Campus News

John L. Halverson, a founding faculty member of Stevenson College and a professor of literature here for 27 years, died in Santa Cruz on Friday, March 28, after several months of illness. He was 69. Halverson was born and raised in Iowa. Before entering college he served for three years in the U.S. Air Force.…

The Heaven’s Gate mass suicide got the phones ringing at the home of UCSC’s resident cult expert, Anthony Pratkanis, who spoke with KION-TV, the Contra Costa Times, Sacramento Bee, and San Jose Mercury News. An editorial in the Eureka Times-Standard praised chemist Joe Konopelski’s efforts to synthesize a potential cancer-fighting compound in his lab. Konopelski’s…

Crafts and artwork by staff members are needed for a Staff Art and Craft Show to be held in May as part of celebrating UC Santa Cruz and the inauguration of Chancellor Greenwood. The show, presented by the Staff Advisory Board, opens at the Women’s Center on Friday, May 9th, in conjunction with an ice…

SANTA CRUZ, CA–The UCSC Arboretum and the Santa Cruz County Chapter of the California Native Plant Society will host their annual Spring Plant Sales on Saturday, April 19. The sales will run from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. in the Arboretum’s eucalyptus grove, at the intersection of High Street and Western Drive. The events are…

SANTA CRUZ, CA–Andrew Stewart will present the talk "Women, Dress, and Desire in Classical Athens" from 7 to 8 P.M. on Thursday, April 10, at the Museum of Art and History at the McPherson Center, 705 Front St. The talk is a part of the Humanities Lecture Series, sponsored jointly by the Humanities Division at…

News and feature ideas in the social sciences, issued periodically by the UCSC Public Information Office. For more information, contact Jennifer McNulty at (408) 459-2495 or mcnulty@ua.ucsc.edu Psychology He said, she said: Psychologist Campbell Leaper studies language and gender Developmental psychologist Campbell Leaper offers a first step for those who are concerned about gender inequality:…

Unbound Feet, by associate professor of American studies Judy Yung, has received the Jeanne Farr McDonnell Award from the Women’s Heritage Museum of San Francisco as the outstanding book within the last two years by and about women. This is the third award the book has received.

Barry Sinervo Assistant Professor of Biology Barry Sinervo, a behavioral ecologist, uses the common side-blotched lizard as a model system to study the fascinating ways in which animal behavior and hormonal systems can dictate evolution and sexual selection. He received acclaim for a recent paper in Nature that described "rock-scissors-paper" mating strategies among male lizards…

SANTA CRUZ, CA–When poor vision hobbled the Hubble Space Telescope, UC Santa Cruz astronomer Sandra Faber and several colleagues suggested that a set of high-tech corrective lenses would restore the telescope’s keen eyesight. They were right, and in the last three years Hubble has rewarded astronomers–and the public– with one stunning view of the cosmos…

For years, union organizers and labor activists have urged consumers to "buy American" as a show of support for American workers. But does buying a Volvo really put U.S. autoworkers out of work? Does increasing foreign competition actually depress U.S. wages? Economists disagree. At UCSC, labor economist Lori Kletzer () is embarking on a 12-month…

SCIPP researchers skeptical about hints of a new particle In a famous experiment more than 80 years ago, physicist Ernest Rutherford fired particles into an ultrathin layer of gold. Most particles zipped through, but some ricocheted sideways and backward, as if they had struck immovable objects. This amazing result parted the curtain of mystery around…

Gail Hershatter, professor of history, is the author of Dangerous Pleasures: Prostitution and Modernity in Twentieth-Century Shanghai (University of California Press, 1997). Hershatter makes use of a broad array of sources–from classical texts, to newspaper reports on court cases, to surveys by doctors and social workers–to present an intellectual history on one of society’s most…