Department of History, UC Santa Barbara

Bought and Sold Three Times in One Day: Robert Glenn’s Oral History of Child Trafficking in the Slave South
2023-11-19 14:00 - 16:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Goleta Library, 500 N Fairview Ave,, Goleta, California, 93117, United States
Sunday, November 19 at 2:00 p.m. at the Goleta Library
John Majewski will give a talk called: “Bought and Sold Three Times in One Day: Robert Glenn’s Oral History of Child Trafficking in the Slave South”

Nakba in the Age of Catastrophe: Lessons from Palestine
2024-01-22 17:30 - 19:30 | CA
Sherene Seikaly will give a talk called:
“Nakba in the Age of Catastrophe: Lessons from Palestine”
What can the history of Palestine teach us about surviving catastrophe? In this talk, Professor Seikaly draws on one hundred years of history to reflect on land, time, and survival.
On Monday, January 22 at 5:30 pm
Location: McCune Room

Ending Poverty in California: A Movement, A Plan, A More Equitable Future
2024-04-18 16:00 - 18:00 | HSSB 6020 (McCune Room), University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
What would a California without poverty look like? How would ending economic hardship advance freedom and well-being for all? This is a prospect that has captured the imaginations of activists, reformers, and everyday people for decades, ever since Upton Sinclair made it the centerpiece of his near successful gubernatorial campaign in 1934. Today, it animates the work of a new generation of community-based leaders who have come together in End Poverty in California (EPIC), an organization devoted to elevating the voices of people experiencing economic hardship, creating and implementing policies rooted in their needs, and advancing a state agenda focused on equal opportunity for all. Since 2022, EPIC has been building grassroots support through its statewide listening tour and coalition-building activities, captured in the acclaimed documentary film Poverty and Power. Featuring excerpts from the film and a conversation with EPIC President Devon Gray, Chief Advisor for Storytelling and Narrative Greg Kaufmann, and Director of Organizing and Community Engagement Jasmine Dellafosse, this discussion, moderated by Professor Alice O’Connor, will focus on a movement that aims to change the narrative about poverty—and California’s economic future.
Event held on Thursday, April 18th at 4pm in HSSB 6020 (McCune Conference Room)
Devon Gray is President of End Poverty in California. He aligns EPIC’s organization’s priorities across issue areas to make a lasting impact for Californians. Prior to joining EPIC, he was a director with Evergreen Strategy Group, where he advised gun violence prevention organizations on policy and strategy. Gray previously served in the Newsom Administration as Special Advisor to the Governor’s Chief of Staff and is an alumnus of national and statewide political campaigns.
Greg Kaufmann is EPIC Chief Advisor for Storytelling and Narrative. He leads EPIC’s storytelling and narrative strategy, creating platforms for people in poverty to share their experiences, ideas, and insights so that we change the story about poverty in California. Prior to joining EPIC, Kaufmann was poverty correspondent at The Nation where his column was syndicated by Bill Moyers and Melissa Harris-Perry called him “one of the most consistent voices on poverty in America.”
Jasmine Dellafosse is Director of Organizing and Community Engagement at EPIC. She leads EPIC’s organizing and community engagement work to help build a movement that creates equal opportunity and ends poverty in California, affirming the dignity of all people. Dellafosse has confronted systemic racism for almost a decade—first as a youth organizer in her hometown of Stockton, CA, where she helped urban development projects such as bringing food desert areas access to fresh produce.
Alice O’Connor is Professor of History and Director of the Blum Center on Poverty, Inequality, and Democracy at UCSB.
Sponsored by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center’s Imagining California series, the Blum Center on Poverty, Inequality, and Democracy, and the Department of History

Reparations Past and Present
2024-04-21 12:00 - 14:00 | CA
For more than 200 years, Americans have argued about whether freed slaves should be compensated for the time and livelihood taken from them. These debates intensified after the Civil War and have once again entered our public discourse.
History Professor Giuliana Perrone will put these debates in context and give listeners some sense of their long history.
So come raise a pint as you hear about America’s past!
Sunday, April 21, 2024 at 12pm
Third Window Brewing, The Barrel Room

Women and Revolution: War, Violence, and Family Separations Across the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands
2024-04-24 17:30 - 19:30 | Alhecama Theater, 215 A East Canon Perdido Street, Santa Barbara, 93101, United States
Verónica Castillo-Muñoz will give a talk called:
“Women and Revolution: War, Violence, and Family Separations Across the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands.”
On April 24 at 5:30pm
At Alhecama Theater, 215 E. Canon Perdido

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

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.

Michael Cooperson (UCLA), "Towards a New Arabic Literary History"
2025-02-24 16:00 - 17:30 | HSSB 4020
Towards a new Arabic literary history
Michael Cooperson, Professor of Arabic, NELC, UCLA
What did pre-modern authors writing in Arabic have to say about their own literary history? Many things, as it turns out, most of them non-linear. In this respect, their accounts differ from the rise-and-fall story later promulgated by European scholars––a story which has now become the dominant one even in the Arab world.

What’s next? One way forward, I propose, is to draw on non-linear approaches, both pre-modern and modern––including, for example, the late-nineteenth century notion of Kulturgeschichte as applied to the cultural history of Arabic-speaking societies. A new literary history of Arabic––or at least, the one I am trying to write––should grant equal weight to all periods and regions; should foreground reception, especially translation, as a critical part of the story; and should embrace avowedly pedagogical elements such as commentary, digression, and above all, visual explanation.
The talk will include a sneak preview of this work in progress; comments and criticism are welcome! I am also very interested in hearing from participants about the state of literary history in their fields of expertise.

Katie Moore, "Counterfeiting and the Coming of the American Revolution"
2025-03-09 14:00 - 15:00 | Goleta Valley Library, 500 North Fairview Avenue, Goleta, 93117
What does the history of counterfeiting reveal about colonial-imperial relations in British North America? What does it tell us about the nature of money itself? Join Professor Katie Moore as she utilizes counterfeiting as a lens to explore the political and
social meanings of money in the century before the American Revolution, unveiling a rich and complex monetary landscape.
Katie A. Moore is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her first book, Promise to Pay: The Politics and Power of Money in Early America, was published in 2024 by the University of Chicago Press.
Questions? Email historyassociates@ia.ucsb.edu

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.

History Associates Talk : Alfredo Gonzalez | "An American Promise: 20th Century US Military Naturalization."
2025-11-02 14:00 - 16:00 | Vista Del Monte, 3775 Modoc Rd, Santa Barbara, 3775 Modoc Rd., Santa Barbara
Assistant Professor of Political Science at UCSB, Alfredo Gonzalez will speak on “An American Promise: 20th Century US Military Naturalization.”
Despite widespread recognition that modern social welfare programs stem from the protections pledged to war veterans, commitments from Congress to naturalize immigrant service members and veterans are absent in debates on the military social safety net. Legal historians have shown that after World War I, veterans’ organizations were instrumental in pressuring Congress to grant citizenship to racially ineligible war veterans, but we know less about whether veterans’ organizations have since considered naturalization a military benefit worth protecting. I explore the boundaries of military social welfare between WWI and the War on Terror, when military naturalization policy significantly changed from guaranteeing legal citizenship to merely expediting an immigrant’s ability to apply for naturalization. Understanding the development of military naturalization policy and its relationship to military welfare requires tracing how the process unfolded to reveal the extent, if at all, decision makers and veterans view political incorporation as part of the repertoire of protected benefits.

Ambition on the Road: Getting Ahead in Arabic Travel Writing
2026-02-02 16:00 - 17:30 | HSSB 4080, 4080 Humanities and Social Sciences Building, UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Monday, Feb 2, 2026 | 04:00 PM

Location

HSSB 4080

A Syrian merchant known as the ʿAṭṭār set out on a new road in 1765. When he began to write about his journey, he did so with specific aim and purpose: success, prestige, and merit. A few years earlier, in 1758, a Maronite Christian by the name of Shukrallāh had put together a literary compendium. The inclusion of a travel-based topography arguably sought to promote an embattled community’s position vis-a-vis the sacred landscapes of the homeland. In both cases, as in many others, making literature was an aspirational act with tangible goals. The talk by Björn Bentlage will investigate the ambitious side of culture with a focus on Arabic narrations of travel and movement from the early modern period onwards.
Björn Bentlage is a lecturer and researcher of Arabic and Middle Eastern Studies at the universities of Bern (Switzerland) and Munich (Germany). His interests range from contemporary legal debates over the connected history of the modern Middle East to literature and media since the Ottoman period.

Feb. 2 CMES Flyer

History Associates Talk by Professor Anthony Barbieri on "Beyond the Mountains and Seas: Eurasian History through Travelers’ Eyes (400 BCE-1936 CE)"
2026-02-22 14:00 - 16:00 | Night Lizard Brewing Company, 607 State Street, Santa Barbara
The History associates brings to you a talk by Professor Anthony Barbieri off the department of history on his latest book. The talk narrates the integrated history of Eurasia over the last two millennia through the travel of two dozen remarkable men and women who voyaged across this vast continent and reported on their encounters with a foreign culture. It argues that, despite increasing empirical knowledge gathered about the “other,” mental projections of the “monsters at the edge of the world,” still colored peoples’ perception of the foreign “other” well into the modern era.
