Two UC Davis professors are busy preparing for the inaugural issue of a new journal about California’s cultures, politics and histories that will be called Boom.

Louis Warren, W. Turrentine Jackson Professor of Western U.S. History, and Carolyn de la Peña, associate professor of American studies and director of the UC Davis Humanities Institute, have been selected by the UC Press to co-edit the new publication scheduled to debut in February 2011.

Boom: A Journal of California will be the first and only scholarly journal to explore the contemporary and historical connections among California’s culture, society, industry, politics and arts, as well as how the state both influences and is influenced by the larger world.

“I couldn’t be more pleased that UC Press chose UC Davis and the UC Davis Humanities Institute as the first home for this important new venture,” said Jessie Ann Owens, dean of Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies. “California studies is a strength at UC Davis, and I know that under the leadership of Carolyn de la Peña and Louis Warren, the journal will flourish.”

The journal will publish quarterly with funding from a $722,000 grant the UC Press received from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The grant also will underwrite an annual conference on California studies at UC Davis.

Boom will present peer-reviewed articles submitted by a wide array of scholars, journalists, community researchers, photographers and others. It will be published in a magazine format similar to another UC Press glossy, Gastronomica, a journal that explores the history, culture and politics of food.

But, unlike many academic journals, Boom will be written and edited to appeal to a broader audience, de la Peña and Warren said.

“Thousands of people would like to read intelligent, critical commentary on how California got to be the way it is and what it is,” Warren said. “It’s not just a state. It’s a gigantic engine of cultural and economic production.”

The editors plan for the journal to illuminate connections between California’s past and the present. Boom will “bring together scholarly writers to produce articles that are engaged with the most pressing issues of the day,” Warren said.

“We wanted something that would bring together these thoughtful analyses and insightful stories about California and present them to readers both within and beyond academia. We wanted something that could have an impact,” de la Peña said.

“So Boom, for me, is the sound that scholarship makes when it hits the ground,” she added. “It’s the sound of delivering something at a moment when it can have an effect on a reader, which is what we want these pieces to achieve.”