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Following the Data: Environmental Archives between Geophysics and Biology

AbstractIn this talk I will present my current project, which explores the practices and politics of large-scale data collection in the environmental sciences during the Cold War. One of the purposes of this project is to broaden the historical inquiry into how knowledge about the environment was produced, by exploring the practices of data collection […]

Battles of Cradles: Abandoned Babies in the Late Ottoman Empire

AbstractThe nineteenth century developments on the issue of child abandonment and provisions for them reveal significant traits of the political agenda, specifically regarding national identity, citizenship, and demographic politics. In the late Ottoman Empire, multi-lingual and multi-religious urban centers shared certain aspects of a cosmopolitan lifestyle. In addition, there was a rather politicized and sensitive […]

Faculty Panel on the Big Burn

 A panel of UCSB faculty from multiple disciplines will discuss the UCSB Reads selection, The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America. Panelists are Peter S. Alagona (History) Karen Lunsford (Writing Program); and Dar Roberts (Geography).

Bare Needs: Palestinian Capitalists and British Colonial Rule

Abstract: In British-ruled Palestine, Palestinian elites and British colonial officials attempted to define and regulate basic needs with varying consequences for economic thought and practices. In the 1930s, against the backdrop of armed rebellion and the Great Depression, Palestinian capitalists distinguished between needs and luxuries in order to shape a pan-Arab utopia as well as […]

Life, Sovereignty, and the Political: Towards a Middle Eastern Global History

AbstractWith one of the latest turns in historiography, it seems that documents as quintessentially national as the American Declaration of Independence can have a global history. This is indeed an exciting prospect, and the distinguished historian David Armitage encourages us all to become global historians if we are to remain relevant. In my first book, […]

“The Recovery of Nazi-Looted Art: The Bloch-Bauer Klimt Paintings”

Los Angeles attorney specializing in recovery of property stolen by the Nazis responsible for the landmark Supreme Court case returning Gustav Klimt paintings–valued at $325 million–to their rightful heir. The Herman P. and Sophia Taubman Foundation Endowed Symposia in Jewish Studies at UC Santa Barbara, a program of the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, is cosponsored by […]

Urbanizing Masculinity: Workers, Weavers and Futuwat in Violent Alliances and Fluid Identities

In this presentation, I employ urban violence to examine how men constructed, performed, and struggled for their masculine identity. I argue that gender identity, performing masculinity, and the construction of manhood were important sites of the adaptation to industrial urban life in crucial years of interwar Egypt. On the backdrop of rapid urbanization and industrialization, […]

“The Israeli-Palestinian Peace Talks in Historical Perspective”

U.S. Ambassador Dennis Ross serves as Counselor, The Washington Institute for Near East Policy and Ghaith al-Omari is Executive Director, American Task Force on Palestine. The event is free and open to the public. Ambassador Ross, the Washington Institute's Ziegler Distinguished fellow and counselor from 2001-2009, returned as its Counselor in December 2011 after serving […]

The Russians are Coming (1966)

The Center for Cold War Studies and International History (CCWS) will be showing the classic 1966 film, "The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming." Directed by Norman Jewison and starring Car Reiner, Eva Marie Saint, Jonathan Winters, and Alan Arkin, the film is a hilarious spoof on the U.S.-Soviet confrontation. It stands as a […]

Marxism and Classics

Sponsored by the Department of Classics. moved from News by hm 12/1/13