Fall Convocation honored the arts as an integral part of UC Davis -- for science and art majors alike, for people on campus and off -- allowing everyone to experience the full gamut of human experience.

"The arts not only help our students find human significance in their life and work, but they inspire the community to elevate the quality of life for us all," Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi said in her fourth convocation - the traditional launch of the new academic year. "The arts enable us to see life more clearly, inspiring us to think and reflect as few other pursuits can."

An estimated 1,100 people - including faculty, staff, students and university friends - attended the "Celebrate the Arts!" convocation Sept. 24 in Jackson Hall at the Robert and Margrit Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts. Watch the archived webcast or read more from UC Davis Dateline. 

This is the second year that the division's recruitments have followed the staffing levels established in the 2010 Academic Plan. We have nearly reached the 12% cut in FTE assigned by the campus, and are continuing the strategy of balancing retirements and recruitments across the division in accordance with the plan. Following a consideration of possible FTE recruitments by last year's Faculty Advisory Committee, and consultation with chairs and directors, I requested and received approval from the provost for the following searches: 

• African American and African Studies, Assistant Professor in Comparative Race and Ethnicity or Diaspora Studies. Search chair: Moradewun Adejunmobi.

• Classics, Assistant Professor, Hellenist. Search chair: Emily Albu. 

• German, Assistant Professor in German Literature. Search chair: Jaimey Fisher.  

• East Asian Languages and Cultures, Assistant Professor in Japanese Linguistics and Language Pedagogy. Search chair: Chengzhi Chu. 

• Native American Studies, Open Rank, Indigenous Languages of the Americas. Search chair: Zoila Mendoza. 

• Religious Studies, Assistant Professor in Early Islam. Search chair: Naomi Janowitz.

• Religious Studies, Assistant Professor in Late Antique Judaism (external funding, in connection with Jewish Studies). Search chair: David Biale. 

Emilio Bejel. José Martí: Images of Memory and Mourning. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

This book is a critical study of visual representations of José Martí -- The National Hero of Cuba -- and the discourses of power that make it possible for Martí's images to be perceived as icons today. Emilio Bejel, distinguished professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, argues that an observer of Martí's icons who is immersed in the Cuban national narrative experiences a retrospective reconstruction of those images by means of ideologically formed national discourses of power. Also, the obsessive reproduction of Martí's icons signals a melancholia for the loss of the martyr-hero. But instead of attempting to "forget Martí," the book concludes that the utopian impulse of his memory should serve to resist melancholia and to visualize new forms of creative re-significations of Martí and, by extension, the nation.

In this volume, associate professor of English Seeta Chaganti collects essays responding to the critical legacy of Penn R. Szittya, the recently retired former chair of Georgetown University's English Department. Inspired by Georgetown's Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice and its statement that poetry "traverses the fields of aesthetic, social, political, and religious thought," this work investigates how medieval poetic language reflects and also shapes social, political, and religious worlds. The contributors offer new readings of canonical late-medieval English poetic texts, such as Langland's Piers Plowman and Chaucer's Parliament of Fowls, and, of equal importance, explore texts that have hitherto not held a central place in criticism but make important contributions to the literary culture of the period.   

For more information, see the publisher's website. 

John Marx. Geopolitics and the Anglophone Novel, 1890-2011. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

Literary fiction is a powerful cultural tool for criticizing governments and for imagining how better governance and better states would work. Combining political theory with strong readings of a vast range of novels, associate professor of English John Marx shows that fiction over the long twentieth century often envisioned good government not in utopian but in pragmatic terms. Early twentieth-century novels by Joseph Conrad, E. M. Forster, and Rabindrananth Tagore helped forecast world government after European imperialism. Twenty-first-century novelists such as Monica Ali, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Michael Ondaatje, and Amitav Ghosh have inherited that legacy and continue to criticize existing policies in order to formulate best practices on a global scale. Marx shows how literature can make an important contribution to political and social sciences by creating a space to imagine and experiment with social organization.   

For more information, see the publisher's website.  

Brenda Deen Schildgen. Divine Providence: A History: The Bible, Virgil, Orosius, Augustine, and Dante. London: Continuum, 2012.

Holding divine intervention responsible for political and military success and failure has a long history in western thought. In this book, professor of comparative literature Brenda Deen Schildgen explores the idea of providential history as an organizing principle for understanding the divine purpose for humans in texts that may be literary, historical, philosophical, and theological. Divine Providence shows that, with Virgil and the Bible as authoritative precursors to late antique views on history, the two most important political thinkers of the late antique Christian world, Orosius and Augustine, produced the theories of Christian politics and history that were carried over into the first and second millennium of Christianity. Likewise, their understanding of how the history of the late Roman Empire connects to God's plan for humankind became the background for understanding Dante's own positions in the Monarchia and the Commedia.

See more on the publisher's website.