Meet Pam Libed, a UC Davis English alumni who now works as a paralegal. Get to know Pam below!
What is your favorite memory at UC Davis?
I actually have several favorite memories at UC Davis, but my top five are: 1.) Reading out in the arboretum on sunny days, 2.) wandering through Shields LIbrary, knowing I had access to all those books, 3.) the friendships I made with classmates, roomates, and professors, 4.) riding Unitrans and getting to know the drivers, and 5.) Riding my bike around campus for fun.
Meet Audrey Camp, an alumni who now works for Cognite! Read more about Audrey Camp below.
What is your favorite UC Davis Memory?
My favorite UC Davis memory was spending my senior year playing volleyball and learning to write both poetry and fiction. After years of required classes, Shakespeare, a million papers, and commuting hundreds of hours, it felt great to experience my version of heaven for a few months.
What are you up to now, professionally or personally?
Aggie alumni Sofia Molodanof graduated with honors from UC Davis in 2018 with an English Major, and emphasis in Literature, Criticism and Theory. She is now one year away from finishing Graduate School at Georgetown in Washington D.C., but her interest in law started as an Undergraduate at UC Davis.
“I had an interest in law when I was here at Davis, I did an internship in the past and I wrote my senior honors thesis on law and literature and I connected that to health and mental health,” Molodanof said.
Say Hello to the UC Davis English Department's January 2020 Student of the Month! Meet Viktor Niemiec, a hard-working and dedicated junior, pursing his English (Literature, Criticism, and Theory emphasis) major and Education minor.
What is the most memorable English class you've taken at UC Davis? Why?
English Professor Emerita Linda Morris has won the 2020 UC Davis Distinguished Professor Emerita Award! Known as a mentor, teacher, scholar, and department chair, Morris is renowned for her ground-breaking research on Mark Twain. She has remained one of the most active scholars in the English department even after her retirement.
Professor Katie Peterson's latest book, A Piece of Good Newsis one of The New York Times Best Poetry Books of 2019. David Orr writes in the Times, "Peterson’s prickly, playful book is filled with quasi parables (including a poem called 'New Parable') that often keep an attractive distance from their own sponsoring emotions — attract
The UC Davis English Department's December 2019 Student of the Month is Helena Sherman, a third year English (Creative Writing emphasis) major, double minoring in Professional Writing and Technology Management.
What is the most memorable English class you've taken at UC Davis? Why?
The Modern Language Association of America today announced that UC Davis English Department Professor Seeta Chaganti is the winner of the twenty-seventh annual Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies for her book Strange Footing: Poetic Form and Dance in the Late Middle Ages(University of Chicago Press, 2018). The Scaglione prize is awarded annually for an outstanding scholarly work that involves at least two literatures.
Say hello to Elana Nager, a senior English (Literature, Criticisim, and Theory emphasis) & Environmental Policy, Analysis, and Planning minor, graduating this upcoming Spring 2020.
What is the most memorable English class you've taken at UC Davis? Why?
Earlier this fall, English Professor Matthew Vernon was invited to give a scholarly talk at his undergraduate alma mater, Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. We heard about the trip and asked him a couple of questions about this return to one of his most important intellectual homes.
“What stood out for you from this visit?,” we asked. “When you had a chance to speak with graduate students at Cornell, what questions did they ask you?”
Vernon’s thoughtful answer to our questioning appears below.
Earlier this fall, Professor Gina Bloom took the augmented reality video game Play the Knave on the road to the Thuto-lore Comprehensive School in Sharpeville township, an hour outside Johannesburg in South Africa.
“I also demonstrated the game to staff at an after-school program in Alexandra township and left a kit with them to use this month,” Bloom reports.
This summer, English / Cinema and Digital Media Professor Stephanie Boluk traveled to Malaysia and China with her collaborator Professor Patrick LeMieux to participate in the Every Game in This City podcast. The show is a production of the Idle Thumbs network, which hosts a series of popular videogame podcasts.
Renowned UC Davis English Professor Emerita Sandra Gilbert received a lifetime achievement award over the summer celebrating her six-decade career of writing and teaching. Professor Gilbert was honored with the Fred Cody Lifetime Achievement & Service Award at the 38th Annual Northern California Book Awards, sponsored by the Northern California Book Reviewers.
Please join us in warmly welcoming Professor Erin Gray to the UC Davis English Department faculty.
Gray begins teaching in the department this year after spending the last two years conducting research supported by back-to-back prestigious postdoctoral fellowships: a University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship at UC Irvine and a Dean's Fellowship in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development.
Kristin is a PhD student and poet who has published two books of poetry in recent months and is beginning to publish research from her dissertation. She published Fossils in the Making in April, while her second book of poetry, Diurne, won the Sunken Garden Poetry Prize and was published by Tupelo Press this month.
Tell us about your new book. What is its central project?
For Hunger is a book of poetry that dwells in the spaces of reproductive labor -- caring for an ill person and a young child, housework, cooking -- and explores their essential bodily conditions and affective states. Hunger, in all its many forms, is at the center of these poems.
What got you started thinking about this set of problems in this way?
Faculty Name Awards, Publications, & Projects Bloom, Gina Gina Bloom was invited to present the Shakespeare Birthday Lecture at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., an event held annually since 1932. Entitled "Rough Magic: Performing Shakespeare through Gaming Technology," the lecture is available for viewing at https://tinyurl.com/yxdrtzsm.
Dr. Elizabeth Carolyn Miller’s new book project "Extraction Ecologies and the Literature of the Long Exhaustion, 1830s-1930s” has landed two high profile fellowships this year from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and also from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. We sat down with Liz to find out more about her much-anticipated book.
How did you get started working on this set of problems?
Lucy Corin was awarded the 2018-19 Academic Senate award for Distinguished Teaching, Graduate and Professional, a tremendous honor. The prize committee wrote this about Prof. Corin’s work with graduate students:
English major Megan West has just won the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Research, one of the most prestigious prizes offered to undergraduate students. The Chancellor’s Award is only the tip of the iceberg. Megan also has been awarded the Leon Mayhew award from the College of Letters and Science, UC Davis’s Norma J. Lang Prize for Undergraduate Information Research, and a campus-wide Outstanding Senior Award. Megan’s honor’s thesis in English was awarded our department’s thesis prize last year, and she is currently finishing up her double-major in Sociology.
“New Words and New Music” was a performance of the collaborative works that some of the writers in the English department have been working on with composers in the Music department. The showcase featured work by Saba Kermati, Meredith Herndon, Kelly Thomas, Lucy Corin, and English Honors student Dimitra Loumiotis. The performance took place at the Ann E. Pitzer Center as part of the Joy S. Shinkowskey Noon Concert Series.
Katie Peterson has been named as a UC Davis Chancellor’s Fellow, an honor that recognizes select associate professors for their extraordinary achievements in research and teaching. Prof. Peterson will hold the title of Chancellor’s Fellow for five years and receive a $25,000 prize to support their work. For more information on this year’s Chancellor’s Fellows, see the press release.
PhD candidate Rebecca Hogue has been awarded a prestigious Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship for 2019-20. The Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship is a national competition awarded to 65 graduate students in the humanities and social sciences across the United States for a one-year term to support their last year of PhD dissertation writing. The title of Rebecca’s dissertation is “Archipelagos of Resistance: Anti-Nuclear Writing of Oceania, 1975-2018.”
U.S. News and World Report, which recently released its new rankings for graduate programs, continues to rank our English Graduate Program in the top 20.
Matt Mason, who received his MA in Creative Writing from the UCD English Department in 1994, has been named the State Poet of Nebraska.
The Nebraska State Poet is selected based on artistic excellence and exemplary professionalism demonstrated by significant publications and special honors, an established history of community service in the advancement of poetry in Nebraska, and the ability to present poetry and interact effectively with a public audience.
English Professor Elizabeth Miller has been awarded a prestigious one-year fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support her completion of her book manuscript, "Extraction Ecologies and the Literature of the Long Exhaustion, 1830s-1930s." The book traces Britain’s transformation during this 100-year period into an extraction-based society and the impact the mining boom had on literary genre and form. To see the full list of projects funded by the NEH in his award cycle, see the
We talked to current 4th year student Jared Kohn about his involvement in the English department and the University Honors Program on campus, as well as his volunteer experience and recent publication.
In your time with the English Department, what has been the most memorable course you have taken? Why?
John Olin Hayden, born December 18, 1932, in Los Angeles, California, died peacefully with family by his side on Saturday, September 8, 2018. The cause of death was related to West Nile virus.
John, lovingly known as “John-O”, graduated from the University of California at Santa Barbara with a degree in English Literature. He earned his M.A. and Ph.D. at Columbia University, also in English Literature. He served four years in Germany with the United States Air Force.
Melody Jue received her B.A. in English from UC Davis in 2008. She is now an Assistant Professor at UC Santa Barbara where she teaches English courses which integrate her interests in the ocean and environment. We were able to speak with Melody about her passion for English as well as her love for UC Davis.
Do you have any fond memories from UC Davis as an English major? What was your favorite class?
Tell us about your new book. What is its central project?
The book rethinks how the medieval is construed in terms of racial politics.
What got you started thinking about this set of problems in this way?
As a person of color who studies the Middle Ages, the question of racial politics as it informs our inquiry has always been apparent to me. This project allowed me to look at obscure and neglected material to present a counter-intuitive argument that upends many of our assumptions about a field of study.
Tell us about your new book. What is its central project?
The New Selected Poems of Robert Lowell aims to introduce a new generation of readers to the American poet Lowell, one of the most significant American poets since 1945. Lowell's literary stardom was a 20th century fact-- but 21st century readers have been less convinced of his significance. My short volume selects Lowell's best poems - 200 or so pages out of a 1500 page Collected Poems - to make the case not simply for his significance but for his brilliance, dexterity, and skill.
Tell us about your new book. What is its central project?
Mark Garrett Cooper and I show how the need to create an audience stamps each of the university’s steadily proliferating disciplines, shapes its structure, and determines its division of labor. In the United States of America, we explain, research universities exist neither to produce nor to curate knowledge but to connect people by means of it. They are media institutions.
What got you started thinking about this set of problems in this way?
Tell us about your new book. What is its central project?
To think about riots as a form of class struggle, racialized in the present, and in turn to understand the fall and rise of this particular form of struggle as an opportunity to reflect on the historical developments of capital and class in the overdeveloped world.
What got you started thinking about this set of problems in this way?
This year, undergraduate students in the UC Davis English Department have been bringing an augmented reality video game called Play the Knave to area K-12 schools. The game allows players to perform their own versions of Shakespeare’s plays.
