Department of History, UC Santa Barbara

Barbara Walker, "Fathers and Sons and the Origins of Cold War ‘Area Studies’ in the United States"
2019-10-30 16:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | HSSB 4080, 4080 Humanities and Social Sciences Building, UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Barbara Walker is Professor of Russian history at the University of Nevada, Reno. She has published on a broad range of historical topics in the area of Russian and Soviet intellectual life and its economic foundations, social organization and culture.
More recently, she has branched out to explore the nature of expertise, specifically “information expertise,” in her current book project, A War of Experts: Soviet and American Knowledge Networks in Cold War Competition and Collaboration. Her book will present the intertwined stories of a variety of lively and committed “information experts” in the Cold War United States and Soviet Union, including early electronic computer designers, U.S.-Soviet research exchange scholars, journalists and Soviet dissidents. Information professionals in the area of intelligence make their appearance too. The book focuses on the efforts of these ambitious, often passionate “experts” to multiply their numbers and to expand the influence of their expertise in this period. To accomplish these goals, they built on networks and traditions reaching back into the 19th century, in which lay the origins of the professionalization of expertise in many areas.
Click here to download the flyer for this event.

The Initiative for the Study of Race, Religion, and Revolution's Winter 2021 Schedule
2021-01-12 16:00 - 18:00 | University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Professor Butch Ware and the ISRRAR announce the Winter Quarter schedule for HIST 210RA: Race, Faith, Revolution. Graduate students are invited to register for this 2-unit seminar and to sign up for the listserv at http://tinyurl.com/ISRRARListServ.
How have Black metaphysics articulated with racial politics in order to advance efforts of justice, liberation, and self-actualization? In this very special year of 2021, our seminar will take on manifestations of anti-black racism and imperialism, as well as African and African Diasporic efforts to mediate between the seen and unseen worlds in struggles for justice.
This graduate seminar is part of a broader collaborative process meant to engage graduate students and faculty alike. The Initiative for the Study of Race, Religion, and Revolution (ISRRAR) seeks to foster a conversation on intersections of spirituality and social change wherein works on (and by) formerly colonized peoples are central, rather than peripheral.
This approach is driven by an axial critique of the ways in which modernity’s core contradictions shape our shared pasts and presents. An era of revolutionary enlightenment, we are told, brought humanity out of the ‘dark ages.’ Freedom dawned. But this ‘age of lights’ brought the darkest of racial taxonomies, and scales of slavery and human suffering unknown to ancient and medieval worlds. Reason proclaimed its mission: liberate humanity from the bondage of irrational religion. Yet rational political economies brought global empires, world wars, and ethnic genocides. Moreover, new nationalisms have drawn on older religious repertories to define citizens and subject them to moral authority. Self-congratulatory Western tropes, however, tend to overlook the ubiquity of race and the persistence of faith, portraying them as incidental rather than fundamental.
Colonized peoples in Africa and the Americas, tell different tales. A generation of emergent scholarship has brought these forward. Scholars (many trained in interdisciplinary fields) have recovered ‘native’ narratives and ontologies of the oppressed, often dislodging dominant meta-narratives in the study of the global West. In History 210 we engage live presentations of the works of scholars, activists, and artists whose conceptualization and execution of their research breaks new ground in these domains.

ISRRAR Event--Dr. LaKisha Simmons, "The Ancestors and the Womb are One: Black Motherhood and Histories of Black Infant Loss"
2021-01-26 16:00 - 18:00 | University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Throughout the twentieth century, Black women in the United States experienced at least double the rates of infant mortality experienced by white women. Through an analysis of oral histories collected in the US South in the 1930s, Dr. LaKisha Simmons (University of Michigan) details what Patricia Hill Collins terms a “Black women’s standpoint on mothering.” From interviewees’ discussions of infant and child loss emerge twin concepts of generation and Black relationality, which enable a theory of Black motherhood as connected to survival and remembrance. The concept of generation reveals how Black women in the 1930s defined themselves as mothering their children after Emancipation and yet as inheriting the ever-present enslaved past through their own mothers and grandmothers. Black women articulated a sense of self and well-being that was in conversation with the ancestors and unborn.
Join this Zoom event here: https://bit.ly/3hVdvP4.

This event is part of the ISRRAR Winter Quarter series.
Professor Butch Ware and the ISRRAR announce the Winter Quarter schedule for HIST 210RA: Race, Faith, Revolution. Graduate students are invited to register for this 2-unit seminar and to sign up for the listserv at http://tinyurl.com/ISRRARListServ.
How have Black metaphysics articulated with racial politics in order to advance efforts of justice, liberation, and self-actualization? In this very special year of 2021, our seminar will take on manifestations of anti-black racism and imperialism, as well as African and African Diasporic efforts to mediate between the seen and unseen worlds in struggles for justice.
This graduate seminar is part of a broader collaborative process meant to engage graduate students and faculty alike. The Initiative for the Study of Race, Religion, and Revolution (ISRRAR) seeks to foster a conversation on intersections of spirituality and social change wherein works on (and by) formerly colonized peoples are central, rather than peripheral.
This approach is driven by an axial critique of the ways in which modernity’s core contradictions shape our shared pasts and presents. An era of revolutionary enlightenment, we are told, brought humanity out of the ‘dark ages.’ Freedom dawned. But this ‘age of lights’ brought the darkest of racial taxonomies, and scales of slavery and human suffering unknown to ancient and medieval worlds. Reason proclaimed its mission: liberate humanity from the bondage of irrational religion. Yet rational political economies brought global empires, world wars, and ethnic genocides. Moreover, new nationalisms have drawn on older religious repertories to define citizens and subject them to moral authority. Self-congratulatory Western tropes, however, tend to overlook the ubiquity of race and the persistence of faith, portraying them as incidental rather than fundamental.
Colonized peoples in Africa and the Americas, tell different tales. A generation of emergent scholarship has brought these forward. Scholars (many trained in interdisciplinary fields) have recovered ‘native’ narratives and ontologies of the oppressed, often dislodging dominant meta-narratives in the study of the global West. In History 210 we engage live presentations of the works of scholars, activists, and artists whose conceptualization and execution of their research breaks new ground in these domains.

ISRRAR Event--Dr. Jason Young, "Look for Me in the Whirlwind: Toward an Ecology of Afro-Futurism"
2021-02-09 16:00 - 18:00 | Zoom, CA
Speaking before a rapt audience, famed black nationalist leader, Marcus Garvey, vowed to support the cause of African liberation not only in life, but also in death, insisting that he would return as an “earthquake, or a cyclone, or plague, or pestilence” to aid in the fight for freedom. He implored his followers: “Look for me in the whirlwind.” Using Garvey’s promise as a starting point, Dr. Jason Young (University of Michigan) reconsiders the history of slavery with an eye trained on the transformative role that torrential rains, gale force winds and raging fires played in both opening and closing paths to freedom and resistance. And in view of the current climate crisis, COVID-19, and yet another national reckoning on racial injustice, Young imagines the role that rising sea levels, receding coastlines, and global fugitivity might play in the Afro-futures to come.
Join this Zoom event here: bit.ly/3hVdvP4

This event is part of the ISRRAR Winter Quarter series.
Professor Butch Ware and the ISRRAR announce the Winter Quarter schedule for HIST 210RA: Race, Faith, Revolution. Graduate students are invited to register for this 2-unit seminar and to sign up for the listserv at http://tinyurl.com/ISRRARListServ.
How have Black metaphysics articulated with racial politics in order to advance efforts of justice, liberation, and self-actualization? In this very special year of 2021, our seminar will take on manifestations of anti-black racism and imperialism, as well as African and African Diasporic efforts to mediate between the seen and unseen worlds in struggles for justice.
This graduate seminar is part of a broader collaborative process meant to engage graduate students and faculty alike. The Initiative for the Study of Race, Religion, and Revolution (ISRRAR) seeks to foster a conversation on intersections of spirituality and social change wherein works on (and by) formerly colonized peoples are central, rather than peripheral.
This approach is driven by an axial critique of the ways in which modernity’s core contradictions shape our shared pasts and presents. An era of revolutionary enlightenment, we are told, brought humanity out of the ‘dark ages.’ Freedom dawned. But this ‘age of lights’ brought the darkest of racial taxonomies, and scales of slavery and human suffering unknown to ancient and medieval worlds. Reason proclaimed its mission: liberate humanity from the bondage of irrational religion. Yet rational political economies brought global empires, world wars, and ethnic genocides. Moreover, new nationalisms have drawn on older religious repertories to define citizens and subject them to moral authority. Self-congratulatory Western tropes, however, tend to overlook the ubiquity of race and the persistence of faith, portraying them as incidental rather than fundamental.
Colonized peoples in Africa and the Americas, tell different tales. A generation of emergent scholarship has brought these forward. Scholars (many trained in interdisciplinary fields) have recovered ‘native’ narratives and ontologies of the oppressed, often dislodging dominant meta-narratives in the study of the global West. In History 210 we engage live presentations of the works of scholars, activists, and artists whose conceptualization and execution of their research breaks new ground in these domains.

ISRRAR Event–Dr. Rasul Miller, "Black Internationalism and Black Sunni Muslims in America"
2021-02-23 16:00 - 18:00 | University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
During the interwar period, the historic neighborhood of Harlem was home to a thriving Black political scene that included Garveyites, Communists, labor organizers, anticolonial activists, and politicized adherents of various new Black religious congregations. Shaykh Daoud Faisal and Mother Khadijah Faisal, the architects of New York City’s first lasting Black Sunni Muslim community worked as artists, organizers, and propagators of Islam for over a decade in 1920s and 1930s Harlem, and were deeply impacted by its Black internationalist political and cultural character. Upon moving to Brooklyn Heights in 1930 they built one of the twentieth century’s most influential Muslim religious communities in the US. In this talk, Dr. Rasul Miller (History, UC Irvine) explores the impact of Black internationalism on this formative Black Sunni religious institution, and the broader Black Sunni religious and cultural orientations it helped to foster.
Join this Zoom event here: https://bit.ly/3hVdvP4

This event is part of the ISRRAR Winter Quarter series.
Professor Butch Ware and the ISRRAR announce the Winter Quarter schedule for HIST 210RA: Race, Faith, Revolution. Graduate students are invited to register for this 2-unit seminar and to sign up for the listserv at http://tinyurl.com/ISRRARListServ.
How have Black metaphysics articulated with racial politics in order to advance efforts of justice, liberation, and self-actualization? In this very special year of 2021, our seminar will take on manifestations of anti-black racism and imperialism, as well as African and African Diasporic efforts to mediate between the seen and unseen worlds in struggles for justice.
This graduate seminar is part of a broader collaborative process meant to engage graduate students and faculty alike. The Initiative for the Study of Race, Religion, and Revolution (ISRRAR) seeks to foster a conversation on intersections of spirituality and social change wherein works on (and by) formerly colonized peoples are central, rather than peripheral.
This approach is driven by an axial critique of the ways in which modernity’s core contradictions shape our shared pasts and presents. An era of revolutionary enlightenment, we are told, brought humanity out of the ‘dark ages.’ Freedom dawned. But this ‘age of lights’ brought the darkest of racial taxonomies, and scales of slavery and human suffering unknown to ancient and medieval worlds. Reason proclaimed its mission: liberate humanity from the bondage of irrational religion. Yet rational political economies brought global empires, world wars, and ethnic genocides. Moreover, new nationalisms have drawn on older religious repertories to define citizens and subject them to moral authority. Self-congratulatory Western tropes, however, tend to overlook the ubiquity of race and the persistence of faith, portraying them as incidental rather than fundamental.
Colonized peoples in Africa and the Americas, tell different tales. A generation of emergent scholarship has brought these forward. Scholars (many trained in interdisciplinary fields) have recovered ‘native’ narratives and ontologies of the oppressed, often dislodging dominant meta-narratives in the study of the global West. In History 210 we engage live presentations of the works of scholars, activists, and artists whose conceptualization and execution of their research breaks new ground in these domains.

ISRRAR Event–Dr. Samiha Rahman, "Redefining Black Excellence: Ihsan, Islamic Education, and the Tijani Sufi Order"
2021-03-09 16:00 - 18:00 | Zoom, CA
Since the 1980s, hundreds of predominantly working-class African American Muslim youth have migrated to the West African Tijani Sufi town of Medina Baye, Senegal. They hope to circumvent the antiblackness, Islamophobia, and economic inequality they face in the U.S. in search of a transformative educational encounter in a society where Blackness and Islam constitute the dominant norms. This talk chronicles these young people’s everyday experiences pursuing Islamic education in Medina Baye. Complicating popular notions that link Black excellence to individualistic material gain and Black capitalism, Dr. Samiha Rahman (CSU Long Beach) argues that Black Muslim excellence (ihsan) provides an alternative paradigm rooted in the pursuit of human excellence through spiritual and social practice. Grounded in a transatlantic Black Muslim tradition, Black Muslim ihsan offers African American Muslims pathways to individual and collective liberation.
Join this Zoom event here: bit.ly/3hVdvP4

This event is part of the ISRRAR Winter Quarter series.
Professor Butch Ware and the ISRRAR announce the Winter Quarter schedule for HIST 210RA: Race, Faith, Revolution. Graduate students are invited to register for this 2-unit seminar and to sign up for the listserv at http://tinyurl.com/ISRRARListServ.
How have Black metaphysics articulated with racial politics in order to advance efforts of justice, liberation, and self-actualization? In this very special year of 2021, our seminar will take on manifestations of anti-black racism and imperialism, as well as African and African Diasporic efforts to mediate between the seen and unseen worlds in struggles for justice.
This graduate seminar is part of a broader collaborative process meant to engage graduate students and faculty alike. The Initiative for the Study of Race, Religion, and Revolution (ISRRAR) seeks to foster a conversation on intersections of spirituality and social change wherein works on (and by) formerly colonized peoples are central, rather than peripheral.
This approach is driven by an axial critique of the ways in which modernity’s core contradictions shape our shared pasts and presents. An era of revolutionary enlightenment, we are told, brought humanity out of the ‘dark ages.’ Freedom dawned. But this ‘age of lights’ brought the darkest of racial taxonomies, and scales of slavery and human suffering unknown to ancient and medieval worlds. Reason proclaimed its mission: liberate humanity from the bondage of irrational religion. Yet rational political economies brought global empires, world wars, and ethnic genocides. Moreover, new nationalisms have drawn on older religious repertories to define citizens and subject them to moral authority. Self-congratulatory Western tropes, however, tend to overlook the ubiquity of race and the persistence of faith, portraying them as incidental rather than fundamental.
Colonized peoples in Africa and the Americas, tell different tales. A generation of emergent scholarship has brought these forward. Scholars (many trained in interdisciplinary fields) have recovered ‘native’ narratives and ontologies of the oppressed, often dislodging dominant meta-narratives in the study of the global West. In History 210 we engage live presentations of the works of scholars, activists, and artists whose conceptualization and execution of their research breaks new ground in these domains.

ISRRAR Event--Dr. Maytha Alhassen, "The Ummic Imperative: A Decolonial Approach to Malcolm X's Islam"
2021-04-06 16:00 | Zoom, CA
Through an assemblage of multiple archives, Dr. Maytha Alhassen tracks the Malcolm X’s political and spiritual project the last year of his life as he travels across decolonizing geographies. Alhassen contends that undergirding Malcolm X’s Black liberation framework is a praxical commitment to an “ummic imperative.” Engaging Malcolm’s spiritual political philosophies will also serve to interrogate and complicate Third World movement politics.
Join this Zoom event at tinyurl.com/isrrarTalk
This event is part of the ISRRAR Spring Quarter series.

ISRRAR Event–Dr. Vincent Brown, "Tacky's Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War"
2021-04-20 16:00 | Zoom, CA
Warfare migrates. This has never been more apparent than in the era when the violence of imperial expansion and enslavement transformed Europe, Africa, and the Americas, as they interacted across the Atlantic Ocean. European imperial conflicts extended the dominion of capitalist agriculture. African battles fed captives to the transatlantic trade in slaves. Masters and their human property struggled with one another continuously. These clashes amounted to a borderless slave war: war to enslave, war to expand slavery, and war against slaves, precipitating wars waged by the enslaved against slaveholders. In this sense, Dr. Vincent Brown argues, Tacky’s revolt was but a war within other wars, which had diverging and overlapping provocations, combat zones, political alliances, and enemy combatants.
Join this Zoom event at tinyurl.com/isrrarTalk
This event is part of the ISRRAR Spring Quarter series.

History Beyond the Academy: A Conversation
2021-04-24 16:00 | Zoom, CA
Come and join us for a panel discussion with recent graduates from UCSB’s Department of
History (Mariel Aquino, Doug Genens, Caitlin Rathe, and Stephanie Seketa) to learn about their experiences working as historians beyond the Academy. Learn about work in academic administration, the non-profit sector and how to research and produce podcasts. The discussion will be moderated by current graduate students Addie Jensen and Mattie Webb. All are welcome!
Join this event on Zoom at https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/6855143149.
Click here to download the event flyer.

ISRRAR Event–Dr. Sylvester Ogbechie, “Godbearer: Yoruba Orisa, Black Atlantic Modernisms and Afrofuturist Imaginaries”
2021-05-04 16:00 | Zoom, CA
Dr. Sylvester Ogbechie‘s work evaluates the resurgence of African gods in Black Atlantic modernisms, contemporary media and Afrofuturist visualities. African deities are everywhere in contemporary culture from the Akan trickster god Anansi and numerous Yoruba Orisa in the American Gods TV series, through images of the Kh’Met (Egyptian) goddess Bast in the Afrofuturist blockbuster movie Black Panther, to the cyberspace narratives of William Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy that centered the Loa (gods) of the Haitian Vodun pantheon as primary characters. This resurgence corresponds to a return of discourses of spirituality in narratives of modernity and contemporary art practice. What is the meaning of this contemporary focus on African deities and how does it allow us to engage anew or reinterpret Black Atlantic arts that foreground African spiritual and cultural registers?
Join this Zoom event at tinyurl.com/isrrarTalk
This event is part of the ISRRAR Spring Quarter series.

History Department celebrates GIVE DAY 2022
2022-04-07 08:00 - 17:00 | University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States

Genders & Sexualities Cluster | Annual Graduate Student Colloquium 2022
2022-06-09 | HSSB 4080, 4080 Humanities and Social Sciences Building, UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
The full program can be downloaded here in May: GSRC Graduate Student Colloquium 2022
All sessions will take place at the University of California, Santa Barbara campus, located on the traditional and unceded territories of the Chumash people. We offer our respect to Chumash Elders past, present, and future as the custodians of this area’s memories, traditions, and cultures.
Session A – 9:00 AM
Julia Crisler, History, UC Santa Barbara
The Hunstwomen: Kennel Mistresses? Medieval Female Kennel Masters and Leaders in Artois

Session B – 10:00 AM
Elizabeth Schmidt, History, UC Santa Barbara
“Subverting Gendered and Raced Expectations: Unacknowledged Labor and Consumers in Military Provisioning”

NUTRITION BREAK 11:00- 11:15 AM
Session C (hybrid) – 11:15 AM
Nora Kassner, History, UC Santa Barbara
“A New and Informal Experiment”
https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/87526376038

LUNCH 12:15 – 1:00 PM
Session D – 1:00 PM
Kristen Thomas-McGill, History, UC Santa Barbara
Gender, Gossip, and Unspeakability on “A Spicy Little Isle where Ladies are Few”

Session E – 2:00 PM
Sarah Dunne, History, UC Santa Barbara
The Migrating Queer Bookshelf: Queer Books, Bookstores, and Communities in the United States

NUTRITION BREAK 3:00- 3:15 PM
Session F – 3:15 PM
Nicole de Silva, History, UC Santa Barbara
“Setting the World House to Right”: Consumer Politics and the Figure of the U.S. Housewife in Postwar Planning, 1942-1945

History Department Picnic 4:30 – 7 PM
Stow Grove Park, Goleta
Thank you for sharing your ideas and time.

History and Political Economy Colloquium with Dr. Giuliana Perrone | "Abolition and Capitalism" | Feb 24, 12 PM | HSSB 4080
2023-02-24 12:00 - 14:00 | HSSB 4080, 4080 Humanities and Social Sciences Building, UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
The colloquium offers a forum for open, substantive discussions on how to approach political economy from a historical perspective; how to grapple with and benefit from the epistemological diversity surrounding political economy; and how a historical take on political economy can help contextualize and address urgent contemporary issues– at UCSB, in Santa Barbara/Southern California, in the U.S., and around the world – ranging from rent, inflation, and student debt to deepening, racialized inequality. For that purpose, we will center our own research and put our work into conversation across geographical, chronological, and field boundaries.
At our third meeting, we will discuss “abolition and capitalism” with Professor Giuliana Perrone, Assistant Professor, Department of History, UCSB.
Required Readings: Sinha – The Problem of Abolition in the Age of Capitalism (1) Perrone Chapter

History and Political Economy Colloquium with Dr. Utathya Chattopadhyaya | "Intoxication and Political Economy"
2023-04-07 12:00 - 14:00 | HSSB 4080, 4080 Humanities and Social Sciences Building, UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
We are excited to announce the fourth session of the History Department’s colloquium on history and political economy. The colloquium offers a forum for open, substantive discussions on how to approach political economy from a historical perspective; how to grapple with and benefit from the epistemological diversity surrounding political economy; and how a historical take on political economy can help contextualize and address urgent contemporary issues– at UCSB, in Santa Barbara/Southern California, in the U.S., and around the world – ranging from rent, inflation, and student debt to deepening, racialized inequality. For that purpose, we will center our own research and put our work into conversation across geographical, chronological, and field boundaries.
At our fourth meeting, we will discuss “Intoxication and Political Economy” with Professor Utathya Chattopadhyaya (flyer attached).
Please note that this session will take place in week 1 of the spring quarter.
In preparation for the meeting, please contact Manuel Covo to obtain a copy of the readings to be discussed. Everyone is welcome. Light refreshments will be served.

Annual Gender + Sexualities Graduate Student Colloquium
2023-06-15 | HSSB 4020, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
9:00 – 10:00 – SESSION A (Presenter will Zoom)
Giulia Giamboni, History, UC Santa Barbara
“Pelegrina de Saladino: Mother, Sister, Patroness, and Business Woman”
This is chapter 2 of my dissertation “Gender, Charity, and Empire in the Late Medieval Eastern Mediterranean.” By investigating the life of fourteenth-century Pelegrina de Saladinis, the chapter explores the complex intersections between gender, politics, and empire in the cross-cultural context of late medieval Zadar (Croatia). A widow with a husband killed in a local uprising and a brother exiled, living in a city ravaged by two centuries of colonial dominion and by the Black death, Pelegrina managed to construct a powerful network turning into a key figure in the social fabric of Zadar. She became a trusted testamentary executor for local powerful families, she endowed and renovated a monastery for poor girls with lands and money, she built a hospital for the poor, and helped persecuted friars from Bosnia find a refuge in her city. Her foundations received the support of other Zaratin women revealing that these women identified with Pelegrina’s image. Pelegrina knew how to gain the trust of her fellow citizens and to navigate oppressive political regimes to provide concrete help to the need of her city. Pelegrina’s story of civic and political engagements in a colonized city challenges traditional narrative of women’s charitable giving. Her life demonstrates that women retooled pious practices of charitable giving to challenge the power of an outside political entity. Weaving close relationships with the local oligarchy, granting lands and resources to religious institutions, and caring for the poor and marginalized offered new and empowering opportunities to women to intervene in the daily life of the city and express their political standing. Pious practices did not constrain women’s individual and collective agency. Instead, women’s charitable activities opened up spaces for performance of agency and emancipatory ends.

10:00 – 11:00 – SESSION B
Makoto Hunter, History, UC Santa Barbara
“‘I Am Not a Criminal’: Mormon Women and the Federal Policing of Polygamous Wives in the Early Progressive Era”
By passing the 1882 Edmunds Antipolygamy Act and criminalizing the “unlawful cohabitation” of men and women not legally married, the United States embarked on an unprecedented campaign of federal sexual reform targeting the nation’s most notorious “deviants”: the polygamous Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or Mormons. On paper, the Edmunds Act specifically targeted men as criminal polygamists, implying women were victims. However, as federal agents sought convictions, their attention turned from polygamist men as defendants to plural wives as potential witnesses. Antipolygamy prosecutors considered the bodily presence of a plural wife—or, better yet, the visible evidence of her pregnancy—an ideal smoking gun to prove unlawful cohabitation. Federal marshals went out of their way to subpoena plural wives to testify against their husbands. Using diaries, letters, and other autobiographical material from plural wives, this paper examines the state’s assertion of power over women’s bodies in the history of late-nineteenth-century antipolygamy. The paper also charts how these women responded, whether by claiming a right to bodily privacy from the witness stand, theorizing the disciplinary purpose of incarceration from prison, or recognizing federal authorities’ surveillance of them in the professed privacy of their communities and homes. Looking back to antipolygamy reveals an unexpected predecessor to early-twentieth-century anti-prostitution legislation, which followed a similar arc of ostensibly prosecuting men’s sexuality by policing women’s bodies—as well as to the contemporary crisis over a woman’s legal right to make choices about her own body and have sexual and reproductive autonomy.

11:00 – 11:15 – NUTRITION BREAK

11:15 – 12:15 – SESSION C
Alice Fulmer, English, UC Santa Barbara
“The T4T Gift Economy and Antagonisms in the Middle English Romance of Sir Launfal”
Current discourse and parlance around “t4t” (trans for trans relationships), involves speculation what such relationships mean in terms of compulsory heterosexuality, conceptions of queerness, ideas about passing, and trans tenderness, but also perceiving an unassuming pair of two things or people and tongue-in-cheek claiming they’re “t4t”. While contemporary queer theory and concepts like “t4t” are anachronistic to such canons such as the Middle English romance tradition, a “t4t” framework may be helpful in uncovering instances of gender non-conformity relative to the 13th and 14th centuries. Romances such as Thomas Chestre’s translative Sir Launfal (a translation of 12thc. Marie de France) exhibit romantic and platonic relationships as central loci in their texts from which a certain ‘t4t’ affect is derived. Without trans language as one knows in the 21st century, ‘t4t’ can be impressed onto the relationship and parasocial objects. While taking inspiration from the work of Sara Ahmed and her generation of affect theorists, this paper carves a path between more traditional (re: heterosexual) medieval literary studies, queer theory/terminology, and the other aforementioned theories. Looking at central characters and their relationships’ dynamics from the Middle English romance tradition provides a means, not a history, from which ‘t4t’ can be understood as a framework to measure affect between individuals who exhibit gender non conformity and how this is impressed and interned into objects they interact or transfer personal affect into. In brief, these gender affirmations and antagonisms propel the narrative’s resolution to demonstrate how they embody the genre of Middle English romance in the late medieval period. Consider this an inquiry into the bandwidth that a romance like Sir Launfal has exploring t4t discourse as present in contemporary transgender studies, along with key excerpts from the fields of etymology, literary history, and whatever is left of philology.

12: 15 – 1:00 – LUNCH

1:00 – 2:00 – SESSION D
Kristina Kelehan, History, UC Santa Barbara
“Spying Homosexuals: An Analysis of the Vassall Affair and Representations, Ideas, and the Politics of Gay Men in Britain during the Cold War
While it is well known that some of the most famous British spies working for the Soviet Union during the Cold War were gay men, much work on this history is written by journalists for popular audiences. My work focuses on a less sensational story but one that is no less important for what it reveals about the politics of queer history in twentieth-century Britain. I am studying the life of John Vassall, a gay man who worked for the British Civil Service and was blackmailed by the Soviet Union starting in 1955. He passed key information to the Soviets until his arrest in 1962. A public scandal at the time, my research examines how the British public reacted to the scandal but also how and why his story disappeared from the public eye and has not received historical attention.

2:00 – 3:00 – SESSION E
Kristen Thomas-McGill, History, UC Santa Barbara
“A Case Study of Celebrity, Scottishness, and Masculinity in the Victorian Empire”
This is Chapter 1 of a five-chapter dissertation, “‘Now I am Going to Tell You about Sir Hector Macdonald’: A Cultural Biography of Memorialization and Child Sexual Abuse in the British Empire.” It traces Hector Macdonald’s extraordinary rise through the ranks from private to major-general, attending to the events of Macdonald’s life and media depictions of him. I show how the late 19th-century print media fashioned Macdonald into a celebrity symbol of Scottish martial masculinity, a particularly salient figure at a time when Britons worried about the fitness of their men in the face of imperial challenges. This chapter is both a biography and a critical analysis of biography as a historical source. Victorian media depictions of Macdonald’s life story are replete with inaccuracies, offering opportunities to consider the tensions and concordances among biography, mythmaking, journalistic errors, and plain lies.

3:00 – 3:15 – NUTRITION BREAK

3:15 – 4:15 – SESSION F (Presenter will Zoom)
Kelsey Wight, History, UC Santa Barbara
Violets & Roses, Betony, & Borage: Italian Women as Apothecaries
In this paper, I will argue that gender played a crucial and oftentimes restricting role in women’s apothecarial practice in early modern Italy, but that it also produced “zones of sociability” and new opportunities for women such as becoming a public figurehead, an author of natural science, or even a saint. The history of science has often marginalized the contributions of women to early modern science and excluded them from discourse concerning natural philosophy. I seek to center the contributions of early modern women and place them, as active participants, within early modern natural philosophy. My central research questions include: How widespread was apothecarial practice within cloistered Italian convents and in the lay public marketplace? How does the Inquisition/Counter-Reformation in Italy factor into how women practiced the apothecarial arts? And how do the apothecary practices of nuns differ from lay women in early modern Italy? I will use the concepts investigated in this research paper to develop my MA thesis and eventual dissertation.

4:15 – 6:00 – KEYNOTE & HAPPY HOUR
Dr. Candice Lyons, 2022-2023 Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow
Department of Black Studies, UC Santa Barbara
“Queering Slavery: Staging Queer Re-Examinations of the Archive”

UCSB History Virtual Open House for Diversity in Graduate Admissions (First-Gen & BIPOC)
2023-10-12 15:00 - 16:00 | Zoom (Online)
The UCSB History Department Invites You to a Virtual Open House for Diversity in Graduate Admissions
Welcome First-Gen & BIPOC Applicants!
Date: Thurs., October 12, 3-4 pm PST
Topics Include

Benefits of graduate study
Unspoken challenges and expectations
Successful applications
Funding opportunities
Personal and professional rewards
Faculty strengths and expertise
Career opportunities

*Register here via Zoom
*All registered participants will receive a link to the recording and slides.
Contacts: Miroslava Chavez-Garcia chavezgarcia@ucsb.edu & Beth Digeser edigeser@ucsb.edu

Van Gelderen Lecture 2024 - "Protect the One Who Carries You": Amulets and Daily Life in Roman Egypt
2024-05-08 17:00 - 19:00 | HSSB 6020 (McCune Room), University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Evan Andersson will present this year’s Van Gelderen Lecture,
“‘Protect the One Who Carries You’: Amulets and Daily Life in Roman Egypt”
On Wednesday, May 8, 2024 at 5:00pm
In the McCune Room, HSSB 6020

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