Michelle Morgante

UC Merced and the City of Merced, through the Levitt Foundation, are hosting a virtual concert in August as part of the current Levitt AMP Virtual Music Series. The series was moved online in response to the postponement of national in-person events due to COVID-19.

Music fans across the country can now enjoy a lineup of hand-picked local and regional favorites by simply logging onto the Levitt AMP Virtual Music Series website . The concerts will last through the summer.

Esteemed anthropologist and archaeologist Professor Mark Aldenderfer, who retired this month from UC Merced, has been awarded the Edward A. Dickson Emeriti Professorship Endowed Chair, the university announced.

“Songs that Never End,” Professor Yehuda Sharim’s intimate film about a family transitioning from Iran to life in Texas, is a finalist contender in the International Documentary Film Festival Vienna and will stream on the festival’s site for one week starting Thursday.

Arturo Arias, a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation professor in the Humanities at UC Merced, has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for his ground-breaking study of contemporary indigenous novels from Guatemala and Mexico.

Arias was one of 173 American and Canadian fellows announced Wednesday by the Board of Trustees of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

The Whiting Public Engagement Program has awarded a $50,000 fellowship to Professor Ma Vang for her efforts to integrate the experiences of refugees into education for high school students in Merced County and beyond.

UC Merced will hold a free Spanish-language health conference for the community on Saturday, Nov. 16, with sessions on topics including preventative health measures, coping with stress, domestic violence and vaccines.

The event is led by the Medical Spanish Service Learning Project, which trains students how to discuss medical topics in Spanish.

As a child, Kevin Dawson traveled from California to visit his grandmother in Harlem, where he recalls playing in Jackie Robinson Park. Dawson, an avid swimmer and surfer, would peer through a fence with his cousins to check out the park’s large swimming pool.

“I remember thinking how fun it’d be to go in the pool. But there was never any water,” he said. “It was a disadvantaged and underfunded community.”

Archaeology Professor Mark Aldenderfer ventured to the Austrian Alps recently to deliver a keynote address at the International Mountain Conference in Innsbruck.