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March 2012
Dear HArCS faculty,
I hope you will enjoy reading about the accomplishments of faculty and grad students in HArCS. Please send announcements of your publications, performances and exhibitions to Erin Hendel ( eehendel@ucdavis.edu).
With best wishes,
Jessie Ann Owens
Dean, HArCS
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HArCS faculty Win ACLS Fellowships
Three faculty members from the Division of Humanities, Arts, and Cultural Studies have won coveted fellowship awards from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS). Noah Guynn of the Department of French and Italian has been named an ACLS Fellow, Hsuan L. Hsu of the English department has been awarded a Frederick Burkhardt Residential Fellowship, and Keith David Watenpaugh of the Department of Religious Studies has been named an ACLS/Social Science Research Council (SSRC)/National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) International and Area Studies Fellow.
All of these fellowships are extremely selective. Nearly 1,200 applicants competed for 65 ACLS awards, and only six ACLS/SSRC/NEH International and Area Studies Fellows were chosen from among the ACLS Fellows. The Council awards only nine to ten Burkhardt fellowships each year in a separate competition. Fellowships will support these outstanding UC Davis scholars as they work to complete major projects in subjects ranging from medieval French farce to Mark Twain's engagement with Asia to human rights in the modern Middle East. For more on these scholars and their awards, see the full article here.
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Alumnus Steven Mackey Wins Grammy Award for Small Ensemble Performance
UC Davis Alumnus Steven Mackey, along with collaborators Rinde Eckert and eighth blackbird, recently won a Grammy Award for Best Small Ensemble Performance. The collective's 11-track album, Lonely Motel: Music from "Slide," was nominated in four categories, including a Best Contemporary Composition nod for Mackey. Drawn from a music theater piece that premiered at the 2009 Ojai (Calif.) Music Festival, the album features Mackey on electric guitar, Eckert on vocals, and the new-age sextet eighth blackbird on instrumentals. Mackey, now the chair of Princeton University's music department, began his musical career as a rock guitarist and has composed music for orchestra, chamber ensemble, dance, and opera. He graduated from UC Davis in 1978. Eckert, too, has ties to the university, having served as the 2008 Granada Artist-in-Residence with the Department of Theatre & Dance. |
Composer Kurt Rohde Continues to Receive Accolades and Commissions
In addition to his recent UC Davis Chancellor's Fellowship (see article here), Professor of Music Kurt Rohde continues to expand his significant record of accomplishments with a series of new commissions. Rohde has won the 2012 Lydian String Quartet Commission to compose a new work to be premiered by the quartet in Spring 2013 at Brandeis University. His work was selected out of 438 blind submissions. See more information about the prize at http://lydianquartet.com/prize.html
The prolific composer has been awarded a Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study Fellowship to work on two chamber opera projects at Harvard-Radcliffe for the academic year 2012-13. One opera will be a collaboration with artist David Humphrey, writer Dana Spiotta and musician Clem Coleman. The second opera project will be a collaboration with poet Paul Mann. During summer of 2013 and 2014, Rohde will be in residence at the Montalvo Arts Center in Saratoga, CA to collaborate on a new film project with artist Shelley Jordon.
Rohde has also received a Meet the Composer/Commissioning Music USA Award to compose a new work for eighth blackbird, Southwest Chamber Music, Firebird Ensemble, Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, and Sequitur to be premiered in fall of 2012 and winter of 2013. He will work with writer Sue Moon and artist Frances McCormack to create a work for narrator, projected images, and small ensemble. Rohde's new work for the eighth blackbird ensemble, This Bag is Not a Toy-A Very Short Concerto for Small Ensemble Without Orchestra, was premiered in December, 2011, and will receive additional performances throughout spring of 2012. |
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Research and Creative Work
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New Human Rights Journal Showcases Undergraduate Writing and Artwork
UC Davis undergraduates are fired up about human rights. Making the Case, a new human rights journal edited, managed, and published by undergraduate students, released its inaugural issue in January 2012. Funded by the Davis Sunrise Rotary Club, the first issue includes scholarly essays from across the disciplines as well as poetry, fiction, and photography.
"The journal is an outgrowth of tremendous student interest in the question of human rights and is an example of the creativity, ingenuity, research excellence and professionalism of our students," said Professor Keith David Watenpaugh, creator and director of the Human Rights Initiative and advisor to the new Interdisciplinary Minor in Human Rights.
Many of the students involved with the journal are also taking part in the human rights minor. Watenpaugh emphasized that the journal was wholly driven by student interest and student work. Every step, including publicizing the call for papers, creating an editorial team, reviewing and editing contributions, assembling the content, and working with printers, was performed by the student staff. Victoria Martin, 2011-2012 co-editor, called the process "a labor of love."
Read the rest of the story on the HArCS website.
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Arts Initiative Story Corps and Lecture Series Provide Insider View of the Arts
We visit museums and galleries, attend film screenings, concerts, and theatre productions, but rarely does the UC Davis community get a chance to peek behind the scenes into the research, thought, and creative processes that our arts faculty put into these products. Two pioneering projects of the UC Davis Humanities Institute Arts Initiative aim to delve deeper into the work of the dynamic and productive arts departments on campus: the Arts Faculty Lecture Series and the Arts Initiative Story Corps. Now in its second year, the Arts Initiative continues its mission of promoting and supporting the creative work of the six campus arts departments and programs. The lecture series invites faculty in the creative arts to showcase their work and explain their research and creative processes, while the story corps presents perspectives on arts events by graduate students in the arts. For more information on both of these projects, see the full article.
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New Faculty Books
Juliana Schiesari, Polymorphous Domesticities: Pets, Bodies, and Desire in Four Modern Writers. (University of California Press, 2012).
In this book, Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature and Chair of Comparative Literature Juliana Schiesari maps out the play of gender, sexuality, and alternative forms of domesticity in the works of four modern European, British, and American writers-Edith Wharton, Djuna Barnes, Colette, and J. R. Ackerley. All four of these writers defied patriarchal paradigms in their lives as well as in their works. Not only did they live outside the norms of the heterosexual family unit, they also pursued and wrote about alternative lifestyles that prominently involved animals. Through close readings from a feminist perspective, Juliana Schiesari reconfigures the ways in which interspecies relationships inflect domestic spheres, reading the "Other" through the lens of gender, home, and family. As she explores how domestic life is refigured by the presence of animals, Schiesari challenges anthropocentric frames of reference and brings the very definition of "human" into question.
Noha Radwan, Egyptian Colloquial Poetry and the Modern Arabic Canon. (Palgrave-MacMillan, 2012).
Egyptian colloquial poetry has recently emerged as the vehicle for communication of choice in the Egyptian revolutionary movement of January 25, 2011. Noha Radwan offers the first book-length study of the rise and development of modern Egyptian colloquial poetry from the 1950's to the present. Radwan, who has recently received tenure and a promotion to associate professor in Comparative Literature, reorients the perspective on the genre away from the sub-literary, situating it among contemporaneous modernist Arabic poetry instead.
Miroslava Chávez-García, States of Delinquency: Race and Science in the Making of California's Justice System. (University of California Press, 2012).
In this unique analysis of the rise of the juvenile justice system from the nineteenth to twentieth centuries, Associate Professor and Chair of Chicana/o Studies uses California as a case study for examining racism in the treatment of incarcerated young people of color. Using rich new untapped archives, States of Delinquency is the first book to explore the experiences of young Mexican Americans, African Americans, and ethnic Euro-Americans in California correctional facilities including Whittier State School for Boys and the Preston School of Industry. Miroslava Chávez-García examines the ideologies and practices used by state institutions as they began to replace families and communities in punishing youth, and explores the application of science and pseudo-scientific research in the disproportionate classification of youths of color as degenerate. She also shows how these boys and girls, and their families, resisted increasingly harsh treatment and various kinds of abuse, including sterilization.
Chávez-García will introduce her work with a book-signing event at the UC Davis bookstore in Spring quarter and with a talk at the Whittier, CA public library on June 2. |
Performances and Exhibitions
Associate Professor of Theatre & Dance Larry Bogad collaborated on Fifteen Islands for Robert Moses, a project curated and designed by artist and theorist Greg Sholette, on display at the Queens Art Museum through May 20, 2012. The museum describes the project as "a site-specific art infiltration into the Panorama of the City of New York, which was built for the 1964 World's Fair by urban planner Robert Moses and is now a centerpiece of the Queens Museum of Art." Bogad's contribution is highlighted on the museum's website.
An exhibit based on Assistant Professor of Design Mark Kessler's research on the historic public garages of San Francisco is on view at the San Francisco Mint, the home of the San Francisco Museum and Historical Society. For more on the exhibition, see the full article on the UC Davis News & Information website.
On February 17, Professor of Technocultural Studies Bob Ostertag's new composition, The Book of Hours, was premiered on WDR Köln, one of the world's most prestigious commissioning programs in the field of contemporary music. Ostertag's piece was performed by an ensemble including Theo Bleckmann (voice), Shelley Hirsch (voice), Phil Minton (voice), and Roscoe Mitchell (saxophones). Ostertag explains that the composition is based upon medieval books of hours, which provided prayers for each hour at a time when clocks were new enough that they were seen as having religious connotations. The broadcast also included a brief interview with Ostertag.
Art Professor Gina Werfel had a one person exhibition at Jane Deering Gallery, Santa Barbara, CA, Feb 1- Mar 4 and will begin a one person show at Alex Bult Gallery in Sacramento in April 2012. View images of the Santa Barbara exhibition at the Deering Gallery website. |
More News of Note
UC Davis News and Information Service has recently released a video highlighting the film collection, Treasures 5: The West, 1898-1938, a 10-hour, 40-film boxed DVD set curated by English professor Scott Simmon for the National Film Preservation Association. The video may be viewed on the UC Davis YouTube channel.
Religious Studies Professor and Director of the Human Rights Initiative Keith David Watenpaugh was interviewed on Capital Public Radio's Insight program regarding Human Rights week and the new Interdisciplinary Minor in Human Rights. Listen to a recording of the program here.
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HArCS and UC Davis after Nov. 18 |
Students and Faculty Speak Out at Teach-In with Angela Davis
Hundreds of students, faculty, and staff packed the ARC Pavilion on Thursday, February 23rd, to discuss "Social Justice in the Public University of California" with renowned scholar and activist Angela Davis. Organized by the Hart Hall Social Justice Initiative, the teach-in was intended to provoke meaningful dialogue about the chaotic events surrounding November 18, 2011, when student protesters were pepper-sprayed by riot police on the UC Davis quad. The event continues to reverberate through our campus and to call into question the purpose of the public university.
See the full story here. A complete recording of Angela Davis's talk and the student responses can be found here. A recording of the faculty roundtable can be found here.
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News from the Dean's Office
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Gift from Margrit Mondavi
It is a special pleasure to report the good news that Margrit Mondavi, a remarkable philanthropist and great friend of UC Davis, has recently given $50,000 to the Division of Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies for student support. The funds will make possible ten awards of $5,000 each to graduate students in HArCS Ph.D. and M.F.A. programs for research travel, summer workshops or other kinds of support. Dean Owens expressed her gratitude for this generosity: "Mrs. Mondavi is acutely aware of the financial challenges students face today and she wanted to provide assistance to our very talented students." The UC Davis Humanities Institute will manage the award process. Details will be announced shortly.
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Faculty Meeting with Chancellor Katehi
The Chancellor invites all HArCS faculty to meet with her on Thursday, April 5, from 1:30 to 3:00 in the Andrews Conference Room. Please RSVP to Grace Dell'Olio ( HArCS-Assistant@ad3.ucdavis.edu) by April 3. |
Town Hall for HArCS Faculty
HArCS faculty are invited to a town hall to discuss the budget and new budget model, as well as the plans for the 2020 initiative. Provost Hexter, Kelly Ratliff and Ken Burtis will make brief presentations and lead a discussion. The Town Hall is scheduled for Monday, April 23, from 10:30 to 12 noon in Voorhies 126.
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