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Herbert A. Young Society
Young Society members were among those invited to a special lecture by historian Eric Rauchway, at a Bay Area residence.
The College of Letters and Science mission is to educate thoughtful, innovative, and capable leaders who are prepared to meet the challenges of tomorrow. Teaching a broad range of fundamental courses, the College of Letters and Science is called upon to offer all undergraduates the best education in humanities, arts and sciences.
You can make a significant impact. Strengthened by your generosity, we will continue to provide all UC Davis undergraduates with a challenging and rewarding education, offer graduate students the opportunity to engage in meaningful research, enlist the top faculty in the nation.
By joining the Herbert A. Young Society through an unrestricted gift of $1,000 or more, you will belong to an important group of alumni, parents, and friends who are committed to excellence in teaching and research. You will impact the students and faculty of the College of Letters and Science. You will extend the promise of a quality education and research to change lives.
Your membership in the Young Society allows the deans to meet the most pressing needs of the College, such as
To join the Young Society, or receive more information about the areas it impacts each year, please contact 530-754-9313.
Download the Young Society Brochure
An annual report distributed to all Young Society members.
Gifts to the Herbert A. Young Society enhance the variety and increase the quality of activities and initiatives that the College of Letters and Science puts forward each year. Every July, after the last fiscal year closes, the funds raised for the Young Society are distributed to the deans. In the past year, the funds raised in 2008-09 were utilized in a number of ways. The funds helped important research make strides in discovery, opened new doors for graduate and undergraduate students, and they provided opportunities for the campus community to hear from experts on a range of topics. A sampling of funded projects follows:
Young Society funds supported graduate students whose work requires travel to Africa. International travel can be integral to research, providing access to primary source material and the opportunity for first-hand learning experience through cultural interaction. More information about the program can be found at: http://aas.ucdavis.edu/.
An ongoing speaker series presented by the UC Davis Humanities Institute and the Center for History, Society, and Culture, the Public Intellectuals Forum seeks to bring compelling, challenging ideas out of the university and into the community. Dynamic and socially engaged scholars were invited last year, whose intellectual work addresses the issues of the day and speaks to broad, diverse audiences. And in holding some of the events in downtown Davis, rather than on the university campus, the series sparked conversations, encourage public engagement and built bridges between the academy and the public. Talks are free and open to all. To join the DHI community listserv to attend this year's talks, please visit http://publicforum.ucdavis.edu/
Hosted at the UC Davis Humanities Institute, and coordinated with the Robert Mondavi Institute for Food and Wine Science, this group brought together faculty and graduate-student scholars in the humanities and social sciences from UC Davis, UC Berkeley, and UC Santa Cruz who are exploring the relationship between food, the body and culture. This collaboration strengthens the work of individual members through work in progress seminars, draws attention to the critical mass of food scholars on the three northern California campuses, provides focused mentoring to graduate students in this area, and fosters dialogue between humanities and science scholars, and the public, on food and body concerns. http://foodandbody.ucdavis.edu/
Julie Wyman, assistant professor of Technocultural Studies, is an award-winning and internationally recognized filmmaker, performer and scholar whose work investigates the body: locating, exploring, and inventing various situations in which the codes, conditions, and visceral experiences of physicality defy expectation. Professor Wyman traveled to Beijing to film a documentary about Olympic weightlifter Cheryl Haworth. Her blog documenting Ms. Haworth is online: http://thepullofgravity.blogspot.com. For more information about the project, visit: http://www.ucdavis.edu/spotlight/0308/documentary.html.
New resources relating to Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies were purchased for the library. The addition of these materials increases accessibility to resources that benefit both the campus and the greater community.
Hosted by the Departments of Theatre and Dance, Technocultural Studies and Cultural Studies, and the UC Davis Humanities Institute, a conference was held exploring how new media are affecting the interaction between producers and audiences.. Electronic media is rapidly changing the relationship of artists, scholars and producers to audiences, readers and writers. Featured speakers included Adriene Jenick, creator of SPECFLIC, Desktop Theatre and Mauve Desert; Praba Pilar, minister of the Church of Nano Bio Info Cogno; video artist Jesus Aguilar, and multi-media artist Rene Garcia, creator of Requiem for the Book. http://theatredance.ucdavis.edu/events/news_detail.aspx?p=48.
The Department of Statistics invited several speakers to present their research and methodologies for analyzing data and its applications in real-world issues and problems we face today. http://anson.ucdavis.edu/seminars/recent-seminar-abstracts#9
Seminars included:
This series of lectures was highlighted by distinguished physicists in celebration of the UC Davis Centennial. They were also recorded and made available online for students and the general public to view and enjoy. The lectures can be found at: http://www.physics.ucdavis.edu/news.html
Organized by Professor Alexandra Navrotsky, the conference united people from the fields of chemistry, geology and materials science who are working in the area of high temperature phenomena in solid and liquid materials. Part of a series of conferences held every three years, the last occurred in Vienna, Austria. http://neat.ucdavis.edu/HTMC-13/. The work done in this area has many applications including creating new materials that are more energy efficient.
Presented to Mathematics Professor Benjamin Morris in recognition of his contributions to the department, the division, and the UC Davis campus. http://www.math.ucdavis.edu/research/profiles/morris
In honor of Professor Dmitry Fuchs, the main theme of the conference is the interplay of algebra and topology over the past 40 years, since the birth of Gelfand-Fuchs cohomology. Topics included current developments in symplectic field theory, representations of infinite dimensional Lie algebras, topological quantum field theory, characteristic classes of foliations, contact homology, Chekanov-Eliashberg differential graded algebra, and Legendrian knot theory. http://www.math.ucdavis.edu/~ekim/fuchsalgetopcon/index.php
Held at UC Davis this year, the conference is the premier international meeting on the statistical analysis of time series data and attracts leading researchers from around the world. It has been held annually since the late 1970s at universities in the United States, Asia and Europe, once before at UC Davis in 1984. This year marked the 25th anniversary of that meeting during which Robert Engle and Clive Granger and James Stock presented their seminal research on co integration. Granger was awarded the 2003 Nobel Prize for his work on this topic. http://nber-nsf09.ucdavis.edu/
The 2008 Economic History Association meeting, Engines of Growth: Innovation, Creative Destruction, and Human Capital Accumulation took place at Yale University. Distinguished Professor Emeritus Alan L. Olmstead is the immediate past president of the association. The discipline of economic history is extremely strong nationally and internationally. http://2008.ehameeting.com/
Supplemental funding was added to the W. Turrentine Jackson Graduate Fellowship, which is awarded to a graduate student concentrating in the history of the United States West.
Support for graduate students whose research requires international travel. International travel is especially important for the work of many disciplines in this area, and students who take a quarter to travel for research explore not just important works inaccessible here in the United States but they also discover a great deal about the area they cover just by living there. http://hia.ucdavis.edu
2009 recipients:
Conceived as collaborative incubators for work-in-progress, faculty research seminars bring together mixed disciplinary groups across the humanities and social sciences to explore timely issues. The seminar participants meet for a single quarter each year to think in community, challenge each other, and generate new insights into individual research trajectories. http://dhi.ucdavis.edu
Fall 2008: "Science and the Sacred", exploring the relationships between religion and science, faith and reason, and the spiritual and technological in various cultural and historical contexts.
Participants: Daniel Stolzenberg (History), Emily Albu (Classics), Allison Coudert (Religious Studies), Mark Elmore (Religious Studies), Ari Y. Kelman (American Studies), Kari Lokke (Comparative Literature), and Blake Stimson (Art History).
Spring 2009: "California Cultures – Past, Present and Future", exploring diverse issues such as migration, immigration and transnational flows, changing notions of community and citizenship, especially in the context of class and race, youth culture and juvenile delinquency, and popular culture formations, including music and film.
Participants: Beth Levy (Music), Miroslava Chavez-Garcia (Chicana/o Studies), Jesse Drew (Technocultural Studies), Robert Irwin (Spanish and Classics), Martha Macri (Native American Studies), and Sunaina Maira (Asian American Studies).
The Speech and Debate Program at UC Davis is a co-curricular, intercollegiate activity which provides students with intensive training in oral and written expression. The program provides UC Davis students with the opportunity to improve their persuasive and argumentative skills by participating in tournaments with students from other California and U.S. universities. Events offered by these tournaments typically include parliamentary debate, dramatic interpretation, extemporaneous speaking, impromptu speaking, and persuasive speaking. http://debateteam.ucdavis.edu
Thanks in part to funds from the Herbert A. Young society, Lisa Materson, Associate Professor of History has written a new book, For the Freedom of Her Race: Black Women and Electoral Politics in Illinois, 1877-1932. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. http://history.ucdavis.edu/faculty/Materson_Lisa
This award, funded in part by funds from the Herbert A. Young Society, was presented to Assistant Professor of Anthropology Andrew Marshall in support of his research of primate ecology in West Kalimantan. http://anthropology.ucdavis.edu/people/andrew-j.-marshall-1
To download the report in PDF, click here.