UC Davis faculty members drew on their vast expertise to publish books on a variety of timely topics including abortion, mass incarceration and wildfire. These books came out in 2023 or are about to be published.
SELF IMPROVEMENT
Charan Ranganath, professor of psychology and neuroscience, focuses of the role of memory to guide us in the present and the future in Why We Remember: Unlocking Memory’s Power to Hold on to What Matters (Penguin Random House, 2024).
ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE
Susan Handy, professor of environmental science and policy, argues that transportation is not working in the U.S. in Shifting Gears: Toward a New Way of Thinking about Transportation (The MIT Press, 2023).
Tessa Hill, professor of earth and planetary sciences, with writer Eric Simons, takes a deep and emotional dive into how human relationships with the ocean are shifting with the rapid changes occurring in the sea in At Every Depth: Our Growing Knowledge of the Changing Oceans (Columbia University Press, 2024).
“We tell stories of people who are rebuilding our connection to the ocean and carving a new, more sustainable way forward,” said Hill.
Emily Schlickman, assistant professor of landscape architecture and environmental design, and Brett Milligan, associate professor of landscape architecture and environmental design, look at how civilization should live under new fire regimes in Design by Fire: Resistance, Co-Creation and Retreat in the Pyrocene (Routledge, 2023).
Geerat Vermeij, professor of earth and planetary sciences, explores how natural selection and evolution funnel toward increasing power, and how this is closely connected to the evolution of humans in The Evolution of Power: A New Understanding of the History of Life (Princeton University Press, 2023).
DESIGN
Timothy J. McNeil, professor of design, explores contemporary exhibition design through real-world examples, museum and exhibition design studio profiles, historical and contemporary voices, and the author’s own creative practice and exhibition-making experience, in The Exhibition and Experience Design Handbook (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2023).
HISTORY
A. Katie Harris, associate professor of history, investigates a little-known incident of relic theft and the lengthy legal case that followed in The Stolen Bones of St. John of Matha: Forgery, Theft, and Sainthood in the Seventeenth Century (Penn State University Press, 2023).
Ethan Scheiner, professor of political science, tells the story of an underdog team that fought against authoritarian forces in Freedom to Win: A Cold War Story of the Courageous Hockey Team that Fought the Soviets for the Soul of its People — and Olympic Gold (Pegasus Books, 2023).
“Purgatory describes being suspended between deliverance and damnation,” said Weber. “That idea of being suspended, these degrees of freedom also come up in the way people talk about colonial rule.”
Benjamin Weber, assistant professor of African American and African studies, reveals how a history of “prison imperialism”— the deliberate use of prisons to control restive, subject populations — extends to modern times of mass incarceration in American Purgatory: Prison Imperialism and the Rise of Mass Incarceration (The New Press, 2023).
Mary Ziegler, professor of law, identifies the inconsistencies and unsettled issues in U.S. abortion politics in Roe: The History of a National Obsession (Yale University Press, 2023).