Every year, UC Davis English exchanges PhD students with the prestigious Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany. This year, we sent a whole family!
PhD student Michael Clearwater was our departmental representative, joined in his travels by his partner and fellow PhD student Bonnie Roy and their child Duncan.
We asked Michael how he and his family are faring in Germany and how this exchange is shaping his research:
The Aggie sat down with Joshua Clover, professor of English and comparative literature, and Elizabeth Miller, professor of English, to see what books had a profound influence on their lives when they were in college. Plus, they name some books they wish they had read in college, with the hopes that this can inspire some of us to pick up a book that we’ve been eyeing for awhile.
Kirsten Burrell is double major in English and Communication as well as the Editor for Her Campus at UC Davis. We asked Kirsten 3 questions in our series dedicated to profiling UC Davis English majors. We’re grateful to several of her English Major colleagues at Her Campus for weighing in as well!
1) First of all, what's Her Campus, and why should UCD students and English majors read it?
We stand with colleagues across HArCS and the UCD campus in supporting students of all races, all religions, all gender identities, all sexualities, and all conditions of documentation.
Below we provide an updated list of resources for students needing care as well as instructions for how to report an act of hate or bias. Please feel free to disseminate widely.
Ian Afflerbach Job title: Marion L. Brittain Fellow in the School of Literature, Media and Communication at the Georgia Institute of Technology. In the first year of a three-year fellowship, Ian is currently teaching a course entitled "From Print Culture to Digital Archive: Modern American Literature and its Periodicals.” This class introduces first year students to Georgia Tech's WOVEN theory of communication (Written Oral Visual Electronic Nonverbal) by having them write essays, design infographics, give presentations, and record videos.
Corey (a senior and an English Major from Hollister, CA) and Eavan (from San Mateo, CA and also a senior in the English Major) are Officers of the Prytanean Women’s Honor Society, the oldest women’s honor society in the US, founded at Berkeley in 1901. We asked them four questions about their experience with this important organization. 1) Both of you serve in a leadership position in the Prytanean Women’s Honor Society here at UC Davis. How do you balance your very time intensive leadership positions with your academics?
Chris Tung graduated from Davis with an English Major in 2011. Since then, he’s been working in the tech sector and this month is launching his first startup, a company called Huttle. Chris says that Huttle aims to connect college students and recent grads with mentors in Silicon Valley. We took the opportunity of his company’s launch to ask Chris four questions about his English alum story. Are You An UCD English Alumni?
We want to hear from you! Tell us what you are up to after graduation!
The Lawrence J. Andrews Prize is awarded annually by the Davis campus to a regularly enrolled student in the College of Letters & Science, who entered the College and the Davis campus as a freshman. Selection is based primarily on academic performance, with preference given to an individual who also has interests outside of pure scholarship.
Becky Mandelbaum (MA 2016) has been named this year’s winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. As part of the award, Becky’s winning collection of short stories, Bad Kansas, will be published by the University of Georgia Press in fall 2017. Now in its 33rd year, the Flannery O’Connor Award was established to encourage gifted emerging writers by bringing their work to a national readership.
This is the first conference for the Vcologies research collective, which focuses on exploring ecologies of nineteenth-century Britain and its empire from an environmental humanities perspective. A list of panelists, paper titles, and the panel schedule can be found on the collective's web site: http://vcologies.org/
Jenae Cohn Job title: Academic Technology Specialist, Program in Writing and Rhetoric at Stanford University As an ATS, I support instructor use of educational technology in their writing classes.
Ade’s hometown is Oakland, Ca. He is an English major who will be declaring a Communication major as well when he starts his Senior year this fall. We asked Ade four questions in this, our first installment of a new series dedicated to profiling UC Davis English majors. How did you first become interested in studying English at the university level? I will never forget the time I decided to study English at the university level. It was my second year of Jr College, in a Shakespeare class that was a requirement to transfer.
Professor Scott Shershow’s new book "Bread" is available from Bloomsbury Press in a series edited by UC Davis English PhD program graduate Christopher Schaberg (now a professor at Loyola University New Orleans).
With the help of an NCAA Postgraduate Scholarship, double major Ana Marija Sola is headed to medical school. She graduated in 2016 with a Bachelor of Arts in English and a Bachelor of Science in neurobiology, physiology and behavior. Ana Marija is an Aggie soccer star, winner of the team’s Newcomer of the Year as a first year student and two-time Most Valuable Defensive Player. She intends to make use of her NCAA Postgraduate Scholarship as she enters medical school in 2017.
Professor Joshua Clover has been on the road this summer giving talks inspired by his latest book, Riot Strike Riot, which was published by Verso in May. Here he is speaking at Stockholm’s Cyclopen cultural center.
Three undergraduate students from Hampton University, Virginia are finishing up a summer of research with Director of Graduate Studies Mark Jerng and three Davis faculty mentors.
Susan Chavez, Al-Majid Edwards, and Telia Royal are the first cohort in the department’s Summer Program for Literary Analysis and Success in the Humanities (UCD-SPLASH), a three-year collaboration with Hampton to support students from Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) conducting literary research at UC Davis.
Fran Dolan, Distinguished Professor of English, was presented with the University of California, Davis, Prize for Undergraduate Teaching and Scholarly Achievement during her "Law and Literature" class on March 1, 2016.
In the four centuries since William Shakespeare's death, his works have been adapted to pretty much every media you can imagine: books, film, radio, you name it. There's even a board game.
Now the Bard has entered the realm of virtual reality with an immersive video game called Play the Knave, developed by the University of California, Davis.
Jane O'Brien went to the Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts near Sacramento to see it in action.
UC Davis assistant professor of English Katie Peterson is one of eight writers of “exceptional accomplishment in any genre” to receive an American Academy of Arts and Letters 2016 literature award. Author of three books of poetry, Peterson is on a list that includes two MacArthur “genius grant” Fellows and a Pulitzer Prize winner.
Take a writing challenge at TheProse.com and win prizes!
Prose is the reading and writing community that provides the coolest social platform for creating and consuming literature. Your words are never censored and remain 100% your own, all day long.
Our mission is to encourage and empower you with writing technology and fresh social media tools, giving you a new, accessible, and interactive experience with words.
The New Yorker magazine recently contained an article featuring English graduate alum, Christopher Schaberg's, two books on airports. Read more at Air Head.
I was a horrible student. One day, my sixth-grade teacher got absolutely fed up with me because I was disrupting the class. Instead of detention, I had to lead the topic discussions for Julie of the Wolves, the book we were reading at the time. Turned out, I loved my ‘punishment.’ A book that had been dreadful for me—and several of my classmates, actually—came alive. I told my teacher that I wanted to teach English literature someday, and she agreed. For the first time in my life, she told my parents that I was an acceptable student.
Friends, Aggies, Countrymen, lend me your ears. For many, the very thought of performing Shakespeare conjures up memories of stammering through a soliloquy in high school while a room of bored classmates look on. But the UC Davis Modlab, “an experimental laboratory for media research and digital humanities”, has developed a video game designed to take the fear out of performing Shakespeare.
Ryan's second novel, Green Island, is out this month from Alfred A. Knopf. She recently had an interview in the New York Times about it, and it was just listed as one of Amazon's Top Picks for Best Books of February. She is currently am an assistant professor of Creative Writing at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.
Professor Lucy Corin has been awarded a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) will award individual creative writing fellowships of $25,000 each to 37 fiction and creative nonfiction writers from 17 states as part of its first FY 2016 grant awards. Through its creative writing fellowships program, the NEA gives writers the time and space to create, revise, conduct research, and connect with readers. This year’s writers were selected from among 1,763 eligible applications by 23 readers and panelists.
"For the last time: No, earning a degree in English, philosophy, art history, name-your-humanities-discipline will not condemn you to a lifetime of unemployment and poverty."
The English Department at the University of California, Davis, and New York Times best-selling novelist John Lescroart are pleased to announce the 12th annual Maurice Prize in Fiction.
The winner of this year’s Maurice Prize for Fiction is Reema Rajbanshi for her novel manuscript Sugar, Smoke, Song, and she will receive a prize of $5000.
The 2014-2015 English Dept Newsletter is now available! Read what has been happening around the department with our faculty, staff and graduate students.
I am delighted to announce that Margaret Ronda has been awarded a Hellman Fellowship for 2015-16! This fellowship is intended to support “the research of promising Assistant Professors who exhibit potential for great distinction in their research.”
Clarke W. Owens, M.A. English/Creative Writing 1976, has a new novel of climate change scheduled for a July 31, 2015 publish date. Pre-order is available on Amazon.com.
Previously we wrote to announce that Professor Yiyun Li had made the shortlist for the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award, billed as "the world’s richest prize for a single short story," for her story "A Sheltered Woman" which originally appeared in The New Yorker. Now we are thrilled to write again to say that she has just been awarded the £30,000 prize! What is more, her win is historic: she is the first woman to ever receive the prize!
Naomi Nishihara, Class of 2014, was an English and history double major, and was very involved with the student newspaper. After graduating, she continued to pursue journalism, working at C-Change Media in San Francisco, The Dallas Morning News, and attending the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. Her stories have covered higher education, California politics, health and technology.
The Wiki Education Foundation is a San Francisco based non-profit that supports the integration of Wikipedia into academia. We run a Classroom Program where professors assign their students to edit Wikipedia as part of their grade, a Visiting Scholars program where Wikipedian's are given access to library resources at universities like UC Davis and encouraged to edit Wikipedia articles using those digital resources, and more.
I graduated from UC Davis in 2007, where I earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in English and a minor in Environmental Planning and Policy. Following this, I attended the UC Davis School of Law from 2008 to 2011. During this time, I completed legal internships with the environmental non-profit organizations Defenders of Wildlife and Environmental Defense Fund. Following my admission to the California Bar, I was hired for an associate attorney position by the law firm Remy Moose Manley, LLP.
Majoring in English at UC Davis was the best decision I made during my undergraduate career. Yes, yes, I see your eyes rolling. I know I should avoid using superlatives in my writing, but I’m breaking the rule just this once, because it’s actually true.
The UC Davis English Department was the perfect place to begin my higher education because it provided me with a challenging and stimulating curriculum taught by passionate faculty and shared with an engaged group of fellow students. My favorite aspect of the English Department at UC Davis was the professors’ ability and desire to apply the themes found in literature of every period and genre to real-world understanding of concepts such as gender and sexuality, citizenry, race, media, globalization and more.
As an Assignment Desk Editor for KCBS/KCAL News I have the exciting opportunity to gather and tell news stories. I listen to police and fire scanners to find out what each department is doing out in the field and I call the departments to find out story details. I hear breaking news first. I also have occasional opportunities to go out in the field and gather new stories.
I write with the extremely exciting news that Colin Milburn has been awarded a “New Directions Fellowship” from the Mellon Foundation. This highly prestigious fellowship is intended to support faculty members who engage in “serious interdisciplinary research” to acquire additional, systematic training in their fields of interdisciplinary engagement. In Colin’s case, he will pursue additional training in computer science to extend his expertise in the emerging field of critical game studies.
I am thrilled to announce that Professor Margaret Ferguson has been awarded the 2015 Distinguished Teaching Award for Graduate and Professional Teaching. As the letter of announcement explains, “This award is one of the most prestigious granted on the UC Davis campus and recognizes outstanding teaching and commitment to student success.”
Please join me in congratulating Margie on this much-deserved recognition!
Please join me in congratulating Professor Beth Freeman, who has been awarded an ACLS Fellowship! These are one of the most prestigious awards available to faculty in the humanities. Beth will use her fellowship time on her book-in-progress, tentatively titled “It Goes Without Saying: Sense-Methods in the United States’s Very Long Nineteenth Century.” Congratulations Beth! Wonderful news! Elizabeth Miller, UCD English Department Chair
Congratulations to Professor Yiyun Li of the UC Davis English Department, one of 19 writers named to the longlist for the 2015 Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award for her story "A Sheltered Woman." This prize is billed as "the world’s richest prize for a single short story." What wonderful news!
A new interview with Professor Scott Simmon describes the research and labors that went into his newly edited version of the recently rediscovered 1938 Orson Welles film Too Much Johnson. The interview is now posted on “Wellesnet”—the site for Orson Welles obsessives!
Elise Winn Pollard, creative writing MA 2009, has been awarded a 2015 emerging writer grant for $19,400.00. The Elizabeth George Foundation awards grants to help emerging writers, poets and playwrights complete a work-in-progress. The foundation also awards grants to youth organizations that help in the same area. Congratulations Elise!
I am delighted to announce that Lynn Freed’s story “The Way Things Are Going,” published in Harper’s in August 2013, has been awarded an O. Henry Prize and will be included in the volume The O. Henry Prize Stories 2015.
Fran Dolan has been awarded the John Ben Snow Prize for her book, True Relations: Reading, Literature and Evidence in Seventeenth-Century England. I am pleased to say that the prize has now been officially announced and posted on the NACBS website. See the following link:
Professor Elizabeth Freeman has won the Norman Foerster Prize for the best essay published in American Literature in 2014. Her winning essay is titled "Sacra/mentality in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood.” This is a major honor from one of the top journals in literary studies. Beth will receive a cash prize and the award will be officially presented at MLA in January 2015. Congratulations, Beth! Liz Miller
