Newsletter 2022

Dear Friends,

I’m writing to share the UC Davis English Department newsletter for 2021–22, a long, strange year for us all. It was a pleasure to return to Voorhies Hall in the fall and begin to see colleagues and students in person again. Despite some ups and downs (the stop-and-start winter quarter being a particularly difficult stretch), it has lifted our spirits to start to re-engage with our community face to face.  

The Deirdre Hackett Award for Experiential Learning

Starting this year, undergraduate and graduate students in the English department will be eligible for a new fellowship: the Deirdre Hackett Award for experiential learning. This opportunity has been made possible by Matt Hackett, who has established the Deirdre Hackett Endowment in English to honor the memory of his late mother, Deirdre, who was a Class of 1987 English major at UC Davis.

New DE in EH

Faculty

Professor of English Parama Roy is retiring this spring, 2022.

How has the department changed since you first started at UC Davis?

Best book of the pandemic: Carolyn Forché's What You Have Heard Is True.

—Pam Houston

I very much enjoyed Robert MacFarlane's Underland: A Deep Time Journey

—Liz Miller

"Live or die, but don't poison everything." –Anne Sexton or Saul Bellow, depending on whom you ask.

—Beth Freeman

The Alice B Toklas Cook Book. Senselessness, by Horacio Castellanos Moya.

—Lucy Corin

In Memoriam

Professors Peter L. Hays and James J. (Jerry) Murphy

The English Department lost two valued emeritus faculty members this year, Professor Peter L. Hays and Professor James J. (Jerry) Murphy. While Jerry (a Professor of Rhetoric and longtime honorary member of our faculty) retired in 1991 and Peter in 2004, both of them remained active in campus life and events into recent years, and they will both be greatly missed.