The Global Financial Crisis and Russia's Economic Growth
2010-11-23 00:00 (America/Denver)
Professor Shinichiro Tabata of the Slavic Research Center at Hokkaido University, Japan, specializes in the history of the Russian economy.
This event is sponsored by the Center for Cold War Studies and International History, the Department of Political Science, and the Department of Economics.
jwil 17.xi.2010

The 'Big One'--Coming Soon On a Fault Near You?
2010-11-30 00:00
The San Andreas fault system is responsible for the formation of our most beloved and dramatic landscapes, and for the earthquakes that shake us up from time to time. In her illustrated lecture, Prof. Tanya Atwater will discuss the chance of someday predicting when and where the earth will break next, the same way weather forecasters predict storms. How far are we from such predictions? Using animations, simulations, maps and images, Prof. Atwater will demonstrate how specialists are finding out about longer term activity by studying sediment layers in the walls of trenches. We will learn how a “trench party” gleans information about possible future earthquakes, and vicariously experience what the next big one might be like.
Prof. emerita Tanya Atwater is UCSB’s very own “shock jock,” with a lifelong passion for maps and large-scale landscapes, both oceanic and terrestrial, and for the plate tectonic processes that create them. She is especially well known for her works on the plate tectonic evolution of western North America and the San Andreas fault system.
An outstanding teacher, Prof. Atwater’s animations are used in classrooms, teaching laboratories, museums, and public forums around the world. Prof. Atwater was elected to the prestigious National Academy of Sciences in 1997. Other recent honors include the National Science Foundation Director’s Award for Distinguished Teaching Scholars and the Geological Society of America Structure and Tectonics Division’s Best Paper Award.
First Presbyterian Church
23 E. Constance Ave.
Santa Barbara, CA 93105
The First Presbyterian Church is located on the corner of State and Constance. The parking lot is entered on East Constance Ave. We will assemble in the small meeting room adjacent to the parking lot.
Cost: $10
Please make checks payable to UCSB History Associates
Detach at dotted line and mail to:
UCSB History Associates, Department of History, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106-9410
hm 11/5/10

Fall quarter instruction ends
2010-12-03 00:00
See calendar link for details.
hm 5/28/10

Is Conventional Trade Unionism Obsolete?
2010-12-03 00:00
Please join us for a talk by Stephen Lerner of the Service Employees International Union, “Is Conventional Trade Unionism Obsolete?”
Lerner is an architect of the groundbreaking Justice for Janitors campaign. He has been a union strategist for more than three decades and writes frequently for both the mainstream press and scholarly publications. He currently directs the SEIU’s effort to hold banks and other financial institutions accountable for their employment effects on our economy and workplace.
The talk, and subsequent discussion, is part of the History 294: Colloquium in Work, Labor, and Political Economy, 2010-2011 lecture series.
The Colloquium meets on Friday, December 3, at 1 p.m. in 4041 Humanities and Social Science Building.
jmj 10/11/2010

Human Experimentation in 20th Century American Medicine: Myths and Realities.
2010-12-03 00:00
This talk compares and contrasts the myths and realities surrounding three specific human experiments: the Tuskegee syphilis study, the Salk polio trials, and the Willowbrook hepatitis experiments.
hm 12/2/10

Winter Quarter instruction begins
2011-01-03 00:00
Classes begin in Winter quarter.If you are enrolled in a discussion section that meets before the main lecture meets, you should still attend section that week.
See calendar link below for details.
hm 12/7/10

The White Rose, or: German Students against Hitler
2011-01-06 00:00
The Department of Germanic, Slavic and Semitic Studies cordially invitesyou to the
Tenth George J. Wittenstein Lecture
Christian Petry’s lecture explores the question whether remembering past
acts of resistance against tyranny–such as that of the Munich student group
in 1942-43–can provide inspiration to face today’s political challenges.
The White Rose (German: die Weiße Rose) was a non-violent/intellectual
resistance group in Nazi Germany, consisting of students from the University
of Munich and their philosophy professor. The group became known for an
anonymous leaflet campaign, lasting from June 1942 until February 1943,
that called for active opposition to dictator Adolf Hitler’s regime.
The six core members of the group were arrested by the Gestapo (German
secret police) and they were executed by decapitation in 1943. The text of
their sixth leaflet was smuggled by Helmuth James Graf von Moltke out of
Germany through Scandinavia to the United Kingdom, and in July 1943
copies of it were dropped over Germany by Allied planes, retitled “The
Manifesto of the Students of Munich.”
Christian Petry is the author of Studenten aufs Schafott: Die Weisse Rose
und ihr Scheitern, 1968 (Students under the Guillotine: The Defeat of the
White Rose). He has published books, articles and films on student
resistance in Nazi Germany, on intercultural education and communication,
and on curriculum development and educational reform.
After studying history and sociology at the Free University of Berlin,
Petry first worked as a teacher and sociologist at schools in southern Germany
before starting a project for vocational and social integration of foreign
youth in Weinheim, Germany. He has served as director of a project network
to support ethnic minorities (“Regionale Arbeitsstellen zur Förderung
ausländischer Kinder und Jugendlicher”) in eight cities of the Ruhr area,
as director of a European Community model project to overcome youth
unemployment in the city of Duisburg, and as executive director of the
Freudenberg Foundation whose objectives include the integration of
immigrant children and adolescents in German civil society and the defense
and promotion of democratic culture. Petry has also served as Chair at the
European Foundation Centre, Interest Group Youth and Education. Since 2010,
he has been executive director of the Stiftungs- und Fördergemeinschaft
Modellprojekte GmbH, Weinheim.
The lecture is free and open to the public.
hm 11/30/10, 1/4/11

Strategies for Defending Higher Education
2011-01-08 00:00
This counter-conference will take place during the annual Modern Language Convention in Los Angeles, January 8th, 2011 from 1-5 at Loyola Law School (919 Albany St, 4 block from the Mariott, in Merrifield Hall). While thousands of people will be meeting at the traditional convention, UC-AFT will hold a one-day event centered on discussing actual strategies for making higher education more just. Speakers will present short papers on topics like the death of tenure, the corporatization of the university, the possibilities of unionization, direct social action, the use and abuse of graduate students, organizing contingent faculty, and taking back shared governance.
Schedule:Remaking the University of California: 1:00-1:45: Catharine Liu, Chris Newfield, Joshua Clover
Defending the Humanities and Shared Governance: 1:45-2:30: Cary Nelson, Jeffrey Williams, Michelle Masse
Organizing Labor and the Academic Class War: 2:30-3:15: Marc Bousquet, Maria Maisto, Joe Berry
Graduate Students and Precarious Labor: 3:15-4:00: Annie McClanahan (Harvard, former UAW bargaining unit), Jasper Bernes (GSOC, UCB), Stephanie Seawell (GEO, UI Champaign Urbana), Kerry Pimblott (UI Champaign Urbana)
Quality, Access, and Affordability: 4:00-4:30: Murray Sperber, Elizabeth Hoffman, and Bob Samuels
Open Discussion on Strategies for Changing Higher Education: 4:30-4:55.
hm 12/10/10

Art and Rhetoric in Roman Culture
2011-01-12 00:00
Jas’ Elsner is Humfry Payne Senior Research Fellow in Classical Art at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and Visiting Professor of Art History at the University of Chicago.
This talk is sponsored by the Department of Classics and the Department of History.
jwil 02.xii.2010

America and the Holocaust
2011-01-18 00:00
Pierre Sauvage, award-winning documentary filmmaker and child survivor of the Holocaust, screens and discusses excerpts from his upcoming feature documentary And Crown Thy Good: Varian Fry in Marseille (2011), as well as his recent documentary short, Not Idly By–Peter Bergson, America and the Holocaust (2010). His presentation addresses one of the enduring questions of the Shoah: What could have been done by the U.S. and its allies and by American Jews to save the Jews of Europe–and why wasn’t it done? Sauvage wrote, produced, and directed Weapons of the Spirit,which received the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award honoring excellence in broadcast journalism and which is widely regarded as a seminal documentary on rescue during the Holocaust.
Profile of Filmmaker
Pierre Sauvage is a child survivor of the Holocaust and a child of Holocaust survivors. An Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker, Sauvage is the President of the Chambon Foundation, which he founded in 1982. The Chambon Foundation was the first nonprofit educational foundation committed to exploring and communicating the necessary and challenging lessons of hope intertwined with the Holocaust’s unavoidable lessons of despair.
Sauvage’s recent documentary short, Not Idly By: Peter Bergson, America and Holocaust (2010) offers a portrait of a militant Jew born in Palestine who led a controversial American effort to fight the Holocaust. According to historian Blanche Wiesen Cook, “This brilliant, galvanizing, and profoundly moving documentary celebrates Peter Bergson’s vigorous efforts to end the silence and the slaughter that defined the Holocaust.”
His latest film, And Crown Thy Good–Varian Fry in Marseille, will be released in 2011. A feature documentary, it tells the story of a New York intellectual who after the fall of France to the Nazis spent a year in the Southern port city of Marseille leading one of the most remarkable and successful rescue efforts of the Nazi era. While celebrating some remarkable Americans?Varian Fry, Miriam Davenport, Mary Jayne Gold, Charles Fawcett, Leon Ball and Hiram Bingham IV?the documentary places the story in the context of those challenging times, addressing American policies towards the unwanted refugees. Both the Jerusalem Cinematheque and New York City’s Museum of Jewish Heritage have recently held retrospectives devoted to the filmmaker.
Sauvage is best known for his 1989 feature documentary Weapons of the Spirit, which tells the story the conspiracy of goodness of a mountain community in France that defied the Nazis and took in and saved five thousand Jews, including himself and his parents. Sauvage was born in this unique Christian oasis, Le Chambon, at a time when much of his family was being tortured and murdered in the Nazi death camps. Only at the age of 18 did Sauvage learn that he and his family were Jewish and survivors of the Holocaust. Weapons of the Spirit won numerous awards and received two national prime-time broadcasts on P.B.S., accompanied by Bill Moyers’ probing 1989 interview of the filmmaker, and remains one of the most widely used documentary teaching tools on the Holocaust.
A popular lecturer on the Holocaust and its continuing challenges, for over twenty years, Sauvage has been a student of what he calls the American experience of the Holocaust. He is one of a pioneering handful of experts on rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust–“righteous Gentiles”–and contends that they still have much to teach us. The son of prominent French journalist and author, Sauvage was 4 when he and his parents moved to New York City in 1948, returning to Paris at 18 to pursue his studies. After working briefly as a journalist, the Sorbonne drop-out fell in love with film at Paris’ legendary Cinémathèque Française, becoming a film scholar and landing a job there working for the legendary genius Henri Langlois. Veteran émigré producer Otto Preminger brought Sauvage back to New York as a story editor. After co-authoring a two-volume critical study of American film directors, American Directors, Sauvage finally got behind the camera himself as a staff producer-reporter for Los Angeles public television station KCET. While producing over 30 hours of varied programming, his first major success came when he decided to begin exploring those Jewish roots he had never known in Yiddish: the Mame-Loshn (1979).
Sponsors:
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 UCSB Arts & Lectures, Department of Religious Studies, Congregation B’nai B’rith, Jewish Federation of Greater Santa Barbara, and Santa Barbara Hillel.
hm 12/7/10, 1/2/11

The Global Landscape of Holocaust Memorials since 1945
2011-01-19 00:00
Since the January 2000 Stockholm conference “The Holocaust – Education, Remembrance and Research,” which was attended by high-level representatives from 46 countries, there has been much discussion of a “globalization” of memory of the Nazi Holocaust. This lecture uses memorials and museums to trace the origins and spread of public awareness of “the” Holocaust and its changing meanings from the 1940s to the new millennium.
The presentation will be followed by a response from Richard Hecht (Religious Studies, UCSB).
Sponsored by the IHC’s Geographies of Place Series.
hm 1/3/11

Women in Prehistoric Greece
2011-01-21 00:00
This talk examines the lives of girls and women in the Minoan and Mycenaean cultures of the prehistoric Aegean (ca. 3000-1000 BCE). Testing modern assumptions and expectations against the archaeological, iconographic, and textual evidence leads to some surprising conclusions. While Minoan-Mycenaean society was probably sex-segregated (Minoan perhaps more so than Mycenaean), there is almost no evidence for love, intimacy, sex, or marriage, but there is good evidence for women participants in some athletic events and the hunt.
John Younger is Professor of Classics and Director of the Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies program at the University of Kansas.
This event is sponsored by the Ancient Mediterranean Studies program and the Ancient Borderlands Research Focus Group.
jwil 06.ix.10

The Crisis, Los Angeles Black Communities, and the Failed State Debate
2011-01-21 00:00
Please join us for a talk by Clyde Woods, Black Studies, UCSB, “The Crisis, Los Angeles’ Black Communities, and the Failed State Debate.” Woods is the author of Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta (2000) and editor of Black Geographies and the Politics of Place (2007). He is now part of a community/academic team studying development policy in Los Angeles.
The talk, and subsequent discussion, is part of the History 294: Colloquium in Work, Labor, and Political Economy, 2010-2011 lecture series.
The Winter Quarter topic is “The Financial Crisis and its Origins.”
The Colloquium meets on Friday, January 21 at 1 p.m. in 4041 Humanities and Social Science Building.
jmj 01/03/2011

Some Problems with Hubris in Ancient Greek Law
2011-01-31 00:00
This paper will examine some characteristic problems and issues in the study of Athenian law, and of ancient Greek law more generally, through an analysis of the offense of hubris (“intentionally dishonoring behavior”). Topics to be discussed include (1) the Athenian law of hubris; (2) parallels with the laws and practices of other Greek communities and their ramifications for the question of the unity of Greek law; and (3) hubris and the categorization of shame.
David Phillips is Associate Professor of History at UCLA.
This event is sponsored by the Ancient Mediterranean Studies program and the Ancient Borderlands Research Focus Group.
jwil 05.I.2011

West Meets East: The International Labor Organization from Geneva to the Pacific Rim Conference
2011-02-03 00:00
West Meets East: The International Labor Organization from Geneva to the Pacific Rim is an Interdisciplinary Conference at the University of California, Santa Barbara from February 3-5, 2011
McCune Conference Room on the 6th floor, HSSB
Thursday, Feb. 3, 3:00 – 5:00 pm
Friday, Feb 4, 9:00 am – 5:00 pm
Saturday, Feb. 5, 9:00 am – 3:00 pm
This conference explores the historical role of the International Labor Organization throughout the Pacific Rim. During the last half century this vast region has become the world’s most important site of capitalist growth and social transformation, the global center of low-wage manufacturing, transoceanic trade, and economic rivalry. As the ILO approaches its hundredth anniversary, the conference probes how this United Nations affiliated international organization has defined “development,” promoted labor standards, fought for women’s rights, and collaborated with nation-states and NGOs.
Keynote Speakers:
Leon Fink, Distinguished Professor of History, University of Illinois, Chicago, 6:30 pm, February 3, UCSB Alumni House
Anita Chan, Professor, China Research Centre of the University of Technology, Sydney, 6:30 pm, February 4, UCSB Faculty Club
For a full conference schedule:

Assessing the Revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt
2011-02-03 00:00
The overthrow of the Ben Ali dictatorship in Tunisia by sustained popular demonstrations has led to even more cataclysmic protests in Egypt, Yemen, Jordan, and elsewhere in the Arab World. UCSB has two of the best experts on Egypt and Tunisia in the US to provide perspective on recent events. Both have done extensive research in Egypt and Tunisia.
Juan E. Campo specializes on Islam in Religious Studies. He is a past EAP Director in Cairo and a frequent visitor to Egypt. He is the current Acting UCSB EAP Director.
Nancy Gallagher is a professor of Modern Middle East History. She has published widely on both modern Tunisian and Egyptian history. She has been nominated to become the UC EAP Director in Cairo.
hm 1/31/11

"A Republic Amidst the Stars": political astronomy and the intellectual origins of the stars and stripes
2011-02-04 00:00
Eran Shalev, a historian of the early republic at the university of haifa, Rome rebornon western shores: historical imagination and the creation of the american
republic (charlottesville: university of virginia press, 2009).
His talk will demonstrate how throughout the republic’s history, the configuration
of the state-as-star and the consequent image of the united states as a
“new constellation” provided a powerful and overlooked vocabulary to
articulate and express Americans’ shifting attitudes toward, and
understanding of their federal republic.
Shalev is a powerful thinker and an engaging speaker. and a light
lunch will be served!
hm 1/29/11

Alea iacta est and all that: Game Theory and Caesar at the Rubicon
2011-02-07 00:00
Robert Morstein-Marx is Professor of Classics at UCSB.
This event is sponsored by the Ancient Mediterranean Studies program and the Ancient Borderlands Research Focus Group.
jwil 05.I.2011

Magic and Religion in Ancient Corinth
2011-02-08 00:00
Located at the narrowest part of the Greek peninsula and controlling land and sea traffic in all four directions, Corinth became famous as one of the greatest commercial centers in the ancient world. Her mighty rock fortress of Acrocorinth also made her almost impervious to attack. Corinth was a prime player in all the important historical events of antiquity, succumbing at one point to destruction by the Roman armies in 146 B.C. and abandonment for roughly a century. Revived by Julius Caesar, Corinth became a provincial capital and once again a thriving center of trade and culture, attracting a large and diverse population of Italians, Egyptians, Jews, Syrians, and many others.
From at least as early as legendary times Corinth also had a reputation as a center for magic and the occult. The city was the venue for some of the most striking adventures of the most notorious witch in Greece, Medea. Many tales about ghosts, haunted houses, the supernatural, and monsters were set in Corinth. Excavations by the American School of Classical Studies have revealed a “cell” where black magic was practiced at night high up on the slopes of Acrocorinth in the Sanctuary of Demeter and Persephone. It was established at roughly the same time as St. Paul’s famous Christian mission to Corinth in the middle of the first century after Christ.
This lecture will present some of the special magical equipment used in these secret activities, as well as the texts incised on lead tablets carrying curses that were deposited in this shrine. Named individuals are singled out for destruction and merit special attention because both writers and targets of many are women.
Ronald Stroud is Klio Distinguished Professor of Classical Languages and Literature Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley.
jwil 29.vii.2010

The Evolution of Arab- and Muslim-American Activism in the Post-9/11 Decade
2011-02-09 00:00
The talk is sponsored by the Center for Cold War Studies and International History (CCWS) and cosponsored by the Department of History.
The event is free and open to the public. A brief reception will follow Dr. Ibish’s presentation.
Please join us for this exciting event!
Hussein Ibish will discuss Arab- and Muslim-American activism after September 11, 2001. He will address immediate reactions to the terrorist attacks, examining how the communities coped with various kinds of fallout and backlash and organized politically in response. He will also consider the longer-term ramifications for Arab and Muslim Americans’ political and community organizing, and the prospects for their empowerment and integration into the American social, cultural, and political scene. Finally, Dr. Ibish will look at the rise of Islamophobia and anti-Arab racism in the broader American cultural and political discourse, and responses to it from various sources.
Hussein Ibish is a Senior Fellow at the American Task Force on Palestine (ATFP) and Executive Director of the Hala Salaam Maksoud Foundation for Arab-American Leadership. Dr. Ibish has made thousands of radio and television appearances and has written for many newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and the Chicago Tribune. He was the Washington, DC Correspondent for the Daily Star (Beirut). Dr. Ibish is editor and principal author of three major studies of hate crimes and discrimination against Arab Americans and the author of numerous articles on Middle Eastern politics, U.S. policy, civil liberties, and Arab-American life. His most recent book is “What’s Wrong with the One-State Agenda? Why Ending the Occupation and Peace with Israel is Still the Palestinian National Goal” (ATFP, 2009).
hm 1/29/11

The Politics of Heritage from Madras to Chennai.
2011-02-10 00:00
Discussant: Prof. Amit Ahuja, Political Science, UCSB
The Politics of Heritage from Madras to Chennai examines the dynamics of public memory in the southern Indian city of Chennai, a former colonial port that now hosts new economic ventures such as software engineering, back office services and export processing. Over the past two decades of neoliberal globalization, state and municipal authorities have launched new efforts to attract investment and consumption through regulatory changes and by fashioning a heritage-conscious cityscape. Working from specific sites (museums, temples, vernacular architecture projects and memorials), Hancock grapples with the question of how people in Chennai remember, represent and debate their past, considering the political and economic contexts and implications of those memory practices.
Mary Hancock is Professor in the Departments of History and Anthropology at UCSB, where she teaches courses on public memory, religion and the anthropology of space and place. She earned her PhD n Anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania, and is the author of The Politics of Memory from Madras to Chennai, as well as numerous articles that have appeared in Modern Asian Studies, American Ethnologist, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, and the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research.
Amit Ahuja, Assistant Professor of Political Science, UCSB, conducts research on the participation and mobilization of marginalized ethnic groups. His interests are located in the areas of ethnic politics, political development, security studies, and South Asia.
Download chapters from the Book: Chapters 1 and 4 from the
RFG Identity website.
Chapter 1 provides background information and we will focus our discussion on Chapter 4.
Sponsored by RFG Identity.
hm 1/30/11

Painting the People’s Court: Art and Democracy in Postwar Japan
2011-02-11 00:00
This paper introduces the work of a group of miner-artists at a coal mine in northern Japan, as an exampleof how art and other forms of cultural expression became vehicles for building new forms of democratic
subjectivity after the end of WWII. The miner-artists’ vision was but one of a multiplicity of visions that
jostled and jockeyed in the dispersed cultural environment of the early postwar, but their efforts to represent
and memorialize an important moment in their recent history can be seen as part of a broad movement
among ordinary people to participate in the formation of their own culture and lay claim to the franchise of
authorship.
hm 2/9/11

What's the Matter with Marriage? Some Early Christian Answers
2011-02-14 00:00
Abstract forthcoming.
Elizabeth Clark is John Kilgo Carlisle Professor of Religion and Professor of History at Duke University.
This event is sponsored by the Ancient Mediterranean Studies program and the Ancient Borderlands Research Focus Group.
jwil 05.I.2011

Language Vitality in Southern Mexico: Histories of Forced Relocations
2011-02-14 00:00
From the mid 1950s to the late 1980s, thousand of indigenous people -particularly Mazatecos and Chinantecos – were relocated from their towns in the state of Oaxaca to the state of Veracruz, to make way for two large dams. There is no record of how many families where relocated, and only few anthropological accounts followed these processes, They all agreed in describing these relocations as ethnocidal, and that the languages were in risk of disappearing. Half a century after the relocations, contrary to what was predicted, we find linguistic communities of Mazatecos, Chinantecos, Nahuas and Zapotecos in the region of southern Veracruz. Due to their lack of territory, language has become a determinant factor in the reproduction of identity and the social, economical and political organization of these communities. In this presentation we discus some of these communities and the conditions under which their languages have persisted.
hm 2/7/11, 2/13

Solvang Past and Present
2011-02-16 00:00
Solvang’s particular Danishness has evolved in step with the American twentieth- and twenty-first centuries. An emphasis on tourism has both preserved and distorted the heritage that fueled the community’s origin. By looking at the details of Solvang’s architecture and objects, we learn what lures recreational shoppers from around the world. Interviews with Solvang’s residents reveal points of view on a cultural production that packages Danish traditions with a dependence on a Latino workforce. Esther Jacobsen Bates will discuss the history of Solvang and how it became the Danish enclave it is today. Ethan Turpin will share short films on his hometown and what he learned in the process of documenting its cultural space.See Solvang presentation page.
Sponsored by the IHC’s Local Places and Geographies of Place series.
About the Local Places Series
How did Solvang become Danish? How did Santa Barbara become California’s first Hollywood? How did Isla Vista become home to one of the most distinguished artists’ presses? Join the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center as we delve into these and other fascinating regional histories in our talks on Local Places.
For more information, please visit: http://www.ihc.ucsb.edu/series/local-places/

The Career and Influence of Apple Computer's CEO, Steve Jobs
2011-02-17 00:00
When Apple Computer recently announced that CEO Steve Jobs wastaking a medical leave, its stock dropped 5 per cent in one day and
pundits began to speculate about the company’s future. How did the
fate of a multi-billion dollar enterprise come to rest so heavily on the
health of a single individual? Join us February 17 as local author Daniel
Alef tells the fascinating story of one of America’s most intriguing and
complex business leaders. Since he co-founded Apple, Steve Jobs has
led an evolution in American technology and culture that has affected
the way Americans think, write, and communicate; the way we buy
and listen to music, even our concept of animated films. Daniel Alef
will describe the defining moments and events in Jobs’ life and attempt
to pierce the iron veil that accounts for his mystique.
Daniel Alef is an award-winning novelist, author and former
syndicated columnist. In addition to his novel, Pale Truth
(named Book-of-the-Year in general fiction by Foreword
magazine at BEA in 2000), the former lawyer and CEO is
the author of articles ranging from the Journal of Taxation to
American Biography, a book on tax law, and more than 300
biographical profiles of America’s great titans of fortune. He is
also a contributor to Sage Publishing’s just released Gender &
Women’s Leadership: A Reference Handbook. A member of the
History Associates Board of Directors, Alef received his J.D. from UCLA Law School
and an LL.M. from the London School of Economics and Political Science. He did
post-graduate work at Cambridge University (Queen’s College). He is also one of the
head coaches (senseis) of the UCSB Judo Club.
$20 (HA members and guests) $23 (non-members)
For more information or to reserve your spot, call (805) 617-0998.
This event is sponsored by UCSB’s History Associates.
Since 1987, UCSB History Associates has brought together community members and UCSB faculty through an annual program of history-focused lectures, lunches, and tours. The History Associates raise money to support graduate training in History at UCSB. Support from the History Associates makes an essential contribution to the success of our graduate students.
hm 2/5/11, 2/7

A Long Strange Trip: The State and the Market for Mortgage Securitization, 1968-2010
2011-02-18 00:00
Please join us for a talk by NEIL FLIGSTEIN, Sociology, UC Berkeley. “A Long Strange Trip: The State and the Market for Mortgage Securitization, 1968-2010.” Fligstein is the author of Markets, Politics, and Globalization (1997) and The Architecture of Markets: An Economic Sociology of Capitalist Societies (2002). His current work evaluates how policies in the 1980s and 1990s to “maximize shareholder value” effected the organization of American industries and working conditions.
The talk, and subsequent discussion, is part of the History 294: Colloquium in Work, Labor, and Political Economy, 2010-2011 lecture series.
The Winter Quarter topic is “The Financial Crisis and its Origins.”
The Colloquium meets on Friday, February 18 at 1 p.m. in 4041 Humanities and Social Science Building.
jmj 01/03/2011

Galileo's Middle Finger: Struggles of Science and Identity Politics in the Internet Age
2011-02-18 00:00
Dear friends of Lawrence Badash and members of the community,
The UCSB Center for Science and Society is pleased to announce the second annual Lawrence Badash Lecture. The Badash Lecture honors a scholar of science and society whose work has advanced not only the history of science, but also the larger aims of social justice, civil liberties, peace and disarmament, public health, or environmental protection.
The first annual Badash Lecture, held in 2010, honored Gregg Mitman,
Director of the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the
University of Wisconsin. This year’s address will be given by Alice
Domurat Dreger, Professor of Clinical Medical Humanities and Bioethics
in the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University. Please
join us for this exciting event.
Abstract:
This talk explores the nature of contemporary scientific controversies
regarding human identity. We will consider several case studies
(including one involving UCSB emeritus professor Napoloen Chagnon) to
parse out the similarities and differences among these cases, and to
consider what scientists and identity activists can do to more
effectively engage in productive, fair dialogue. The speaker
approaches this topic as an historian of science and medicine who has
been studying this issue as part of a Guggenheim book project, but
also as someone who has been an advocate in the intersex rights
movement and as someone who has been subject to scathing criticisms by
some transgender rights advocates for her historical scholarship.
About the Speaker:
Alice Dreger is Professor of Clinical Medical Humanities and Bioethics
in the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University, and a
Guggenheim Fellow. Her books include *Hermaphrodites and the Medical
Invention of Sex* and *One of Us: Conjoined Twins and the Future of
Normal* (both from Harvard University Press). She served as Chair of
the Board of the Intersex Society of North America (ISNA) for seven
years. Dr. Dreger’s essays on science, medicine, and life have
appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the
Washington Post, and the Chicago Tribune. In 2009, W. W. Norton
selected her essay, “Lavish Dwarf Entertainment,” for inclusion in its
annual Best Creative Non-Fiction volume. She has appeared on numerous
broadcasts as an expert on sex, including on HBO, CNN, the Oprah
Winfrey Show, and Savage Love. Dr. Dreger is a regular blogger for
Psychology Today and a contributor to the Hastings Center’s Bioethics
Forum. More information is available at her personal website,
alicedreger.com.
About Larry Badash:
Professor Emeritus Larry Badash passed away in 2010 after a 36-year
teaching and research career at UCSB. A specialist in the history of
physics and nuclear weapons, Larry was the author of seven books and
dozens of articles. He was also a popular mentor, avid outdoorsman,
and community activist who worked for civil liberties and
environmental protection. For more about Larry’s life and
accomplishments, please see:
SB Independent obituary, Sept. 2010
This event is hosted by the UCSB Center for Science and Society, and
cosponsored by the UCSB departments of Anthropology and Feminist
Studies.
hm 1/25/11

4th Annual Ask-A-Vet Forum
2011-02-23 00:00
A panel of UCSB student veterans will participate in this event, now in its fourth year. The students will discuss their experiences in the armed forces, including service in Iraq and Afghanistan, and their transition to university life. This event is sponsored by Student Veterans at UCSB, a non-partisan student group sponsored by the Office of Student Life. Professor John Lee from the Department of History will serve as moderator for the forum.
jwil 15.ii.2011

Migrant Rights and Migrant Melodrama, or Elvira Arellano as Suffering Mother and Evil Mother, Criminal and Saint
2011-02-24 00:00
Date: Thursday, Feb. 24th from 5:00-6:00 p.m.Location: 2nd Floor conference room, #2135, Social Sciences and
Media Studies building
Abstract of Talk:
Ana Elena Puga trains a theater/performance studies lens on the
struggle to control public perception of undocumented migrant rights
activist Elvira Arellano, who was deported in 2007. Puga coins the
term “migrant melodrama” to describe how key media coverage,
cultural production, and social performance in Arellano’s case
recycled and deployed tropes from nineteenth-century melodrama.
Migrant melodrama was used by Arellano herself, as well as by both
supporters and detractors of the single mother, who sought
sanctuary in a Chicago church together with her US-born son. Can
melodramatic spectacles of suffering insist on a common humanity
and make ethical claims for inclusion into an imagined community?
Yet can they also backfire by setting the price of inclusion at an
impossibly high level of virtue?
Bio of Speaker:
Ana Puga’s current book project, Desperate Acts: Melodrama and
Spectacles of Suffering in the Performance of Migration,
interrogates the reliance on melodrama in late twentieth and
twenty-first century artistic and social performances featuring
undocumented migrants from Latin America, especially women and
children. Desperate Acts shows how performances that involve
suffering migrant bodies often re-circulate nineteenth-century
melodramatic tropes from race, domestic, and sensation melodramas,
asking how those tropes circumscribe contemporary political agency.
Puga is the author of Memory, Allegory, and Testimony in South
American Theatre: Upstaging Dictatorship (Routledge 2008) and
translator, with Mónica Núñez-Parra, of Finished from the Start and
other Plays, an anthology of six works by Chilean playwright Juan
Radrigán (Northwestern University Press 2008). Puga has published
articles in Latin American Theatre Review and Theatre Journal,
among other journals. She co-founded LaMicro Theatre, dedicated to
the staging of contemporary Spanish, Latin American and US Latino
plays in English and bilingual productions.
hm 2/21/11; jwil 22.ii.2011
