UC Merced Children’s Opera, a performance that delights and enlightens thousands of schoolchildren a year while giving Bobcat students experience in theater, has received support from a generous grant from the Central Valley Opportunity Fund.
Spirits were high and futures bright while all else was soaked in a summer storm that made Tuesday morning’s Scholars Bridge Crossing, UC Merced’s traditional greeting to new students, a welcome unlike any before.
Call them Thunder ‘Cats.
The ceremony embraced about 2,000 first-year and transfer students to a campus that this fall semester marks 20 years since the first undergraduate class began at the newly built institution, bringing the power of a University of California education to the Central Valley.
UC Merced has debuted a writer-in-residence program with one of California’s premier chroniclers of its history, especially the titanic power plays for land and water that have shaped the state’s growth and loom over its future.
Mark Arax, a Fresno native, author and former Los Angeles Times journalist, will host workshops about his craft throughout the academic year. His presence on campus also will offer inside access to a working author.
Zachary Silva’s camera escorts us to extraordinary places. We see UC Merced from high above, the land around the campus warped by a fisheye lens. We look straight down a pole at a fluttering U.S. flag and two lonely tractors.
These eye-popping points of view are among other photographs by Silva on display at Carnegie Arts Center in Turlock. The UC Merced student is one of a dozen artists in an exhibition called “Valley Focus: Growing Talent.”
If Arden, the sprawling, wild forest in William Shakespeare’s “As You Like It,” were in the United States instead of the Bard’s imagination, it would certainly be a national park.
Like Yosemite.
That is why this light comedy is an ideal fit for the annual UC Merced theater project that weaves modern issues of environmental stewardship into the 16th-century playwright’s words.
A UC Merced professor entered the bleak world of a fading, 64-year-old man in a Virginia state prison to illustrate the challenges of being elderly and incarcerated.
“Where’s My Coffee Cup?” is a half-hour documentary by media and performance studies Professor Yehuda Sharim. It premieres April 18 at the Virginia Museum of History and Culture. Plans are underway to present the film worldwide, including a possible screening at UC Merced this fall.
The Huntington Library in San Marino is one of the world’s greatest sources for independent research in the humanities, with documents and artifacts that span 11 centuries. Scholars from more than 30 nations visit its reading rooms or tap into its digital services.
Each year, the library awards 15 long-term fellowships for high-quality research. Of those, six are named distinguished fellows, an honor for exceptional work in their field of study.
Todo Cambia, UC Merced’s annual Human Rights Film Festival, is about more than film this year.
Deborah Taffa, an Indigenous author and educator whose book about growing up in a mixed-race home and struggling with social acceptance was hailed as one the best memoirs of 2024, will make a special visit to Merced this month.
An exhibition that collects artistic visions from five continents and weaves them into a compelling plea to protect our planet has found the perfect home for the first few months of 2025.
At least that’s how Grace Garnica, manager of UC Merced’s La Galería, sees it. And she has a point: The Central Valley and a university committed to environmental research are ideal for “Actions for the Earth: Art, Care & Ecology.”*
