Carolyn de la Peña, a professor of American studies who directs the UC Davis Humanities Institute and co-edits the UC magazine Boom: A Journal of California, has been appointed interim vice provost of Undergraduate Education.

de la Pena

De la Peña officially assumes her new post Jan. 1. Her appointment is for one year, or until the appointment of a permanent replacement. Pat Turner, who has served in the post for the last 13 years, is switching UC campuses at the end of the year, moving to UCLA to serve as its dean and vice provost of Undergraduate Education.

UC Davis Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor Ralph J. Hexter, who appointed de la Peña, plans to launch a national search for a permanent replacement in 2013.

As interim vice provost for Undergraduate Education, de la Peña’s primary responsibility will be to support Hexter in providing campuswide leadership for the delivery and enhancement of undergraduate education. She will serve as a liaison for academic issues pertinent to undergraduate education across each of the four colleges and Academic Senate, as well as outside the campus with the Office of the President, other universities and relevant accreditation agencies.

“Carolyn enjoys the respect and broad support of her colleagues across campus, and students revere her,” Hexter said. “She is energetic, creative and deeply and imaginatively involved in interdisciplinary collaborations. We are all fortunate that she has agreed to take on this challenging and rewarding assignment.”

For her part, de la Peña said she will embrace the new opportunity: "UC Davis is known for our dedicated and innovative undergraduate teaching. This is one of the things that most attracted me to this campus initially.

"I’m looking forward to supporting our faculty, graduate students and staff in their continuing efforts to enrich our students’ academic experiences. Given my background at the Humanities Institute, I’m particularly interested in enhancing undergraduate opportunities to learn from and contribute to original research."

De la Peña, who has a doctoral degree in American studies from the University of Texas at Austin, has taught at UC Davis since 2001 and has served as director of the Humanities Institute since 2007. She and Louis Warren, the W. Turrentine Jackson Professor of Western U.S. History, have served as co-editors of Boom since UC Press launched the general-interest magazine in February 2011.

Today, de la Peña chairs UC’s systemwide network of humanities center directors and is a core participant in the Studies of Food and the Body Multicampus Research Program, comprising faculty members and graduate students across the social sciences and humanities on five UC campuses who, together, explore the intersection of food and human systems and cultures.

She is the author of two books (The Body Electric: How Strange Machines Built the Modern American, 2003, and Empty Pleasures: The Story of Artificial Sweetener from Saccharin to Splenda, 2010), two co-edited volumes (Rewiring the Nation: The Place of Technology in American Studies, with Siva Vaidahyanathan, 2007, and Local Foods Meet Global Foodways: Tasting History, with Benjamin Lawrance, 2012), and about 20 articles on the history of people’s relationship to technologies and objects — especially those that enhance physical performance — in the United States.

As interim vice provost for Undergraduate Education, de la Peña will receive an annual base salary of $157,500.

Online

A Q&A with de la Peña on UC system's research website.

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