Department of History, UC Santa Barbara

Skid Row Marathon Film & Panel Discussion on Homelessness
2018-08-25 11:45 - 2018-08-26 15:00 (America/Los_Angeles)
Two screenings of SKID ROW MARATHON, an acclaimed independent film about an innovative running club formed by a judge for the court that oversees the Skid Row district in LA. An avid runner, he started a running club for clients which had some remarkable transformative effects.

Two showings:
Saturday August 25, 11:45am at Metro 4
Sunday, August 26, 3 pm at the MCC Theater UCSB
(UCSB SHOWING FREE TO UCSB STUDENTS W/ID)

Saturday’s showing is $25/per ticket, a benefit for New Beginnings Counseling Center and its many outreach programs to those struggling with housing insecurity and homelessness in our community.

The Sunday showing at UCSB is FREE to UCSB students WITH ID (others, suggested donation, $25), and is sponsored by:
The Division of Humanities and Fine Arts of the College of L&S;
Department of History;
Department of Sociology;
Interdisciplinary Humanities Center;
Multi-Cultural Center;
UCSB Alcohol and Drug Program;
The Blum Center for Global Poverty Alleviation.

Thank you to our UCSB co-sponsors!!

The quickest way to get info and reserve seats is:
https://sbnbcc.org/skid-row-marathon/

For the trailer, see http://skidrowmarathon.com

New Major's Meeting
2018-09-26 11:00 - 12:00 | HSSB 4020, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Come meet your peers in the department and hear an impressive faculty panel speak about the departmental honors program, the history majors’ club, and many other exciting opportunities UCSB history has to offer. hope to see you all there!

"Censorship, Politics, and the Making of a Literary Classic", a talk by Carlos Aguirre at the Colloquium on Latin American and Caribbean History
2018-10-05 17:00 - 18:30 | HSSB 4020, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, 93106, United States
Please join us for the next meeting of the History Department’s Colloquium on Latin American and Caribbean History as we welcome Prof. Carlos Aguirre (University of Oregon), who will be presenting a paper entitled “Censorship, Politics, and the Making of a Literary Classic: The Biography of Vargas Llosa’s La ciudad y los perros“.
The talk will be held at 5pm on Friday, October 5th in HSSB 4020, and will be followed by a small reception.
This event is supported by the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, the History Department Colloquium Committee, the Latin American and Iberian Studies Program, and the Program in Comparative Literature.
Abstract
Mario Vargas Llosa’s first novel, La ciudad y los perros (Barcelona, 1963), marked the beginning of the author’s outstanding literary career but also, according to many, of the “Latin American boom,” a literary, political, and publishing phenomenon that changed the landscape of Latin American and world literature. A novel about a group of adolescents in a military school in Lima that was widely read as a critique of Peruvian militaristic, machista, and authoritarian culture, it became an almost instant classic but was also involved in a series of literary and political controversies. Exploring the role of literary and friendship networks, the Spanish publishing industry, the negotiations with Franco’s censorship office, the scandals that surrounded its reception, and the political climate of the time, this talk will reconstruct the process by which the manuscript of a novel written by an almost unknown author became a powerful literary, cultural, and political artifact.
About the speaker
Carlos Aguirre is Professor of History at the University of Oregon and the author or editor of several books on slavery and abolition, crime and punishment, intellectuals, and the history of Lima. His most recent publications include The Peculiar Revolution. Rethinking the Peruvian Experiment under Military Rule, co-edited with Paulo Drinot (2017) and Bibliotecas y Cultura Letrada en América Latina. Siglos XIX y XX, co-edited with Ricardo Salvatore (2018). For more information on professor Aguirre’s works, check https://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~caguirre/home.html
We hope to see many of you there!

The Topography of Citizenship
2018-10-11 03:00 - 16:30 | HSSB 4080
October 11 (Thursday) 3 pm, HSSB 4080 : Simon Goldhill (University of Cambridge), The Topography of Citizenship (co-sponsored by Critical Issues: Changing Faces of US Citizenship).
Citizenship is most often discussed as a question of legal status within a framework of rights and occasionally duties. Goldhill will be looking at the physical infrastructure of citizenship and how this is changing. How are cities constructed to create different sites of engagement for
citizenship and different forms of exclusion? What sort of cities do we wish to make to create civic life? The focus will be on the modern city, but with an instructive comparison with past models, physical and theoretical.

Book Launch: Professor Xiaowei Zheng's "The Politics of Rights and the 1911 Revolution in China"
2018-10-17 17:00 - 19:00 | McCune Conference Room (HSSB 6020), Humanities and Social Sciences Bldg, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Please join the Department of History to celebrate the publication of Professor Xiaowei Zheng’s new book, The Politics of Rights and the 1911 Revolution in China (Stanford University Press, 2018). Professor Matthew Sommer (History, Stanford) and Professor Anthony Barbieri-Low (History, UCSB) will speak about the significance of Professor Zheng’s book for the field of modern Chinese history. The event is cosponsored by the department of East Asian Languages and Cultural Studies and the Confucius Institute. A reception will follow.

Talk by Dr. Charles Delgadillo: "Crusading for Democracy: William Allen White's Liberal Republican Internationalism"
2018-10-23 16:00 - 17:30 | HSSB 4080, 4080 Humanities and Social Sciences Building, UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Delgadillo flyer
The question of America’s role in the world has been fiercely contested for more than a century in the Republican Party. The “isolationists” have argued that American interests were better served by remaining free of foreign entanglements, while the “internationalists” have countered that American peace and prosperity demanded that it play a role in shaping the international order. It is only in recent days, under the leadership of Donald Trump, that Republican isolationists have prevailed over their internationalist opponents in the party.
Charles Delgadillo traces William Allen White’s (1868-1944) trajectory as one of the founding fathers of liberal Republican internationalism. White achieved national fame with his conservative Emporia Gazette editorial “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” but he quickly evolved into a progressive Republican and later into a New Deal liberal. White fought for an active American role in the world, from his early explorations with the global progressive movement during the 1900s to his efforts to generate public support for the Allies during World War II. The final battle of White’s life was fought to cement the supremacy of internationalism over isolationism in the Republican Party. White’s role in advancing liberal Republican internationalism, his perception of the isolationist threat, and his colorful life make him a fascinating case study in the age of “America First.”
The event is sponsored by the Center for Cold War Studies and International History and cosponsored by the Department of History.
Charles Delgadillo is an Instructor in History at the California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. He earned his PhD in History at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 2010, and his dissertation examined a cohort of four liberals who grappled with America’s rise as a world power between the World Wars. The work yielded two journal articles and Crusader for Democracy: The Political Life of William Allen White, which is Delgadillo’s first book.

Talk by Professor Ula Taylor, UC Berkeley: "The Promise of Patriarchy: Women and the Nation of Islam"
2018-11-01 11:00 - 12:30 | Embarcadero Hall, 935 Embarcadero Del Norte, Isla Vista
The partiarchal structure of the Nation of Islam (NOI) promised black women the prospect of finding a provider and a protector among the organization’s men, who were fiercely committed dto these masculine roles. Black women’s experience in the NOI, however, has largely remained on the periphery of scholarship. In her presentation, Ula Taylor documents their struggle to escape the devaluation of black womanhood while also clinging to the empowering promises of patriarchy. Taylor shows how, despite being relegated to a lifestyle that did not encourage working outside of the home, NOI women found freedom in being able to bypass the degrading experiences connected to labor performed largely by working-class black women and in raising and educating their children in racially affirming environments.
Co-sponsored by the College of Letters and Sciences; the MultiCultural Center; the Department of History; Hull Chair in Feminist Studies; and Black Studies

Parents' and Family Weekend faculty panel event: "Crossings and Boundaries"
2018-11-02 14:00 - 15:30 | HSSB 6020 (McCune Room), University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Please join us for our Parents’ and Family Weekend faculty panel event. The History Department faculty will discuss the ways in which boundaries—ideological, cultural, political, and intellectual—build barriers that impact the lives of ordinary people and their ability to access resources, knowledge, and power. Come join us, and bring along your family!

Film Screening at Pollock Theater: RBG
2018-11-05 19:00 - 21:30 | Pollock Theater
Screening of the film RBG at the Pollock Theater. At the age of 85, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has developed a lengthy legal legacy while becoming an unexpected pop culture icon. But the unique personal journey of her rise to the nation’s highest court has been largely unknown, even to some of her biggest fans – until now. RBG (2018) explores Ginsburg’s life and career through interviews, public appearances and archival material.

Betsy West and Julie Cohen (co-directors) will join moderator Jeannine DeLombard (English, UCSB) for a post-screening discussion. For more, see the event website here.

Film screening: "1968: The Year that Shaped a Generation"
2018-11-07 19:00 - 20:30 | HSSB 6020 (McCune Room), University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
1968 Poster1968 was a pivotal year in U.S. and global history. In the United States, students protested the Vietnam War. In France, they protested university conditions and sparked worker strikes across the country. In Mexico City, they protested state violence. This was also the year when the peaceful protest known as the “Prague Spring” flourished in Czechoslovakia, when Martin Luther King planned a Poor People’s March on Washington, and when Robert Kennedy ran for president. But the backlash against all of these stirrings was fierce. King and Kennedy were gunned down. Soviet tanks crushed the Prague Spring. Disarray in the American peace movement allowed Richard Nixon to become president. This documentary combines riveting archival footage and insightful interviews—with Jesse Jackson, Barbara Ehrenreich, Carlos Fuentes, Pat Buchanan and others—to recreate an extraordinary year. The emerging picture is one of turmoil and anguish but also one of hope. The Vietnam protests ultimately led to a winding down of the war. The French uprising spurred university reforms in that country. The Prague Spring, though ground down in 1968, planted the seeds of Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution of 1989. After the screening of the film, Professor Salim Yaqub will make a brief presentation and lead a discussion.
Sponsored by the IHC and the Center for Cold War Studies and International History

Professor Barbieri-Low Speaks on "Paradise" at Santa Barbara Museum of Art
2018-11-15 16:30 - 18:00 | Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 1130 State Street, Santa Barbara, CA, 93101, United States
Professor Anthony Barbieri-Low will speak on “Visions of Immortality and Paradise in Ancient China and Egypt” as part of the Art Matters series at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. This research is part of his new book-in-progress, The Black Land and the Middle Kingdom: Comparative Perspective on Ancient Egypt and Early China. Admission is free for students with ID.

Talk by Professor Bonnie Honig, Brown University: "Postures of Refusal"
2018-11-28 14:00 - 16:00 | HSSB 6020 (McCune Room), University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Postures of Refusal: From Antigone to Kaepernick

How do the postures of our bodies communicate citizens’ dissidence or conformity, non-compliance or care? When Kaepernick kneels, Black Lives Matter lie down in the streets, soldiers stand at attention, and we all speak of moral fortitude as having a spine or showing spine, are these mere dramatizations and harmless metaphors? Or might they tell us something about the gendering of moral conscience? This talk will look at the significance of posture of obedience and disobedience in a variety of texts, from Sophocles’ Antigone” to Euripides’ “Bacchae,” from speeches/interviews by Muhammad Ali to photographs of Colin Kaepernick.

Bonnie Honig is Nancy Duke Lewis Professor in the departments of Modern Culture and Media (MCM) and Political Science at Brown University. She is author of Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics (Cornell, 1993), Democracy and the Foreigner (Princeton, 2001), Emergency Politics: Paradox, Law, Democracy (Princeton, 2009), Antigone, Interrupted (Cambridge University Press, 2013), and Public Things: Democracy in Disrepair, (Fordham University Press, 2017). She has edited or co-edited: Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt (Penn State, 1995), Skepticism, Individuality and Freedom: The Reluctant Liberalism of Richard Flathman (Minnesota, 2002) the Oxford Handbook of Political Thought (Oxford, 2006) and, most recently, Politics, Theory, and Film: Critical Encounters with Lars von Trier (Oxford, 2016). She is currently at work on a new project called Theaters of Refusal, to be delivered as the Flexner lectures at Bryn Mawr College in the fall of 2017 and to be published by Harvard University Press. In 2017-18 she is serving as the Inaugural Cranor Phi Beta Kappa Scholar.

UCSB History Associates Lecture: "Pious Postmortems: Anatomy and the Making of Saints", Professor Brad Bouley
2018-12-01 14:00 - 15:30 | Karpeles Manuscript Library, 21 West Anapamu Street, Santa Barbara, CA, United States
During the Reformation, the Catholic Church suffered a crisis in one of its oldest and most powerful institutions: belief in the saints. To support the veneration of these individuals, canonization officials turned, it would seem paradoxically, to medical science. Canon lawyers and physicians thought that medicine could be used to prove miracles. The category of supernatural was, however, a tricky one and so canon lawyers, theologians, and doctors developed a range of techniques to establish the bounds of nature. This talk examines the means used to determine the existence of the supernatural in human bodies. Surprisingly, the tools employed in the search for the holy mirror and presage many of the techniques later used by experimental scientists to establish the factuality of unusual observations.
The speaker, Brad Bouley, completed his PhD at Stanford in 2012 and taught at Penn Sate until he joined the UCSB History department in 2017. His specialty is Italian history from the 16th through the 18th centuries. Bouley studies the intersections of religious history, the history of science, and the history of food and urban provisioning. His first monograph, Pious Postmortems: Anatomy, Sanctity and the Catholic Church in Early Modern Europe, was published last year.
Please RSVP using this flier

Talk by Leon Fink, Georgetown: "Neoliberalism Before Its Time? Labor and the Free Trade Ideal in the Era of the 'Great Compression.'"
2018-12-07 13:00 - 15:00 | hssb 4041, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, 93106, United States
Fink, the editor of LABOR: Studies in Working-Class History, is the author or editor of a dozen books. These include The Long Gilded Age: American Capitalism and the Lessons of a New World Order (2014); Sweatshops at Sea: Merchant Seamen in the World’s First Globalized Industry, from 1812 to the Present (2011); The Maya of Morganton: Work and Community in the Nuevo New South (2003); and Progressive Intellectuals and the Dilemmas of Democratic Commitment (1997).

Talk by Stuart McManus, Chinese University of Hong Kong: "Agency, Intersectionality, and the Classical Tradition in the Early Modern Hispanic World
2018-12-07 16:00 - 18:00 | HSSB 4080, 4080 Humanities and Social Sciences Building, UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
How did Mediterranean culture shape life in the multiethnic global empires of Spain and Portugal? To answer this question, this talk will explore the role of the classical tradition in structuring and disseminating early modern Hispanic discourses on empire, slavery, and Christian missions with a particular focus on the ways ancient literary forms and civic practices (from the epigram to Ciceronian public speaking) were then appropriated by ethnically Iberian, indigenous, and African students of antiquity to carve out a place for themselves within this hierarchical global space. By taking a global and intersectional approach to classical reception studies, this talk makes the case that the global impact of Greece and Rome cannot be understood without reference to historically-specific constructions of race, gender, and class.

Stuart Tyson Smith, "Playing Hounds and Jackals: Gaming, Empire, Entanglement and the International Style in the Late Bronze Age
2019-01-09 11:00 - 12:30 | HSSB 6056

Public History event: Career Diversity speakers
2019-01-14 16:00 - 17:30 | HSSB 4020, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
The Public History program and History Graduate program are hosting two guests, Megan Bowman and Peter Bachman, to discuss their experiences teaching at independent schools. Both teach at Fintridge Preparatory School, which is in the Los Angeles area, and both are historians.
This Career Diversity event is part of an ongoing series to encourage graduate students and their mentors to think more broadly and creatively about the career opportunities available to people seeking PhDs in history and related fields.
If you are are a graduate student, or a mentor of a graduate students, please join us for this important and exciting talk. Delicious refreshments will be served!

Talk by George O'Malley: "Tracking the Intercolonial Slave Trade"
2019-01-18 13:00 - 15:00 | hssb 4041, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, 93106, United States
Professor Gregory O’Malley, of UC Santa Cruz, is the author of Final Passages: The Intercolonial Slave Trade of British America, 1619-1807 (2014), a logistical study of slave trading and its economic, political, and cultural consequences. His current project, “The Intra-American Slave Trade Database” tracks more than 11,000 voyages.
A copy of his paper, co-written with UC Irvine professor Alex Borucki, can be found here.

"Podcasting the Past: Teaching Tolerance and the Making of Queer America"
2019-01-23 15:00 - 17:00 | CITRAL Seminar Room, Library, UCSB Library, 525 UCEN Rd, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
“Podcasting the Past: Teaching Tolerance and the Making of Queer America” — History Department Gender and Sexualities Cluster

Interactive talk with Dr. Leila Rupp, Distinguished Professor of Feminist Studies Leila Rupp, Department of Feminist Studies, will talk about the process of designing and co-hosting a podcast, “Queer America,” sponsored by the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Teaching Tolerance project. The podcast aims to help educators to integrate queer history into their curriculum.

Talk by Sigrid Schmalzer, University of Massachusetts, Amherst: "The Layered Landscapes of Hebei and Guangxi: Mao-era History and the COnstruction of China's Agricultural Heritage"
2019-01-23 17:00 - 18:30 | SS&MS 2135
Chinese scientists, scholars, and state officials are actively engaged in a transnational movement to preserve “agricultural heritage.” But what is agricultural heritage and how does it relate to a “people’s history” of agriculture? This talk will focus on two sites where the PRC state is actively seeking to promote and preserve agricultural heritage. Both sites are famed for their spectacular agricultural terraces: one lies in the northern province of Hebei and the other in the southern province of Guangxi. Despite ethnic, cultural, and environmental differences, the two sites share some important historical experiences. In both places, people identify terracing as a form of survivial for their migrant ancestors in a new land. More recently, the two sites underwent a powerful, transformative Mao-era history that matters deeply to local people but is in danger or erasure or cooption today in the ahnds of an eco-authoritarian state. The speaker will explore these two cases to demonstrate the need for a critical historical approach: she will urge scholars to recognize the significance of the Mao era in the construction of both agricultural knowledge and the agricultural heritage paradigm, while resisting efforts to coopt that history in the service of state power.
Sigrid Schmalzer is Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her first book, The People’s Peking Man: Popular Science and Human Identity in Twentieth-Century China, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2008 and won the Sharlin Memorial Award from the Social Science History Association. Her second book, Red Revolution, Green Revolution: Scientific Farming in Socialist China (Chicago, 2016) won the Joseph Levenson Prize form the Association for Asian Studies.

Symposium "BEYOND THE SPILL: THE HISTORY AND POLITICS OF OIL IN CALIFORNIA"
2019-01-24 17:00 - 2019-01-25 15:30 | Wireframe Studio and SRB Multipurpose Rm
The year 2019 marks the 50th anniversary of the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill. The Mellon Sawyer Seminar on Energy Justice in Global Perspective at UCSB is excited to invite you to our upcoming symposium, BEYOND THE SPILL: THE HISTORY AND POLITICS OF OIL IN CALIFORNIA, which will take place on January 24-25 at UCSB. Attached to this message you will find a poster that we would love for you to share with your colleagues, friends, and email lists. For a full schedule of symposium events and information on participants, please see our website at http://www.global.ucsb.edu/energyjustice/events.

UCSB History Associates: "Ruth Bader Ginsburg: A Life", talk with Jane De Hart and Laura Kalman
2019-01-26 14:30 - 16:00 | Buchanan 1910
Please join us for a talk by Jane Sherron De Hart, professor emerita of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, on her new biography, Ruth Bader Ginsburg: A Life. It is the first full life—private, public, legal, philosophical—of the 107th Supreme Court Justice, one of the deepest and most profoundly transformative legal minds of our time. This book, fifteen years in the making, was written with the cooperation of Justice Ginsburg herself and based on many interviews with the justice, her husband, her children, her friends, and her associates. De Hart’s book on the Equal Rights Amendment (Sex, Gender, and the Politics of Sex: A State and a Nation , co-written with Donald G. Matthews) won the American Political Science Association’s Victoria Schuck Award for the best book on women and politics.
Professor Laura Kalman, Distinguished Professor of History at UCSB, noted legal historian, and author most recently of The Long Reach of the Sixties: LBJ, Nixon and the Making of the Contemporary Supreme Court (2017), will present a comment on de Hart’s book and its significance. Kalman’s biography of Lyndon Johnson’s friend, Abe Fortas, told the story of another famous justice of the US Supreme Court, Abe Fortas. This book won the LittletonGriswold Prize awarded by the American Historical Association for the most distinguished book on US law and society.
This event will take place in UCSB’s Buchanan Hall, Room 1910, on Jan. 26, 2019 at 2:30 pm. Discussion and a reception will follow.

"Agrarian Quests: The Search for Comunidades and Campesinos in Rural Peru,” a lecture by Javier Puente
2019-01-30 16:00 - 17:30 | HSSB 4020, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Abstract
The history of twentieth-century Peru is the history of the rural countryside, its governance, and the making of comunidadesand campesinosas foundational elements of a social, economic, and political landscape. Throughout a number of decades, domestic state powers and transnational capital turned lands and pastures into battlegrounds of ideas about labor, property, and modernization at large. In turn, clashing visions of power placed comunidadesand campesinosat the center of their responses to enduring uncertainties and anxieties on the economic exploitation and sociopolitical control of the country. Hacendados, engineers, intellectuals, corporations, political parties, the military, among others, contended and disputed the meaning of being a comunidadand a campesino. Ultimately, a civil war brought the search to a violent end, revealing the extent, limitations, and failures of the rural making of a nation-state.
About
JAVIER PUENTE holds a Ph.D. from Georgetown University and currently serves as assistant professor of Andean history at the Instituto de Historia of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile.
This lecture s presented as part of the LAIS 200 graduate seminar. It is free and open to the campus community. A small reception follows the talk. Students interested in discussing further Dr. Puente’s work after the reception are encouraged to contact the LAIS Program Director at mendez@lais.ucsb.edu to get the reading materials.
*LAIS thanks the generous co-sponsorship of the Departments of History, Global Studies, and the Global Environmental Justice Project to this event.

Film showing: "In the Shadow of the Moon"
2019-01-30 19:00 - 21:00 | HSSB 6020 (McCune Room), University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
2019 marks the 50th anniversary of NASA’s Apollo program. The mission’s crewed flights began in 1968 with the first lunar circumnavigation; on July 20, 1969 Neil Armstrong became the first human to step foot on another planet. By the end of 1972 Apollo’s funding was cut and NASA’s moon explorations were over. From 1969 to 1972 there were eight crewed missions and 12 astronauts walked on the surface of the moon, exploring and doing scientific work “for the benefit of all mankind.” This award-winning documentary explores remastered archival footage and the recollections and commentary of almost every astronaut alive in 2007 regarding their participation in the Apollo program. Note the determination and awe that echoes through the memories of these unique Americans. Learn what they thought about the tumultuous decade of the 1960s and how their accomplishment seemed to bring the world together, ever so briefly. Hear what they say about humans going back to the moon and beyond, a feat that is once again on NASA’s radar. The film will be introduced by 2018/2019 Center for Cold War Studies Fellow, Christina Roberts, a PhD student in the History of Science program at UCSB. Light refreshments served.In the Shadow of the Moon-flyer

Talk by Priti Ramamurthy, University of Washington: "Feminist Commodity Chains"
2019-02-01 13:00 - 15:00 | hssb 4041, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, 93106, United States
A scholar of gender and globalization, Ramamurthy has conducted ethnography in the same villages in the Telangana region of southern India for three decades to examine the relationship between social reproduction of families and agricultural transformation. She is co-editor and co-author of The Modern Girl Around the World: Consumption, Modernity, and Globalization (2008).

Heavenly Hermaphrodites, a Lecture by Leah DeVun
2019-02-04 14:30 - 16:00 | HSSB 6020 (McCune Room), University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
DeVun Flier
This lecture examines how certain ancient and medieval thinkers claimed that “hermaphroditism” was the original condition of humanity, created by God and documented in the first chapters of Genesis. The idea that Adam was a hermaphrodite fueled medieval debates about sex and gender, as well as about human nature. In the modern world, objections to transgender and gender-nonconforming people often cite the bible, which is viewed as describing the division of humans into two distinct sexes. Historians and other scholars, I argue, should consider more carefully how Christian ideas about the sexed body emerged and developed – such histories have the power to disrupt our certainty about which sexes and genders are legitimate, natural, and deserving of human dignity.
Leah DeVun is an Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University. She is the author of Prophecy, Alchemy, and the End of Time (Columbia) and co-editor of Trans*Historicities (Duke), as well as articles in GLQ, WSQ, Osiris, postmedieval, Journal of the History of Ideas, and Radical History Review. Her current research interests lie in the history of science and the history of gender, sex, and sexuality in medieval and early modern Europe.

Book Launch and Signing by David Treuer, University of Southern California: The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America From 1890 to the Present
2019-02-04 17:00 - 18:30 | HSSB 6020 (McCune Room), University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Almost from the moment it occurred, the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee Creek on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota was cast in the popular imagination as a point of no return, at which not only did hundreds of Lakota men, women and children perish but so, in a sense, did Native American life itself. Now David Treuer–the critically acclaimed writer, anthropologist, and journalist, himself Ojibwe from Leech Lake Reservation in northern Minnesota–brings to that mythology its long-overdue reckoning. In The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee, Treuer traces the rich, resilient and multi-dimensional story that Native people have been living over the past century, and adds new chapters to the story of American Indian creativity and resilience in our modern times.
Professor Treuer will be signing books at the event.

Edgardo Pérez, USC: "Slavery, irreverence, and sovereignty in the revolutionary Caribbean"
2019-02-06 17:00 - 18:30 | HSSB 4020
Please join us for the next meeting of the Colloquium on Latin American and Caribbean History as we welcome Edgardo Pérez, who will deliver a talk entitled “Slavery, irreverence, and sovereignty in the revolutionary Caribbean”.
The talk will be held in HSSB 4020 at 5 pm on Wednesday, February 6th, and will be followed by a small reception.
Abstract: Cartagena de Indias, on the north coast of today’s Colombia, declared independence from Spain and extended citizenship to free men of color between 1812 and 1815. Hundreds of Afro-Caribbean sailors flocked to this port town, where they obtained nominal citizenship and jobs as privateers—pirates with a license to attack Spanish shipping out at sea. Because Cartagena leaders saw their privateering policy as an “act of sovereignty,” this talk asks how exactly common sailors—the main protagonists of this story—embodied political sovereignty at sea and on land. Cartagena’s privateers throw into relief the history of sovereignty as practice; these maritime workers used irreverent talk, ambivalent political belonging, and dynamic connections with the Republic of Haiti to build the first Spanish American experiment in maritime republicanism. This untold story may thus reveal the origins of multi-ethnic, plurilingual and border-crossing citizenship.
About the Speaker: Edgardo Pérez Morales is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Southern California.

History Club Weekly Meetings
2019-02-07 19:00 - 21:00 | HSSB 4020
UCSB’s new and improved History Departmental club is for majors, minors, and anyone with a passion for the past! Meetings are held every Thursday at 7:00 PM in HSSB 4020. See flier below for information about upcoming events. Please email histclub.ucsb@gmail.com with any questions.

Career Diversity Speaker: Jim Newland, Program Manager for Strategic Planning and Recreation Services
2019-02-12 13:30 - 16:00 | HSSB 3208
Jim Newland, Program Manager for Strategic Planning & Recreation Services, California State Parks, will be speaking on Tuesday, February 12, 1:30-4pm, HSSB 3208, as part of our series on alternate careers for historians. In addition to talking about his own work as a historian within the California State Parks, he will be discussing upcoming opportunities within the park system. Within the next two years, California State Parks will be hiring eight to ten historians for full-time positions across the state. Jim will discuss the process of application and the kinds of work done by historians within the state park system. You can find more information about this here.
This Career Diversity event is part of an ongoing series to encourage graduate students and their mentors to think more broadly and creatively about the career opportunities available to people seeking PhDs in history and related fields.
If you are are a graduate student, or a mentor of a graduate students, please join us for this important and exciting talk. Delicious refreshments will be served!
