History and Critical Race & Ethnic Studies

Five UC Merced faculty members are among the first awardees of a UC-wide honor given for exemplary research in budding academic careers.

The Early Career Faculty Research Excellence Awards, launched last fall, support commitment to scholarship and creative activity across the 10-campus system. The awards build on a range of programs and initiatives across the system designed to support thriving faculty careers at UC. 

A highly customizable degree that rewards curiosity, reaches out to a diverse set of learners and prepares scholars for people-centered careers has arrived at UC Merced.

Liberal studies, a bachelor’s program that taps into disciplines in the School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts, debuts in the fall 2026 semester. Students can parlay the degree’s flexibility with core UC Merced attributes such as undergraduate research and easy access to professors and advisers.

Taliyah Miller would be the first to tell you she arrived at UC Merced with an unwavering, long-range goal: become an anesthesiologist. What she could not have predicted was that a difficult roommate, a therapist’s question and a job she forgot she applied for would upend that goal and leave her better for it.

Miller was raised in Stockton, the third-largest city in the San Joaquin Valley. As the youngest of three with siblings several years older, it was like being an only child. She developed an independent personality early on.

Black History Month often honors familiar names, leaders whose courage and determination changed the course of a nation. But many others have made groundbreaking contributions that exposed injustice, advanced civil rights, reshaped American culture and revolutionized technology. Their achievements and efforts were met with threats, ignorance and suppression. Some had soaring potential cut short by mortal illness.

When Nicolette Lecy began her graduate studies at UC Merced, life was anything but typical.

It was August 2020, in the heart of the COVID-19 pandemic. Lecy’s classes were held remotely, and she had limited access to campus.

Another challenge that could have hindered Lecy’s academic goals — she became a mother during the Thanksgiving break of her first semester at UC Merced.

This story is part of a series for Black History Month. Read more stories highlighting Black excellence at UC Merced.

The brutal deaths of African Americans George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery and others at the hands of police officers five years ago catalyzed for Black communities to unite globally and reignite the Black Lives Matter movement.

Educators from across California will gather at UC Merced for an up-close look at a curriculum that teaches schoolchildren about Hmong Americans — their history in Southeast Asia, their cultural traditions, and their journeys to the United States to escape war and deadly oppression.

Tsitsi Dangarembga spread the spirit of ubuntu over UC Merced on Wednesday night, imparting its message of “how we can be good people who live well together.”

Humanities education has been under fire on college campuses over the past decade.

“There’s a lot of concern nationally about graduate education in the humanities. We’re producing plenty of Ph.D.s but are there enough jobs for them upon graduation?” said anthropology and heritage studies Professor Robin DeLugan, who leads UC Merced’s Research Center for Community Engaged Scholarship (ReCCES).

“How do we make a humanities career more feasible?”