Affiliated Faculty
LIZA GRANDIA
Associate Professor, Native American Studies
Liza Grandia, cultural anthropologist, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Native American Studies at the University of California-Davis. Since 1993, she has collaborated with numerous indigenous and environmental NGOs in Guatemala and Belize. She is the author of two ethnographies based on seven years of fieldwork: Enclosed: Conservation, Cattle and Commerce among Q’eqchi’ Maya Lowlanders (2012) and Tz’aptzooq’eb’: El Despojo Recurrente al Pueblo Q’eqchi’(2009). She is founder and coordinator of the Q’eqchi’ Scholars Network, which seek to connect researchers with social and environmental justice struggles. As the incoming director of the Indigenous Research Center of the Americas (IRCA), she is working to foster more community-engaged and community-driven research across the hemisphere. Her own research and activist interests include: agrarian and biodiversity conservation issues in northern Guatemala and southern Belize; corporate and development threats to indigenous peoples; cultural perceptions of toxics in everyday life; GM-corn; hegemony and controlling processes; the commons.
ARI KELMAN
Professor, History
Ari Kelman is a Chancellor’s Leadership Professor of History at UC Davis. He specializes in urban, environmental, and cultural history. His first book, A River and Its City: The Nature of Landscape in New Orleans, won the 2004 Abbott Lowell Cummings prize and was reprinted in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. His most recent book, A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling over the Memory of Sand Creek, won the 2014 Bancroft Prize, Avery O. Craven Award, and the Robert M. Utley Prize. His writing has appeared in a number of scholarly and popular journals, including Slate, The Christian Science Monitor, The Nation, The Times Literary Supplement, The Journal of American History, the Journal of Urban History, and many others.
ELIZABETH CAROLYN MILLER
Professor, English
Elizabeth Carolyn Miller is a Professor of English at UC Davis who specializes in nineteenth-century British literature and culture, media studies, gender studies, and literature and the environment. She is currently engaged in a project on the aesthetics of extraction capitalism in nineteenth-century Britain and its empire, tentatively titled “Text Mining: Extraction Ecologies and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imaginary.” Her most recent book is Slow Print: Literary Radicalism and Late Victorian Print Culture (Stanford, 2013), which received the Best Book of the Year award from the North American Victorian Studies Association as well as Honorable Mention for the Modernist Studies Association Book Prize. Her first book was Framed: The New Woman Criminal in British Culture at the Fin de Siècle (Michigan, 2008), and she has published a wide range of journal essays including recent articles on Thomas Hardy and trees, William Morris and extraction capitalism, and liberation ecologies in nineteenth-century socialism.
MICHAEL RIOS
Associate Professor, Environmental Design and Landscape Architecture
Michael Rios joined the Landscape Architecture faculty in July 2007; previously, he held a joint faculty appointment in the School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture at The Pennsylvania State University. Professor Rios teaches courses in human geography, urban design, and community development. His research interests focus on linking theoretical developments in political and social geography with contemporary public policy, professional practice, and citizen participation in the planning and design of public landscapes. He has published articles on these topics in the Journal of Architectural Education, the Journal of Park and Recreation Management, and the Journal of Urban Design, and book chapters in Good Deeds, Good Design: Community Service through Architecture (Princeton Architectural Press) and From the Studio to the Streets: Service Learning in Architecture and Planning (Stylus).
SIMON SADLER
Professor, Art History
Simon Sadler is Professor of Architectural and Urban History and Director of the Program in Art History. His research concentrates on the urban, ideological and natural imperatives of modern and contemporary architecture. His publications include three books, Archigram: Architecture without Architecture (MIT Press, 2005), The Situationist City (MIT Press, 1998) and Non-Plan: Essays on Freedom, Participation and Change in Modern Architecture and Urbanism (edited with Jonathan Hughes; Architectural Press, 2000). His ongoing research focuses on radical ecological and globalizing trends in architecture since the 1960s of the sort, for instance, which gathered in California and the southwest around The Whole Earth Catalog (see “Drop City Revisited,” Journal of Architectural Education, 58.1 (2006). His most recent publications include “TEDification versus Edification,” Places (January 2014) and “Autonomy’s Ghost and General Education,” Architectural Histories 1.16 (2013).
CECILIA TSU
Assistant Professor, History
Cecilia Tsu received her Ph.D. from Stanford University in 2006 and joined the History faculty as an Assistant Professor that year. Her research and teaching interests include Asian American history, race and ethnicity, immigration, California and the American West, gender, agricultural and rural history. She has a recent article, “‘Independent of the Unskilled Chinaman’: Race, Labor, and Family Farming in California’s Santa Clara Valley,” in Western Historical Quarterly (November 2006). Professor Tsu recently published Garden of the World: Asian Immigrants and the Making of Agriculture in California’s Santa Clara Valley (Oxford University Press, 2013) based on her dissertation, which won the W. Turrentine Jackson Dissertation Award for best dissertation on the history of the American West from the American Historical Association, Pacific Coast Branch, and the Gilbert C. Fite Dissertation Award for best dissertation on agricultural history from the Agricultural History Society.