Professor emerita and groundbreaking multimedia artist Lynn Hershman Leeson returns to campus as a Manetti Shrem California Studio artist-in-residence to screen several of her films and give a talk. At UC Davis from 1993 to 2004, she is a pioneer in the fields of photography, video, film, performance, artificial intelligence, installation, interactive and net-based media art.

Mauricio Ernesto Ramírez, a postdoctoral scholar in the UC Davis Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies, first walked through Balmy Alley when he was a student at a nearby elementary school in San Francisco’s Mission District. The block-long alley contains the most concentrated collection of murals in a city that’s a tapestry of murals. The alley’s art — which first began appearing in the early 1970s —has long been about issues relevant to the many Mission residents who trace their roots to Mexico and Central America.

UC Davis is hosting two internationally acclaimed artists who will give public talks, screen films and work directly with students in May. Lynn Hershman Leeson and Shimon Attie are presented by The Manetti Shrem California Studio in the Department of Art and Art History, housed in the College of Letters and Science. The California Studio is part of UC Davis art studio and underwritten by a gift from Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem.

Lucy Corin, a UC Davis Department of English professor of creative writing, has received a Guggenheim Fellowship. She plans to use the fellowship to work on her next novel, tentatively titled Les and Rae. She is one of eight fiction writers to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship this year.

“(The book) is about a couple who respond to current cultural pressures differently — one joins an underground gun group and one sneaks away into the woods at the edge of their neighborhood,” she said.

In rural Nigeria in 2014, 276 teenaged girls were abducted from their school by the militant Islamist group, Boko Haram. A few escaped, some were later released, but nearly a decade later about 100 are still missing.

Art historians will traverse the vast Pacific Ocean for the annual Templeton Colloquium in Art History at UC Davis. “Pacific Encounters,” taking place Feb. 24, will explore the art, material culture, people and places of the Pacific and how they were depicted through the lens of European exploration and exploitation. The colloquium will focus on New Zealand and Hawaii.

A Pacific-oriented colloquium was driven by student interest.

The UC Davis College of Letters and Science will be well represented when the Modern Language Association holds its annual convention in January. About 30 UC Davis faculty members and graduate students will present research at the gathering in San Francisco of the MLA, the leading organization for scholars of language and literature.

Albert J. McNeil, UC Davis professor emeritus of the Department of Music and an original faculty member and chair of the Department of African American and African Studies, died on Nov. 29. He was 102. At UC Davis from 1969 to 1990, McNeil transformed the University Chorus from an occasional course to a full public performance group and also created the Chamber Singers.

Maceo Montoya is a UC Davis professor, writer, artist and scholar, and recently made his first film. He’s also added editor to his many titles, leading the highly regarded Huizache: The Magazine of a New America. Montoya recently piloted the relaunch of the journal with a new issue coming out this month.