Our February 2025 "Books of the Month" selections honor Black History Month. Get familiar with some lesser known aspects of American history, celebrate song and dance, or immerse yourself in someone else’s story. This month’s reads include cultural and historical analyses as well as two memoirs, a biography and a novel.
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.
The Kumbh Mela pulls together multiple strands of India’s deep cultural past with its status today as the second-most populous nation in the world with international influence and ambition to reach for the stars. Over 400 million are expected across the duration of this year’s festival, which runs from January 13 through February 26, 2025.
With the start of the new year and upcoming presidential inauguration, we’ve chosen to focus on politics, advocacy and community organizing. At the College of Letters and Science, we’re thinking deeply about these topics and the work of our faculty and lecturers demonstrates just that.
With flavor and flair, a community of academics, chefs and food justice advocates are sparking conversation at UC Davis and beyond through the new seminar Thinking Food at the Intersections: Justice and Critical Food Studies. The seminar series is supported by a $225,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation received earlier this year.
In a new book, historian Stacy Fahrenthold unravels the history of Lebanese, Syrian and Palestinian immigrants’ activism in the global textile industry and labor strikes. Her book reveals how women garment workers, child laborers and union activists struggled against white and even Arab American bosses, as well as why their impact has gone ignored.
The University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI) has recently funded two projects led by faculty in the UC Davis College of Letters and Science that document the lives of marginalized people, both in the past and present.
Five students from the College of Letters and Science were awarded the Norma J. Lang Prize for Undergraduate Information Research. Their work spans multiple disciplines across the prize category of Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences.
Charles Walker, a professor of history in the UC Davis College of Letters and Science, was recently awarded a $100,000 grant to digitize archives from three major human rights organizations in Peru. With this funding from the UCLA Library’s Modern Endangered Archives Program, this project will preserve documents that chart a history of human rights in the country.
This year, the Fulbright Program named two College of Letters and Science faculty as scholars who will advance their research with international colleagues. Fulbright US Scholar Awards, which are administered through the U.S. Department of State, are among the most prestigious international awards.
