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Water Science and
Engineering
Wildlife, Fish, and Conservation Biology
Women and Gender Studies
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Wildlife, Fish, and Conservation Biology
The present Department of Wildlife, Fish,
and Conservation Biology began with the establishment of the Department
of Animal Physiology in 1964. Frederick W. Lorenz (first chair)
and A. H. Miller, both physiologists from the Department of Poultry
Husbandry, and Walter E. Howard, a zoologist, were the founders.
Lowell Myler, Director of Field Stations, was helpful in establishing
a wildlife component within the department.
The vertebrate ecology (wildlife) staff grew rapidly
with the addition of specialists Cummings, Teague, Marsh, and five
associated biologists of the Bureau of Sport Fisheries and Wildlife,
U.S. Department of the Interior. The wildlife group within the Department
of Animal Physiology was organized into a Division of Wildlife,
Fish, and Biology in 1973, with Dale E. Lott (from the psychology
department) serving as the first chair. The Museum of Wildlife and
Fisheries Biology was established under the curatorship of Ron Cole,
and a 100-acre field site on West Campus called the Experimental
Ecosystem was added to enable behavioral and physiological research
on captive vertebrates and the observation of various wildlife species.
Key faculty hires from 1969 to 1980 included Professors Anderson,
Botsford, Cech, Jacobsen, Moyle, Raveling and Schwab, who provided
broad expertise in fish, bird, and mammal biology and ecology. The
unit reached full departmental status in 1986 as the Department
of Wildlife and Fisheries Biology.
Early in the 1990s conservation biodiversity became
an increasingly important issue around the world and an increasingly
important part of faculty research. Student interest was high. Several
new faculty were brought on board, including Caro (conservation
biologist), Van Vuren, Eadie, D. and N. Erman, Elliott-Fisk, and
Kelt. The unit became the Department of Wildlife, Fish, and Conservation
Biology in 1995. Academic ties to the Bodega Marine Laboratory were
strengthened with the appointment of Klimley as an adjunct professor
in 1999. Aquatic research ecologist Suchanek was added the same
year as director of the Clear Lake Research Program.
The department has always had a strong outreach
and extension focus, with well-established Agricultural Experiment
Station (AES) and Cooperative Extension (CE) components. Applied
AES research in California has focused largely on the ecology and
conservation of fisheries and wild vertebrates in wildland, agricultural,
and urban settings. This research ranges from the individual organism
to population, community, and ecosystem levels. CE staff were assigned
to campus departments in 1988. The academic expertise of these faculty
(Dewees, Fitzhugh, Salmon, and Whisson) includes wildlife biology
management, ecological methods of wildlife damage control for crops,
rangelands, and forests, and fisheries science and management. The
department also houses the California Sea Grant Extension Program.
Department faculty, staff and students are heavily engaged in research
and outreach on the ecology, conservation, and best management of
California's fish and wildlife and their ecosystems. source
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Women and Gender Studies
The Women and Gender Studies Program began
at UC Davis in 1977 when a committee of women faculty, headed by
Sandra Gilbert, submitted a proposal for a Women's Studies major
that would address "the neglect of women's socio-culture situation
and achievement in almost every academic discipline." After
some struggle, the committee won approval for the program, which
began offering an undergraduate major and minor in the winter of
1981, producing its first graduate in 1982. Volunteer directors
managed the program until 1989, when its first full-time director,
Judith Newton, was hired.
By 1999 the faculty numbered nine, four with full-time
appointments in the program, and five with shared appointments in
the departments of sociology, Asian American Studies, anthropology,
and textiles and clothing. The program offered two dozen courses,
had nearly tripled its majors from 16 to 54 (not including minors),
and enrolled 45 graduate students in a Designated Emphasis in Feminist
Theory and Research. The latter, established in 1991, was the first
such emphasis in the UC system.
The Women and Gender Studies program collaborates
with other units to offer a major in critical gender work. It offers
core courses that include introductions to the critical study of
gender; feminist theory and its relation to other theoretical traditions;
and feminist methodologies and approaches to knowledge. The program
also provides overviews of various subfields including the racially
comparative study of gender and of women of color; gender and popular
culture; gender and public policy; gender and globalization; theories
and histories of sexuality; and, most recently, masculinities and
gender and science.
Women and Gender Studies has an affiliated faculty
of great richness and variety. Currently, 64 faculty members are
affiliated with the program, including scholars who consider gender
within ethnic and national contexts. The collaboration between Women
and Gender Studies and faculty in other departments offers students
a wealth of specifically focused courses as well as an understanding
of theoretical and methodological traditions and current issues
in cross-disciplinary fields. A central goal of the program has
been to participate in the reconstruction of Women's Studies as
a field in which important issues are considered through dialogue
across racial and national divides. The program has made it a priority
to teach gender in a racially comparative way.
In 1998 Women's Studies was renamed Women
and Gender Studies to reflect the complex ways that gender systems
interact with race, class, sexuality, and nationality to shape identities,
social relations, economic systems, organizations and, indeed, all
of culture. Development of courses in the critical study of masculinities
also contributed to this decision. source
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