Department of History, UC Santa Barbara

Sergey Saluschev, "Reluctant Abolitionists: Slavery and Abolition in the Nineteenth-Century Caucasus, 1801-1914"
2025-01-23 17:30 - 19:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | HSSB 4020

Juan Cobo Betancourt, "Christianity, Colonialism, & the Muisca peoples of the Northern Andes"
2025-02-20 18:00 - 19:00 | Alhecama Theater, 215 A East Canon Perdido Street, Santa Barbara, 93101, United States
Public Lecture: Juan Cobo Betancourt, “Christianity, Colonialism, & the Muisca peoples of the Northern Andes”
Alhecama Theatre, 215 E. Canon Perdido Street, located in El Presidio de Santa Bárbara State Historic Park
Free and open to the public. RSVP to historyassociates@ia.ucsb.edu
How does colonialism work without a strong colonial state? How does religious conversion work without an effective missionary project? How can historians work with an archive full of fictions? Taking the history of the Muisca peoples of the Northern Andes of what is now Colombia, who from the 1530s found themselves at the centre of efforts by Europeans to transform them into Catholic, tribute-paying vassals of the Spanish crown, this talk explores the complex and contradictory ways in which Christianity, Spanish colonialism, and Indigenous politics came together to produce a new kind of society to the disappointment of everyone involved.
Juan Cobo Betancourt is Associate Professor of History and Director
of the Latin American and Iberian Studies Program and
Center for Latin American and Iberian Research at UC Santa
Barbara. He has written three books on questions of religion,
race, law, and language in colonial Latin America.

Talk: Erin Trumble, "Rebirth after Retirement: How Elderly Women Reinvented Femininity in Edo Japan"
2025-05-07 17:00 - 19:00 | McCune Conference Room (HSSB 6020), Humanities and Social Sciences Bldg, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Speaker: Graduate Student Erin Trumble

Title: “Rebirth after Retirement: How Elderly Women Reinvented Femininity in Edo Japan”

Description: The talk will focus on retirement as a life stage and examine how it represented a time when women had both more freedom after being liberated from daily tasks and more authority due to their age. I will examine prescriptive literature and its silences around responsibilities for retired women, as well as use examples from the lives of Nakako, Ieko, Shigako, and Aijo to show how women engaged with travel, literature, and religion in new ways as a result of this freedom and authority.

Lawrence Badash Memorial Lecture 2026 : "Reading Galileo's Letters: Experiments in Friendship, Knowledge, and Community" by Paula Findlen
2026-01-27 16:30 - 18:00 | HSSB 6020 (McCune Room), University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Paula Findlen, Ubalto Pierotti Professor in History and Italian Studies at Stanford University will be delivering The Lawrence Badash Memorial Lecture of 2026. Her talk will be on Tuesday, January 27 at 4:30 pm in the McCune Room, HSSB 6020. Her talk is titled:
“Reading Galileo’s Letters: Experiments in Friendship, Knowledge, and Community”

Abstract:
Galileo’s letters are an essential archive for understanding his life and work, but what exactly was their role in the evolution and presentation of his science? This talk explores the instrumental role of Galileo’s letters in the production and communication of scientific knowledge and the evolution of the scientific community with which he engaged. It also explores the role of letters in the controversies surrounding his science and discusses why we should see Galileo’s letters as one of his important experiments.
