Recent ucdavislibrary_books items

Cross-Linguistic Variation and Efficiency

Tue, 12 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This book argues that major patterns of variation across languages are structured by general principles of efficiency in language use and communication. Evidence for these comes from languages permitting structural choices from which selections are made in performance, e.g. between competing word orders and between relative clauses with a resumptive pronoun versus a gap. The preferences and patterns of performance within languages are reflected in the fixed conventions and variation patterns across grammars, leading to a ‘‘Performance–Grammar Correspondence Hypothesis.’’ The general theory that is laid out in Hawkins’s Efficiency and Complexity in Grammars (OUP) is extended and updated. New areas of grammar and of performance are discussed, new research findings are incorporated that test Hawkins’s earlier predictions, and new advances in the contributing fields of language processing, linguistic theory, historical linguistics, and typology are addressed. This efficiency approach...

Border Biomes: Ecological Imaginaries of Mexico's Edges

Fri, 8 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

What effect do heavily fortified national borders have on the natural environments that surround them? In Border Biomes, Emily Celeste Vázquez Enríquez explores this question by analyzing contemporary Mexican, Latinx, and Indigenous literature that has tried to highlight the human and ecological toll of Mexico’s borders with the United States and Guatemala. By challenging the very premise of borders as permanent, immovable boundaries, she shows how novelists and poets in Mexico and the United States have tried to represent and understand the vast social, political, and ecological harm caused by these constructions. She argues that the environmental destruction that borders create is inseparable from state‑sanctioned, anti‑immigrant racial violence. To do this, she structures the book around three main biomes: rivers, deserts, and forests. Within each chapter, Vázquez Enríquez considers how authors such as Dolores Dorantes, Natalie Diaz, and Ofelia Zepeda have drawn...

Migration: The Biology of Life on the Move (Second Edition)

Tue, 28 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Migration is a dramatic behaviour distinct from other movements. It is an important component of life histories of biodiverse organisms including terrestrial and marine vertebrates, insects, many invertebrates, and the propagules of some plants. This sequel discusses migration across a wide range of groups and species drawing comparisons to illuminate migratory life cycles and their evolution. It takes an integrative approach to migration as a physiological and behavioural phenomenon with important ecological consequences. Part I defines migration in relation to other movements, provides examples, and includes an updated chapter on recent results from newly developed electronic tracking and other methods. Part II surveys proximate mechanisms including physiology, morphology, constraints, the use of winds and currents, and new discoveries regarding the ability to orient and navigate. Part III on the evolution of migratory life histories is the longest section of the book. It...

The Aesthetic Character of Blackness: Sounds Like Us

Mon, 17 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In The Aesthetic Character of Blackness, Jemma DeCristo theorizes the means by which black art liberates the free world but does not and cannot liberate black people. Drawing on Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Alain Locke and as well as the aesthetic thought of Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Schiller, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Theodor Adorno, DeCristo critiques the exaltation of black culture and art’s saving power by analyzing the violence underneath aesthetic production. She tracks black music’s representational and anti-representational capacities in projects of black non/humanization from nineteenth-century abolitionism and the founding of the recording industry to the emergence of black queer blues performers and the rise of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s. Theorizing the contemporary neoliberalization of black audio-visual spectacle, DeCristo ultimately demonstrates that the voluptuous world of black aesthetics beautifies an anti-black world that wields...

The Quest for Liberation: Philosophy and the Making of World Culture in China and the West

Wed, 17 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Contemporary debate on cosmopolitanism routinely refers to Immanuel Kant as its intellectual origin. A group of Chinese and German-speaking thinkers in the early twentieth century, however, used classical Chinese philosophy as an alternative intellectual genealogy to reimagine ethics, politics, society, and modernity for the entire world. Their engagement with Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism broadens the scope of global intellectual history to include a non-European origin of concepts and ideas.Due to the differences in their local crises, the Chinese and the European stories are often narrated in separate national and cultural contexts. Bridging the critical divide between China and the West, The Quest for Liberation examines the thinkers’ shared interest in Chinese philosophy and their common effort to envision a world culture other than Western modernity.Breaking with the common logic of either studying the reception and adaptation of Western ideas in the East...

Fear of a Dead White Planet

Thu, 31 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Fear of a Dead White Planet asks: How does one study when the planet is on fire? The More Worlds Collective challenges the contemporary rush to planetary technofixes for environmental emergency. Instead, it tracks how such planetary-science frames are enmeshed in the longstanding projects of White Supremacy, settler colonialism, and epistemological violence. Calling for unlearning and joined-up study, the collective reclaims terraforming from off-earth engineering schemes to think through how our more modest efforts to study differently are also world-making and world-breaking. In orienting its work toward terra and formation, the collective commits to a place-based, non universal study scaled at levels both intimate and massive. Through its serious but unruly methods, Fear of a Dead White Planet invites readers to recognize and conjure alternate worlds in and around the university.

Native Persistence at a California Mission Outpost: The Bioarchaeology and History of the Asistencia de San Pedro Y San Pablo

Wed, 23 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Construction work in 2016 at Sanchez Adobe Park, the site of a historic Spanish mission outpost in the San Francisco Bay Area, led to the surprising discovery of human skeletal remains. This book presents a series of bioarchaeological studies done in collaboration with the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band of Mission San Juan Bautista, the state-appointed Most Likely Descendants of the Ohlone people buried in this cemetery, to explore persistence and change in the lives of Native Californians recruited into the Spanish missions during the late 1700s. This volume presents cutting-edge research techniques used to study the health, diet, social connections, and medicinal practices of these Ohlone individuals. Studies include obsidian and glass bead sourcing, osteological and paleopathological analysis, stable isotope analysis, and proteomic studies of dental calculus. By comparing these findings with historical records, researchers are even able to identify several of the individuals...

Settler Attachments and Asian Diasporic Film: A cinematic study of Asian–Indigenous relationality

Thu, 10 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Settler Attachments and Asian Diasporic Film is an interdisciplinary examination of the stubborn attachment of Asian diasporas to settler-colonial ideals and of the decolonial possibilities Asian diasporic films imagine. Beenash Jafri uniquely addresses the complexities of Asian–Indigenous relationality through film and visual media, urging film scholars to approach their subjects with an eye to the entanglements of race, diaspora, and Indigeneity.

Highlighting how Asian diasporic attachments to settler colonialism are structural, she explores how they are manifested through melancholic yearning within the figure of the Asian cowboy in films such as Cowgirl and Wild West and through the aesthetic and representational politics of body and land in experimental films by Shani Mootoo and Vivek Shraya. While recognizing the pervasive violence of settler colonialism, Jafri maintains a hopeful outlook, showcasing how Asian diasporic filmmakers persistently...

Plato Was Not a Mathematical Platonist

Wed, 9 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This Element shows that Plato keeps a clear distinction between mathematical and metaphysical realism and the knife he uses to slice the difference is method. The philosopher's dialectical method requires that we tether the truth of hypotheses to existing metaphysical objects. The mathematician's hypothetical method, by contrast, takes hypotheses as if they were first principles, so no metaphysical account of their truth is needed. Thus, we come to Plato's methodological as-if realism: in mathematics, we treat our hypotheses as if they were first principles, and, consequently, our objects as if they existed, and we do this for the purpose of solving problems. Taking the road suggested by Plato's Republic, this Element shows that methodological commitments to mathematical objects are made in light of mathematical practice; foundational considerations; and, mathematical applicability.

Chinese Marriages in Transition: From Patriarchy to New Familism

Wed, 9 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Outdated models of Chinese gender roles, marriage, and family transitions portray these changes as streamlined and unidirectional, from traditional to modern, public to private, collective to individual. Chinese Marriages in Transition documents the complex, nuanced, and multidirectional nature of these cultural transformations. Using complex and large-scale historical national data as well as comprehensive data from multiple countries, Xiaoling Shu and Jingjing Chen demonstrate that, while the second demographic transition is unfolding in many advanced Western societies, it is not necessarily a normative form of societal transition. Working instead from a framework of "new familism," Shu and Chen show that Chinese new familism consists of both old and new values, including the persistence of some traditional beliefs and practices, accompanied by a transition to modern perceptions of gender, and adaption to some modern forms of family formation.

Kernels of Resistance: Maize, Food Sovereignty, and Collective Power

Tue, 8 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The story of how Mesoamerican food activists faced down Monsanto . . . and wonRight before the 2014 World Cup, US trade interests pressured Guatemala’s legislature into lifting its national ban on genetically modified (GM) crops and criminalizing traditional seed saving practices. Maya elders responded with a campaign of mass civil disobedience, blocking highways until the Guatemalan Congress repealed this “Monsanto Law.” Uniting rural and urban Guatemalans, this uprising spotlighted the existential threat of GM corn to the livelihood, dignity, and cultural heritage of maize-producing milperos (small farmers) throughout Mesoamerica. Ten years later, Mexico is also facing down US trade aggression to defend a 2020 presidential ban on the import of GM corn for human consumption.Liza Grandia chronicles how diverse coalitions in Mexico and Guatemala have defended their sacred maize against corporate threats to privatize it. Rather than just “voting with their forks” like...

Missionaries, Anthropologists, and Music in the Indonesian Archipelago

Mon, 7 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Although the history of Indonesian music has received much attention from ethnomusicologists and Western composers alike, almost nothing has been written on the interaction of missionaries with local culture. This study represents the first attempt to concentrate on the musical dimension of missionary activities in Indonesia. In fourteen essays, a group of distinguished scholars show the complexity of the topic: while some missionaries did important scholarship on local music, making recordings and attempting to use local music in services, others tried to suppress whatever they found. Many were collaborating closely with anthropologists who admitted freely that they could not have done their work without them. And both parties brought colonial biases into their work. By grappling with these realities and records, this book is a collective effort to decolonize the project of making music histories.

Pragmatic Liberation and the Politics of Puerto Rican Diasporic Drama

Mon, 7 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Pragmatic Liberation and the Politics of Puerto Rican Diasporic Drama explores the work of a unique group of playwrights—Puerto Rican dramatists writing in the United States—who offer a model of political engagement. As members of the Puerto Rican diaspora, they have a heightened awareness of the systematic discrimination and the colonial citizenship created by Puerto Rico's territorial status. Pragmatic Liberation analyzes the work of established playwrights as well as work that has previously received little attention in the world of theater studies, including René Marqués's Palm Sunday. The book demonstrates the strategies these playwrights use to model a nuanced way of moving toward liberation while being sensitive to the potential impact these actions might have on those closest to us. This is a crucially important model that needs more attention in our currently polarized political moment.

The Land Is Our Community: Aldo Leopold’s Environmental Ethic for the New Millennium

Mon, 7 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A contemporary defense of conservationist Aldo Leopold’s vision for human interaction with the environment. Informed by his experiences as a hunter, forester, wildlife manager, ecologist, conservationist, and professor, Aldo Leopold developed a view he called the land ethic. In a classic essay, published posthumously in A Sand County Almanac, Leopold advocated for an expansion of our ethical obligations beyond the purely human to include what he variously termed the “land community” or the “biotic community”—communities of interdependent humans, nonhuman animals, plants, soils, and waters, understood collectively. This philosophy has been extremely influential in environmental ethics as well as conservation biology and related fields. Using an approach grounded in environmental ethics and the history and philosophy of science, Roberta L. Millstein reexamines Leopold’s land ethic in light of contemporary ecology. Despite the enormous influence of the land ethic,...

The Lithic Imagination from More to Milton

Mon, 7 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The Lithic Imagination from More to Milton explores how stones, rocks, and the broader mineral realm play a vital role in early modern England’s religious and cultural systems that in turn informs the period’s poetic and visual imagination. The twin buttresses of a human lifespan and the gyre-like turns of England’s long Reformation provide a broad dome under which to locate the many textual and visual archives this book studies. These texts and images participate in specifically English histories (literary, artistic, political, religious), although Continental influences are frequently in dialogue. The religious orbit tracks the rivalries firstly between Jewish and Christian culture, touches on Christianity’s tension with Islam, but most intently follows the antagonisms of Catholic and variants of Reformed or Protestant belief. The bibliography features canonical names such as Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne, Wroth, Herbert, Milton, and Pulter, but puts them in company...

UC Davis School of Medicine History of the Research Program

Wed, 10 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

UC Davis School of Medicine History of the Research Program

American Power and International Theory at the Council on Foreign Relations, 1953-54

Mon, 28 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Between December 1953 and June 1954, the elite think-tank the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) joined prominent figures in International Relations, including Pennsylvania’s Robert Strausz-Hupé, Yale’s Arnold Wolfers, the Rockefeller Foundation’s William Thompson, government adviser Dorothy Fosdick, and nuclear strategist William Kaufmann. They spent seven meetings assessing approaches to world politics—from the “realist” theory of Hans Morgenthau to theories of imperialism of Karl Marx and V.I. Lenin—to discern basic elements of a theory of international relations. The study group’s materials are an indispensable window to the development of IR theory, illuminating the seeds of the theory-practice nexus in Cold War U.S. foreign policy. Historians of International Relations recently revised the standard narrative of the field’s origins, showing that IR witnessed a sharp turn to theoretical consideration of international politics beginning around 1950, and remained preoccupied...

Where Truth Lies: Digital Culture and Documentary Media after 9/11

Mon, 28 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

In this book Kris Fallon traces the evolution of documentary film and photography as they migrated onto digital platforms during the first decades of the twenty-first century. He examines the emergence of several key media forms—social networking and crowdsourcing, video games and virtual environments, big data and data visualization—and demonstrates the formative influence of political conflict and the documentary film tradition on their evolution and cultural integration. Focusing on particular moments of political rupture, Fallon argues that the ideological rifts of the period inspired the adoption and adaptation of newly available technologies to encourage social mobilization and political action, a function performed for much of the previous century by independent documentary film. Positioning documentary film and digital media side by side in the political sphere, Fallon asserts that “truth” now lies in a new set of media forms and discursive practices that implicitly shape...

The Small Matter of Suing Chevron

Tue, 22 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Suzana Sawyer traces Ecuador’s lawsuit against the Chevron corporation for the environmental devastation resulting from its oil drilling practices, showing how distinct legal truths were relationally composed of, with, and through crude oil.

Modernist Idealism: Ambivalent Legacies of German Philosophy in Italian Literature

Fri, 12 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Offering a new approach to the intersection of literature and philosophy, Modernist Idealism contends that certain models of idealist thought require artistic form for their full development and that modernism realizes philosophical idealism in aesthetic form. This comparative view of modernism employs tools from intellectual history, literary analysis, and philosophical critique, focusing on the Italian reception of German idealist thought from the mid-1800s to the Second World War. Modernist Idealismintervenes in ongoing debates about the nineteenth- and twentieth-century resurgence of materialism and spiritualism, as well as the relation of decadent, avant-garde, and modernist production. Michael J. Subialka aims to open new discursive space for the philosophical study of modernist literary and visual culture, considering not only philosophical and literary texts but also early cinema. The author’s main contention is that, in various media and with sometimes radically different...

Scriptures, Shrines, Scapegoats, and World Politics: Religious Sources of Conflict and Cooperation in the Modern Era

Wed, 6 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

The effect of religious factors on politics has been a key issue since the end of the Cold War and the subsequent rise of religious terrorism. However, the systematic investigations of these topics have focused primarily on the effects of religion on domestic and international conflict. Scriptures, Shrines, Scapegoats, and World Politics offers a comprehensive evaluation of the role of religion in international relations, broadening the scope of investigation to such topics as the relationship between religion and cooperation, religion and conflict, and the relationship between religion and the quality of life. Religion is often manipulated by political elites to advance their principal goal of political survival. Zeev Maoz and Errol A. Henderson find that no specific religion is either consistently more bellicose or consistently more cooperative than other religions. However, religious similarity between states tends to reduce the propensity of conflict and increase...

Gaming the Metrics: Misconduct and Manipulation in Academic Research

Wed, 29 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

How the increasing reliance on metrics to evaluate scholarly publications has produced new forms of academic fraud and misconduct. The traditional academic imperative to “publish or perish” is increasingly coupled with the newer necessity of “impact or perish”—the requirement that a publication have “impact,” as measured by a variety of metrics, including citations, views, and downloads. Gaming the Metrics examines how the increasing reliance on metrics to evaluate scholarly publications has produced radically new forms of academic fraud and misconduct. The contributors show that the metrics-based “audit culture” has changed the ecology of research, fostering the gaming and manipulation of quantitative indicators, which lead to the invention of such novel forms of misconduct as citation rings and variously rigged peer reviews. The chapters, written by both scholars and those in the trenches of academic publication, provide a map of academic fraud and misconduct today....

Ethnography #9

Wed, 29 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

As Alan Klima writes in Ethnography #9, “there are other possible starting places than the earnest realism of anthropological discourse as a method of critical thought.” In this experimental ethnography of capitalism, ghosts, and numbers in mid- and late-twentieth-century Thailand, Klima uses this provocation to deconstruct naive faith in the “real” and in the material in academic discourse that does not recognize that it is, itself, writing. Klima also twists the common narrative that increasing financial abstractions in economic culture are a kind of real horror story, entangling it with other modes of abstraction commonly seen as less “real,” such as spirit consultations, ghost stories, and haunted gambling. His unconventional, distinctive, and literary form of storytelling uses multiple voices, from ethnographic modes to a first-person narrative in which he channels Northern Thai ghostly tales and the story of a young Thai spirit. This genre alchemy creates strange...

Paris in the Dark: Going to the Movies in the City of Light, 1930–1950

Wed, 29 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

In Paris in the Dark Eric Smoodin takes readers on a journey through the streets, cinemas, and theaters of Paris to sketch a comprehensive picture of French film culture during the 1930s and 1940s. Drawing on a wealth of journalistic sources, Smoodin recounts the ways films moved through the city, the favored stars, and what it was like to go to the movies in a city with hundreds of cinemas. In a single week in the early 1930s, moviegoers might see Hollywood features like King Kong and Frankenstein, the new Marlene Dietrich and Maurice Chevalier movies, and any number of films from Italy, Germany, and Russia. Or they could frequent the city's ciné-clubs, which were hosts to the cinéphile subcultures of Paris. At other times, a night at the movies might result in an evening of fascist violence, even before the German Occupation of Paris, while after the war the city's cinemas formed the space for reconsolidating French film culture. In mapping the cinematic...

Beside You in Time

Thu, 17 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

In Beside You in Time Elizabeth Freeman expands biopolitical and queer theory by outlining a temporal view of the long nineteenth century. Drawing on Foucauldian notions of discipline as a regime that yoked the human body to time, Freeman shows how time became a social and sensory means by which people assembled into groups in ways that resisted disciplinary forces. She tracks temporalized bodies across many entangled regimes—religion, secularity, race, historiography, health, and sexuality—and examines how those bodies act in relation to those regimes. In analyses of the use of rhythmic dance by the Shakers; African American slave narratives; literature by Mark Twain, Pauline Hopkins, Herman Melville, and others; and how Catholic sacraments conjoined people across historical boundaries, Freeman makes the case for the body as an instrument of what she calls queer hypersociality. As a mode of being in which bodies are connected to others and their histories across and...

Creating the intellectual: Chinese communism and the rise of a classification

Fri, 28 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Creating the Intellectual redefines how we understand relations between intellectuals and the Chinese socialist revolution of the last century. Under the Chinese Communist Party, “the intellectual” was first and foremost a widening classification of individuals based on Marxist thought. The party turned revolutionaries and otherwise ordinary people into subjects identified as usable but untrustworthy intellectuals, an identification that profoundly affected patterns of domination, interaction, and rupture within the revolutionary enterprise. Drawing on a wide range of data, Eddy U takes the reader on a journey that examines political discourses, revolutionary strategies, rural activities, urban registrations, workplace arrangements, organized protests, and theater productions. He lays out in colorful detail the formation of new identities, forms of organization, and associations in Chinese society. The outcome is a compelling picture of the mutual constitution of the intellectual...

Toward a Living Architecture? Complexism and Biology in Generative Design

Thu, 27 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Toward a Living Architecture? examines the emerging field of generative architecture and its nexus with computation, biology, and complexity. Based on Christina Cogdell’s field research in architecture studios and biological labs, this book critiques generative architecture by evaluating its scientific rhetoric and disjunction from actual scientific theory and practice, definitively explaining the role of the natural sciences within contemporary architecture.

Respawn: Gamers, Hackers, and Technogenic Life

Tue, 19 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

In Respawn Colin Milburn examines the connections between video games, hacking, and science fiction that galvanize technological activism and technological communities. Discussing a wide range of games, from Portal and Final Fantasy VII to Super Mario Sunshine and Shadow of the Colossus, Milburn illustrates how they impact the lives of gamers and non-gamers alike. They also serve as resources for critique, resistance, and insurgency, offering a space for players and hacktivist groups such as Anonymous to challenge obstinate systems and experiment with alternative futures. Providing an essential walkthrough guide to our digital culture and its high-tech controversies, Milburn shows how games and playable media spawn new modes of engagement in a computerized world.

Gaming the Stage

Tue, 12 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Rich connections between gaming and theater stretch back to the 16th and 17th centuries, when England's first commercial theaters appeared right next door to gaming houses and blood-sport arenas. In the first book-length exploration of gaming in the early modern period, Gina Bloom shows that theaters succeeded in London's new entertainment marketplace largely because watching a play and playing a game were similar experiences. Audiences did not just see a play; they were encouraged to play the play, and knowledge of gaming helped them become better theatergoers. Examining dramas written for these theaters alongside evidence of analog games popular then and today, Bloom argues for games as theatrical media and theater as an interactive gaming technology.Gaming the Stage also introduces a new archive for game studies: scenes of onstage gaming, which appear at climactic moments in dramatic literature. Bloom reveals plays to be systems of information for theater spectators: games...