Department of History

Anita Guerrini, a Horning Professor of the Humanities and Professor of History at Oregon State University and an adjunct professor at UCSB, has won the 2018 Pfizer Award for her book, The Courtiers’ Anatomists: Animals and Humans in Louis XIV’s Paris, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2015. Pfizer Book Prize is one of the top awards in […]

Professor de Hart’s new book, Ruth Bader Ginsburg: A Life, is the first full-life biography of the pioneering Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.   It has been getting a great deal of attention with reviews in Newsday, the Wall Street Journal, and other media outlets. Congratulations on the accomplishment, Professor de Hart!

The Department of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara invites applications for a tenure-track assistant professorship in Early North American history, c. 1700-1830. Appointment begins July 1, 2019. PhD expected at time of appointment or candidate must have completed all requirements for a PhD in History or a related field (or equivalent degree), except the dissertation (or equivalent), […]

UCSB History graduate student Brian Griffith has been awarded a 2018-2019 Fulbright Fellowship to conduct research in Italy on his doctoral dissertation, “Bacchus’ Blackshirt: Winemaking and Making Italians in Fascist Italy.” While residing primarily in Rome, he will conduct archival research in Rome and Florence, and he will interview vintners in Tuscany.

UCSB Emeritus Professor of History, Harold Clark Kirker, died in San Francisco on May 30, 2018, just a few days before his 97th birthday.  Professor Kirker, who served in the 10th Mountain Division of the U.S. Army from 1943-45, received his PhD from U.C. Berkeley in 1957.  After teaching at M.I.T. for nine years, he served on the faculty at […]

Rudy Guevarra, a 2007 UCSB History PhD, has been named one of two recipients of a 2018 Ford Foundation Senior Fellowship.  They give this description of his pathbreaking work: Rudy P. Guevarra Jr., Associate Professor Arizona State University, Asian Pacific American Studies, School of Social Transformation“Aloha Compadre: Latinxs in Hawai’i, 1832-2010” My research over the last eighteen years has focused […]

The History Department was saddened by the death of Professor Emeritus Carl Harris on May 14 of this year. Professor Harris, who joined the UCSB history faculty in 1968 and retired in 2011, combined theoretical breadth, innovative social science, and in-depth research in primary sources to produce influential scholarship on the nature and sources of political power in the United […]

Studies in Late Antiquity is edited by Prof. Elizabeth DePalma Digeser of the UCSB History Department.  Check out the contents of the latest issue below.   Studies in Late Antiquity Summer 2018; Vol. 2, No. 2   THE EDITOR The Chain of Hermes: Late Ancient Founders and Traditions Elizabeth Depalma Digeser Stud Late Antiq 2018; 2.2: 145-146 doi:10.1525/sla.2018.2.2.145 http://sla.ucpress.edu/content/2/2/145 ARTICLES […]

Last week, a number of UCSB History graduate students organized and participated in the biannual UCSB Graduate Student Medieval Studies Conference. This year’s conference theme was “The Politics of Pleasure: Social Networking in the Middle Ages.” The planning committee invited a number of scholars from diverse backgrounds to present on the varied ways in which pleasure leisure competition, entertainment, friendly […]

Dr. Holly Roose completed her PhD in History at UCSB last June. Since then, Holly received offers of tenure-track professorships, but she has decided to pursue a higher calling.  She is now the Director of UCSB’s Promise Scholar Program.  The program guides several hundred students who have extremely high financial need through their university careers.  She advises them, makes sure they […]

Professor Zheng has just published her monograph The Politics of Rights and the 1911 Revolution in China with Stanford University Press. China’s 1911 Revolution was a momentous political transformation. Its leaders, however, were not rebellious troublemakers on the periphery of imperial order. On the contrary, they were a powerful political and economic elite deeply entrenched in local society and well-respected both for […]

Professor Alagona has been awarded a visiting fellowship for fall, 2018 at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, where he will be working on his next monograph, Menagerie: People and Wildlife in the American City.

The UCSB History Department excelled with the most number of donors in the Humanities and Fine Arts during UCSB Give Day 2018.   Thank you to everyone who supported our department and our students!

Two UCSB History faculty — Giuliana Perrone and Sherene Seikaly — have been awarded UC Presidents’ Research Fellowships in the Humanities, which will enable them to spend the 2018-2019 academic year working on their next monographs. Professor Perrone’s project, Reconstructing the Law: Slavery in Post-Emancipation Southern Courts, tells the story of “legal Reconstruction,” which was the process by which all […]

Prof. Erika Rappaport’s book A Thirst for Empire: How Tea Shaped the Modern World was recently awarded the biannual Book Prize at the Pacific Coast Conference on British Studies (the PCCBS is an affiliate of the North American Conference on British Studies). A Thirst for Empire previously won the Gourmand award for Best Book on Tea in the World and has received excellent reviews in […]

Prof. Patrick McCray is the newest recipient of the Smithsonian Institution’s Arthur Molella Distinguished Fellowship. The position is offered for 2018-2019 by the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. The fellowship was awarded to McCray for his project “Artists as Inventors, Inventors as Artists” which aims to broaden our understanding […]

Dr. Sarah Case, who is Managing Editor for The Public Historian, published her book Leaders of Their Race: Educating Black and White Women in the New South last year. It has just been reviewed for H-Net. Professor Case has also been invited to be a feature author at the Decatur book festival this coming August/September.

Click here to read the full interview in the UCSB Current.

  Senior Honors Thesis student Zingha Foma has been chosen as the first  Parker-Tiampo Family Scholar.  The scholarship will support Foma’s research on her senior honors thesis, “The Origin of Dutch African Prints: An Investigation into the history of the Dutch owned African textile company, Vlisco.”  The project emerged from her discovery that today Vlisco, a European company, is the […]

With Spring 2018 registration beginning soon, here are some History classes to consider.  And, check out our full Spring 2018 schedule of classes. History 9: Introduction to Historical Methods– Hiroshima in History and Memory MWF 2:00-2:50pm, GIRV 2108. Professor Kate McDonald. How has the atomic bombing of Hiroshima been remembered and commemorated in the United States and Japan? This course […]

Professor McDonald appears in this week’s edition of the “Meiji at 150” podcast, hosted by Dr. Tristan Grunow at the University of British Columbia. Listen to the podcast here.

Studies in Late Antiquity (SLA) is a forum for innovation and reflection on global Late Antiquity (150 – 750 CE) which questions and expands on received models and methods. Primary points of interest include interconnections between the Mediterranean and Africa, Iran, Arabia, the Baltic, Scandinavia, the British Isles, China, India and all of Asia, as well as disrupting the assumed connection […]

A new study from the American Academy of Arts & Sciences challenges the myth of the underemployed, unhappy humanities graduate.  The study analyzed data from the U.S. Census and other government sources, plus Gallup polling of workers nationwide.  In contrast to stereotypes about humanities majors, the study reveals that workers with BA degrees in the humanities had a very low unemployment […]

Congratulations to Sergey Saluschev, who has been awarded a 2018-2019 research fellowship from the American Councils Title VIII Research Scholar Program.  Funded by the U.S. Department of State’s Program for Research and Training on Eastern Europe and the Independent States of the Former Soviet Union (Title VIII), the American Councils Research Scholar Program provides full support for graduate students, faculty, and independent scholars […]

Professor Manuel Covo has been awarded a research fellowship at the Huntington Library for the 2018-2019 academic year. During the tenure of the fellowship he will be finishing his first monograph, The Entrepôt of Atlantic Revolutions: Saint Domingue, Commercial Republicanism and the Remaking of the French Empire. This monograph will place the American, French, and Haitian Revolutions within a global context […]

Emerita Professor Sarah Cline has been appointed to a two year post on the General Council of the Conference on Latin American History

Anthony Barbieri-Low’s co-authored 2 volume work, Law, State and Society in Early Imperial China  (Brill 2015), has been accorded Honorable Mention status in this year’s Patrick D. Hanan Prize for translation from the Association for Asian Studies.  The prize is awarded biennially to an outstanding English translation of a significant work in any genre, from any work from any era that […]

Professor Juan Cobo Betancourt has won a $15,000 grant from the UC Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI) to support his work on a digital archive of texts from Colonial Latin America.  Prof. Cobo has co-founded a non-profit foundation devoted to digitizing the holdings of endangered archives and libraries in Colombia, making the results available and accesible online for free, and promoting […]

A Thirst for Empire, Professor Rappaport’s recent book on how tea shaped the British empire, has won a Gourmand World Cookbook Awards for the Best Book on Tea in the United States and the World. The Gourmand World Cookbook Awards were founded in 1995 by Edouard Cointreau and are the only international competition that features food writing. Every year, they honor […]

Professor Brownlee, author of Federal Taxation in America: a History and professor of economic history, appeared this week in the “Taxes” episode of the Washington Post podcast Constitutional. In the episode, he and Joseph Fishkin, professor of law at the University of Texas, Austin, discuss the history of the income tax in the United States in light of Congress’s historic tax reform bill. The […]

Professor Hasegawa was recently featured in a cover interview with Rorotoko: Cutting Edge Intellectual Interviews discussing his recently published book on the Russian Revolution, Crime and Punishment in the Russian Revolution: Mob Justice and Police in Petrograd. 

Click here to watch a short interview with Prof. McDonald about her recent book, Placing Empire: Travel and the Social Imagination in Imperial Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017).

Stephan Miescher, along with Javiera Barandiaran (Global Studies), Mona Damluji (Film and Media Studies), David Pellow (Environmental Studies), and Janet Walker (Film and Media Studies) has been awarded, by the Andrew F. Mellon Foundation, a yearlong grant to support a Sawyer Seminar on “Energy Justice in Global Perspective” for the 2018-19 academic year. Sawyer Seminars aim to engage productive scholars […]

Secondary-level female education played a foundational role in reshaping women’s identity in the New South. In Leaders of Their Race: Educating Black and White Women in the New South, Sarah H. Case examines the transformative processes involved at two Georgia schools–one in Atlanta for African American girls and young women, the other in Athens and attended by young white women […]

9/21/17 update: On Friday October 13 there will be a book launch with Prof. Rappaport and guest speakers, in UCSB Theater-Dance West 1701 auditorium, from 5 to 7pm. Recent books have revealed how certain commodities, such as sugar and cotton–and now tea–have shaped the global economy and the rise of mass consumerism. Tea has been one of the most popular […]

In addition to Prof. Kate McDonald’s first book, a study on travel in imperial Japan, and Prof. Hal Drake’s examination of miracles in the fourth century Roman empire, summer and fall 2017 will see the publication of Prof. Erika Rappaport’s  A Thirst for Empire: How Tea Shaped the Modern World and Prof. Toshi Hasegawa’s Crime and Punishment in the Russian Revolution: Mob […]

Professor Drake’s new book offers a fresh examination of a complex polytheistic period in Roman history, surveying a wide range of faiths and belief systems during this eventful century. It offers a thoroughly researched assessment of the supernatural and its sociological and cultural effects on history down to the present. Contemporary readers engaged in religious discourse will find the analysis […]

Prof. Mhoze Chikowero is a featured correspondent in the June 20, 2017 issue of The Herald, Zimbabwe’s largest daily newspaper.  Click here to read Prof. Chikowero’s essay on Cde Dickson “Chinx” Chingaira, a leading Chimurenga (“liberation” in the Shona language) musician and veteran of Zimbabwe’s liberation struggle.  The essay draws from Prof. Chikowero’s recent book, African Music, Power, and Being […]

UCSB History professors Verónica Castillo-Muñoz, Sherene Seikaly, and Sharon Farmer celebrate their new books with Chancellor Henry Yang. Prof. Castillo-Muñoz has just published The Other California: Land, Identity and Politics on the Mexican Borderlands with the University of California Press. Prof. Seikaly recently published Men of Capital: Scarcity and Economy in Mandate Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2016). Prof. Farmer recently published […]

Perspectives on History, the news magazine of the American Historical Association, recently published findings on the job outcomes of students who graduated with an undergraduate degree in history, titled “History is Not a Useless Major“. Contrary to popular myths, history majors are not underemployed or paid less than graduates in other fields. The article concludes, “Majoring in history does not doom […]

The 12th Conference of the International Federation for Research on Women’s History/ Federation Internationale Pour la Recherche en Histoire des Femmes (IFRWH/FIRHF) will be held August 12-15, 2018 at the University of California, Santa Barbara, USA, the home of the current President, Eileen Boris. This will be the first time that this international gathering of historians of women and gender […]

UCSB History professors Verónica Castillo-Muñoz, Elizabeth Digeser, Ann Plane, and Gabriela Soto-Laveaga have chapters in a new edited volume, Globalizing Borderlands Studies in Europe and North America, just published by University of Nebraska Press. The volume was edited by UCSB professor John W.I. Lee and professor Michael North of the University of Greifswald, Germany.  Professor North was a Fulbright Distinguished […]

Cornell University Press recently published Professor Salim Yaqub’s new book, Imperfect Strangers: Americans, Arabs, and U.S.–Middle East Relations in the 1970s. Yaqub’s book argues that the 1970s were a pivotal decade in U.S.-Arab relations—a time when Americans and Arabs became an inescapable presence in each other’s lives and perceptions, and when each society came to feel profoundly vulnerable to the […]

Congratulations to this year’s winner of the Phi Alpha Theta Best First Book Award, Dr. Mateo M. Farzaneh, for The Iranian Constitutional Revolution and the Clerical Leadership of Khurasani. Dr. Farzaneh is an Associate Professor of History of the Islamic World and the Modern Middle East at Northeastern Illinois University-Chicago. Dr. Farzaneh’s PhD is from UC Santa Barbara, where he studied […]

Dr. Giuliana Perrone has been named as one of this year’s Kathryn T. Preyer Scholars by the American Society for Legal History for her paper entitled “Slaves into Citizens: Legitimizing Black Domestic Relationships in Reconstruction-Era State Courts.” She will be presenting her paper at the society’s annual conference in Toronto this October.

Let the Games Begin With the 2016 Olympics just over in Brazil, UC Santa Barbara scholars including Prof. John W.I. Lee discuss the origins and significance of the Games.  Click here to view the complete story.

“A collaborative effort of the Public History Program at UC Santa Barbara, the UCSB Library’s Department of Special Research Collections and the campus’s divisions of student affairs and humanities and fine arts has earned a Leadership in History Award from the American Association for State and Local History (AASLH). The UCSB contingent is one of 63 recipients of the annual […]

A bitter election. Social unrest and violence at home and abroad that seem to augur ruinous times. A gaping political divide fed in part by new technology and ways to communicate. Sound familiar? Welcome to the 19th century. While the hyper-partisanship of today’s America might feel new, two UC Santa Barbara scholars note that we’ve been down this road before. […]

April Haynes (UCSB History PhD 2009) has won the 2016 SHEAR (Society for the History of the Early American Republic) book prize for her 2015 monograph, Riotous Flesh: Women, Physiology and the Solitary Vice in 19th-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). “Riotous Flesh …sets a new standard for how to study together black and white female reformers while […]

Three graduating seniors, including one History major, have been recognized for their outstanding contributions to undergraduate research at UC Santa Barbara. The Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Research for 2016 has been awarded to Charles Joseph Key, who has earned a bachelor of arts degree in History, as well as two other undergraduates from different disciplines. Under the mentorship […]

Professor Sherene Seikaly has won this year’s prestigious Plous Award from UCSB’s Academic Senate. Established in 1957, and named after Harold J. Plous, an Assistant Professor in UCSB’s Department of Economics, the Plous Award is presented annually to: an Assistant Professor from the College of Letters and Science. Selection is based on outstanding performance and promise as measured by creative action […]

Since the beginning of the Great Recession in 2007, the history major has lost significant market share in academia, declining from 2.2% of all undergraduate degrees to 1.7%. The graduating class of 2014, the most recent for which there are national data, included 9% fewer history majors than the previous year’s cohort, compounding a 2.8% decrease the year before that. […]

Most faculty who have been around for a while and perhaps a few grad students will remember Jessica Chapman, who studied Vietnamese history at UCSB and wrote a great book: Cauldron of Resistance: Ngo Dinh Diem, the United States, and 1950s Southern Vietnam (Cornell University Press, 2013). She is now a professor of history at Williams College. Jessica has just […]

Public History PhD Student Melissa Barthelemy has been awarded the Margaret T. Getman and William J. Villa Service to Students Award, for the exhibit that she curated, “We Remember Them: Acts of Love and Compassion in Isla Vista,” an exhibition honoring the acts of love and compassion that emerged in Isla Vista and on the UC Santa Barbara campus after […]

Congratulations to Dr. Anthony Barbieri-Low, who has been awarded a year-long fellowship from the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange (Senior Scholar Grant program) for his book project “The Many Lives of the First Emperor of China, from History to Myth to Popular Culture.”