Humanities

Central Valley Stories Seminar Connects Students to Community

March 18, 2025

Central Valley Stories event attendees and one painting

Among the UC Merced students’ impressive creations in the dimly lighted room — dioramas, poems, photo collages, paintings in bold colors — Derek Miller’s creation attracted attention. Because it gurgled. It was a tall box open on one side. Balanced on top was a...

Ancient Textile Discovery Suggests More Southern Route for Silk Road

Cloth remains found in the Samdzong tomb complex in Nepal by UC Merced Professor Mark Aldenderfer suggest the village might have been part of the long-distance trade network of the Silk Road. Textile...

New Lecture Series Draws Distinguished Maya Scholars

UC Merced Professor Arturo Arias, recently named one of the campus’s first John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Chairs, has established a new lecture series to further critical race issues and ethnic...

Dean Earns NEH Support for Book on Madrid Attacks

Jill Robbins, dean of the UC Merced School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts, has received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to support the completion of her...

Two Professors Named Campus’s First MacArthur Chairs

Two UC Merced faculty members with distinguished, international research careers recently became the campus’s first John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Chairs. Professor Mark Aldenderfer, who served...

Harvard Professor to Speak on How Culture Changes the World

Harvard University Professor Doris Sommer will present UC Merced’s fourth annual Distinguished Lecture in the Humanities at noon Feb. 22 in the California Room on campus. Sommer’s talk, “The Work of...

New Dean Inspired by Campus’s Innovative Spirit

With two decades of experience at prominent American research universities, Jill Robbins has a good feel for what works and what doesn’t in academia. That’s partly because change comes so slowly to...

Human Rights Film Series Marks 10th Anniversary

The UC Merced Human Rights Film Series celebrates its 10th anniversary this year, with a series dedicated to the memory of Denard Davis, a Merced community advocate, educator, mentor and civil rights...

Student-Professor Team Publishes Book on Literary Pioneer

UC Merced alumna Beth Hernandez-Jason and Professor Manuel M. Martín-Rodríguez have teamed up to create a compilation of essays devoted to the works of author John Rechy. “The Textual Outlaw: Reading...

Hmong Anniversary Celebration Kicks Off at UC Merced

This year marks the 40th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War, and with it, the beginning of the Hmong, Lao and other Southeast Asian migration from Laos and Thailand to the United States. To...