, an anthropologist studying the origins of rituals and pilgrimages, and a mathematician investigating the complexity of large datasets have been named the 2026 Dean’s Faculty Fellows for the College of Letters and Science at UC Davis.
Smell is a vital, if underappreciated, medium through which we inhabit and imagine the world. In Olfactory Worldmaking, Hsuan L. Hsu traces how olfactory experience communicates across visceral, material, and affective registers to offer new ways of relating, which challenge the extractive logics of racial and colonial capitalism. Blending environmental humanities, sensory studies, and critical ethnic studies, the book highlights how scent animates suppressed histories and marginalized memories.
In this edition of Books of the Month, we're 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.
The Academic Senate and Federation have announced their top awards, comprising 15 academics across various disciplines throughout the university. The awards cite the impact these academics have had on their fields, on UC Davis students and on the broader community through public service.
From medieval medical tools and methodologies to modern analyses of health care access for women and marginalized groups, our scholars bring context and new connections to a topic that is both contentious yet necessary to daily life and humanity's existence.
Welcome to Books of the Month, where once a month, we select works from our Bookshelf of authors within the College of Letters and Science at UC Davis. January is often a time for self-reflection and goal setting, so this month’s list features books that touch on both.
This month, explore how connections are formed, maintained and shared with letters and science authors. In this collection of books, our authors and scholars mine their own families as their inspiration for memoirs, poetry, fiction and analyses.
Just weeks after being named U.S. Poet Laureate by the Library of Congress, Arthur Sze visited UC Davis, sharing his love of poetry and translation with students, faculty and community members. Sze was joined by poet Carol Moldaw.
