In Remembrance of Professor Jan Goggans

Dear Campus Community,

It is with deep sadness that we write to inform you of the death of UC Merced founding faculty member Professor Jan Goggans.

Since her arrival to the School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts in 2005, she helped shaped the culture of the school with her focus on kindness and putting people first. Jan put students at the center of their own learning, calling out their talents by validating their own lived experiences.

She was the best imaginable ambassador for UC Merced. She tirelessly worked with the Admissions Office to show students what a welcoming university is like. And for faculty and staff, too, her outreach helped bring us here. My case is not unusual. I came here because Jan worked her network to introduce me to this new enterprise, and she was the first person from the campus with whom I talked. She was, as always, honest; I learned not only about the exciting work, but also about the challenges working at a startup university would entail. It was an easy choice to make in part because I knew I would have such a caring, thoughtful, and honest colleague in my new academic home.

While she taught mostly literature classes, she was a truly inter-disciplinary cultural critic. Her first book powerfully elucidates the intersections of art and social science as forces for social change by telling the story of photographer Dorothea Lange’s collaboration with economist Paul Taylor, and her work on Okie poet Wilma McDaniel brought the writer’s archives to UC Merced’s library. Her most recent book looked at twentieth century popular fiction and the fashion industry to understand how intersecting arts enabled working class readers opportunities to express, sometimes obliquely, their identities. Goggans’s research and classes always focused on the often marginalized and forgotten: working class readers, Dust Bowl migrants, women whose writing was trivialized by those in power.