Shared values and knowledge

In a ceremony at the White House, President Barack Obama awarded the 2014 National Humanities Medal to Vicki Ruiz, UC Irvine Distinguished Professor of history and Chicano/Latino studies. The Medal recognizes those who have deepened the country’s understanding of humanities and broadened citizens’ engagement with history, literature, languages, philosophy and other such disciplines.

Ruiz has spent her nearly 40-year academic career – which began with collecting oral testimony from Mexican immigrants who worked in U.S. canning factories – reclaiming the stories of Latinas who fought for civil and labor rights and, in the process, pioneering the field of Chicana/Latina history.

The soft-spoken historian has written or edited several books, including co-editing the groundbreaking Latinas in the United States: A Historical Encyclopedia. The three-volume set – with more than 600 entries and 300 photographs – documents contributions by Latina women to the economic and cultural development of the U.S.

In addition to her roles as the Associate Dean at the School of Humanities and Professor of History and Asian American Studies, Judy Tzu-Chun Wu is a leader in UC Irvine's efforts towards inclusive excellence. She currently serves as the Director of the Humanities Center as well as the Center for Liberation, Anti-Racism, and Belonging (C-Lab), launched in 2022. 

Wu has been recognized with numerous awards and honors for her research and campus involvement here at UC Irvine. In 2021 alone, she had been named a Dynamic Womxn of UCI and a Cross-Cultural Center Faculty Ally of the Year. She also received the Outstanding Faculty Mentorship Award from the DREAM Center and the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Research Mentorship.

As a faculty member, her research interests focus on analyzing intersecting social hierarchies, such as those based on race, gender, sexuality, and citizenship. She is particularly interested in understanding how individuals form identities and navigate/protest social inequalities. She has published three books, Dr. Mom Chung of the Fair-Haired Bastards: the Life of a Wartime Celebrity (University of California Press, 2005), Radicals on the Road: Internationalism, Orientalism, and Feminism during the Vietnam Era (Cornell University Press, 2013), and Fierce and Fearless: Patsy Takemoto Mink, First Woman of Color in Congress (New York University Press, 2022).

Elizabeth Loftus, Distinguished Professor in UC Irvine’s School of Social Ecology and forensic memory expert, is one of only a handful of scientists from around the world elected to the respected National Academy of Sciences. An innovator in false memory research, her work during the past three decades indicates that memory is highly susceptible to distortion and contamination, and that people can be influenced to “remember” familiar or common experiences that did not actually occur.

Loftus has examined numerous claims of repressed memory in court that have turned out to be highly dubious or false. She also has explored the memories of eyewitnesses whose accounts are sometimes inaccurate and have led to the conviction of innocent people.

The Review of General Psychology ranked Dr. Loftus among the top 100 psychologists of the 20th century — a list that begins with luminaries B.F. Skinner, Jean Piaget, and Sigmund Freud.