HOLIDAY - Presidents' Day
2016-02-15

Beyond Hebrew: Zionism and the Politics of Multilingualism in Palestine, 1920-1948
2016-02-17 17:00 - 18:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | HSSB 3041, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Event Description:
The promotion of modern Hebrew as a spoken vernacular is often viewed as a central accomplishment of the Zionist movement in Palestine before Israeli statehood. But by viewing twentieth-century history through the lens of language, author Liora Halperin questions the common narrative of a Zionist move away from multilingualism during the years following World War I. She demonstrates how Jews in Palestine remained connected by both preference and necessity to a world of languages outside the boundaries of the pro-Hebrew community even as many of them promoted Hebrew and achieved that language’s dominance.
The story of language encounters in the Jewish community of Palestine is a fascinating tale of shifting power relationships, both locally and globally. Halperin’s absorbing study explores how a young national community was compelled to modify demands for Hebrew exclusivity as it negotiated its relationships with its diverse Jewish population, Palestinian Arabs, the British, and others outside the margins of the national project and ultimately came to terms with the limitations of its influence and power in an interconnected world.

About the Speaker:
Liora R. Halperin is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History and the Program in Jewish Studies and the holder of the Endowed Professorship in Israel/Palestine Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, where she has taught since 2013. Her research focuses on Jewish cultural history, Jewish-Arab relations in Ottoman and Mandate Palestine, language ideology and policy, and the politics surrounding nation formation in Palestine in the years leading up to the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. She is also a member of the advisory board for CU’s Archive of Post-Holocaust American Judaism, and affiliated faculty in Middle Eastern Studies at the CU Center for Asian Studies.

Sponsored by the Center for Middle East Studies and Jewish Studies at UCSB.

Desmond King, "When the State Stops: The Unruly Demise of Federal Civil Rights Activism"
2016-02-19 13:00 - 15:00 | HSSB 4041, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Professor Desmond King is the author Making Americans: Immigration, Race, and the Origins of Diverse Democracy (Harvard University Press, 2002) and co-author (with Lawrence Jacobs) of Fed Power: The Federal Reserve and the Great Recession (forthcoming).

Probing "Presence": Photography and Policing in Colonial South Africa
2016-02-23 14:00 - 15:00 | SSMS 2135, 2135 Social Sciences and Media Studies Building, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
TALK:
Lorena Rizzo (University of Bielefeld & Harvard University)
Probing “Presence” – Photography and Policing in Colonial South Africa
The presentation starts from research conducted in the Western Cape Archives in 2012/3. While working on a collection of photographic albums produced in a Cape Town convict station in the late 19th and early 20th century, I came across a pair of photographs portraying a convict who bore my surname. I use this archival coincidence or curiosity as an entry point into a methodological and theoretical discussion of the status of photography as a historical source and its appeal as a medium to genealogical research and memory studies. While revisiting some of the classical texts on photography, among them Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida, this paper focuses on Eelco Runia’s notion of “presence.” In sum, it examines some of the ways in which historical photographs resonate with contemporary negotiations of the past in South Africa.

The talk is sponsored by the IHC’s African Studies Research Focus Group, History (Research Cluster Empires, Borderlands, and their Legacies), History of Art and Architecture, Film and Media Studies.
Event Flyer

Book Launch and Signing: James F. Brooks, Mesa of Sorrows: A History of the Awat'ovi Massacre
2016-02-23 19:00 - 20:00 | Chaucer Books, 3321 State Street, Santa Barbara, CA, 93105, United States
On Tuesday, February 23, 2016, Chaucer Books in Santa Barbara will be hosted a book launch/signing for James F. Brooks’ new monograph, Mesa of Sorrows: A History of the Awat’ovi Massacre.

For additional information on Mesa of Sorrows, please visit the following URL: http://books.wwnorton.com/books/Mesa-of-Sorrows/

Holly Roose: 3rd Annual Van Gelderen Graduate Student Lecture
2016-02-28 12:30 - 15:00 | Alumni Hall, Mosher Alumni Center, UCSB, Santa Barbara , CA, 93106, United States
On February 28, the UCSB History Associates present the 3rd annual Van Gelderen Lecture shocasing graduate student Holly Roose who will talk about her doctoral dissertation:
“Once you go Black you got to go back: Multicultural Garveyism in the Far West”
About our Speaker:
Holly Roose has recently completed her doctoral dissertation and will receive her degree soon. In 2015, she won a campus-wide Graduate Student Association Teaching Prize and also received the History Department’s Outstanding TA Award.
Lecture Background:
Between 1916 and 1925, Marcus Garvey created the largest Black nationalist movement in world history, in in the American West his work linked up with other such movements in ways that have gone unstudied by scholars.
Once you go “Black” (that is, become interested in the issues of race, Blackness, and current social issues), you have to go “Back” (become knowledgeable about the U.S.’s shared racial history and dynamics to under-stand our contemporary experiences). “Black Lives Matter” and the violence visited upon on the bodies of Black men and women are not new social phenomena, but have deep roots in the nation’s foundations. These issues must be examined by investigating their origins, paths of continuity, and impacts which flow down from that history. One of the most fruitful areas lies in the nature of Black identity and the articulation of the ob-jectives of racial progress that emerged from the con-cept of Black nationalism as conceived in the early 20th century. These were central to the Civil Rights and Black Power movements of the mid 1950s through the 1970s.
Luncheon
A luncheon of bbq beef and chicken will be served at 12:30 pm in the Alumni Hall on the plaza level (second floor) of the Mosher Alumni House. The Alumni House is at the entrance road for Campbell Hall, next to con-venient parking ($3 on weekends).
Campus map available at: http://www.tps.ucsb.edu/mapFlash.aspx
RSVP
Please see attached flyer and send in your reservation.
Cost
$10 for graduate students, $20 for History Associates members and their guests, and $25 for non-members.

Samir Sonti, "The Price of Prosperity: Inflation and the Making of American Inequality"
2016-03-04 13:00 - 15:00 | HSSB 4041, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Samir Sonti is completing a dissertation on the politics of inflation in the United States from the 1930s to the 1980s.

Last Day of Winter 2016 Quarter
2016-03-18
View full academic calendar: https://registrar.sa.ucsb.edu/cal2016.aspx

Shape Shifters: Journeys Across Terrains of Race and Identity
2016-03-18 - 2016-03-20
Conference, Shape Shifters: Journeys Across Terrains of Race and Identity, to be held in UCSB’s McCune Conference Center, March 18-20. Forty scholars from three continents will be on hand.

Conference Website
Conference Poster

Speakers
Please join us for two public lectures in the McCune Conference Room (HSSB 6020):

Friday, March 18, 9:30-10:30, Paul Spickard of UCSB’s History Department will present “Not Passing—Shape Shifting: Reflections on Racial Plasticity”
Saturday, March 19, 1:15-2:00, Angelica Pesarini of Lancaster University’s Sociology Department will present “‘You were too white! I was ashamed!’ Interstitial Negotiations of Blackness in Fascist East Africa”

About
We are accustomed to thinking of identities—racial, ethnic, national, gendered, religious—as if they were permanent, essential, unalterable features of individuals and groups. A is Black, B is Jewish, C is Chinese, and so are all of the members of their respective families and kin groups, and so must they remain. Over the last couple of decades, theorists have begun to posit hybrid identities, betwixt and between received categories. But still they have pictured these hybrids as more or less static entities in a middle zone. In a new development, quite recently, some scholars have begun to see such identities as at least sometimes fluid, ambiguous, contingent, multiple, and malleable. Those are the scholars who will inhabit this conference.
The people about whom these scholars write, whose lives are the subject of this conference and this book, are shape shifters. At different times in their lives, or over generations in their families, as they have moved from one social context to another, or as new social contexts have been imposed on them, their identities have changed from one group to another. This is not racial, ethnic, or religious imposture. It is simply the way that people’s lives have unfolded in fluid social circumstances.
Among the kinds of forces that have created such fluid social circumstances are migration, borderlands, trade, warfare, occupation, colonial imposition, the creation and dissolution of states and empires, shifting national and imperial boundaries, and forcible removal of peoples from their homelands. Each of the stories told in this conference and in this book is intrinsically fascinating. Each also illuminates the ways that individuals have lived their lives and negotiated their social positions amidst one or more of these major forces of social change. We want to understand what happens in the lives of such shape shifters, and what are the varieties of work that this shape shifting is doing.

First Day of Spring 2016 Quarter
2016-03-28

American History & Institutions Exam
2016-03-29 11:00 - 14:00 | HSSB 3038
Alternative way of satisfying UCSB AH & I GE requirement.
Those students interested in taking the exam must contact the HIST undergraduate advisor, Monica I. Garcia, to obtain the reading list for the exam a minimum of two weeks prior to the exam date.
migarcia@hfa.ucsb.edu HSSB 4036

“Crafting Gendered Notions of Intimacy: Indian ‘Coolie’ Households in British Malaya and the Colonial Construction of ‘Everyday Violence’
2016-04-04 17:00 - 18:30 | HSSB 4020, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Lecture by
Dr. Arunima Datta
Dr. Arunima Datta received her PhD in 2015 in Southeast Asian history from the National University of Singapore. She is currently a post-doctoral Fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore and Assistant Editor of the Journal of Malayan Branch of the Asiatic Society. She has published several articles related to her dissertation, “Life Beyond Dependency and Victimhood: Indian Coolie Women on Rubber Estates of Colonial Malaya (1900-1945), most recently in Women’s History Review.

Robin and Robert Jones present "Refugees on the Greek Island of Lesbos"
2016-04-14 14:00 - 15:30 | McCune Conference Room (HSSB 6020), Humanities and Social Sciences Bldg, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
On Thursday, April 14th at 2pm in HSSB 6020, Robin and Robert Jones will speak about their experiences working with refugees landing on the Greek island of Lesbos.
Their presentation is co-sponsored by the History Department, the Center for Middle East Studies, and the Argyropoulos Hellenic Studies Endowment.
Robin and Robert Jones live part of their year on the Greek island of Lesbos, which is a major landing area for desperate refugees from war-torn Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq. The refugees arrive in rubber rafts, crossing the strait from Turkey, under harrowing conditions; many die en route.
Robin (center) greets a family waiting at a transit station. Women and children composed 50 percent of all refugees who fled to Europe by sea in 2015.
The Jones’ have put together a photographic exhibit of the refugees – their arrival and living conditions – and the children’s drawings, along with a PowerPoint presentation documenting this world event. They were intimately involved in providing assistance and support and now they want to tell the refugees’ stories.
It is a story that needs to be told, and puts a very human face on what otherwise is, for most people, a five minute clip on the news. It also provides an important counterpoint to the “immigrant as terrorist” narrative that dominates the news these days.

You can read more about Robin and Robert in the Independent: http://www.independent.com/news/2016/mar/10/horror-and-hope-lesbos/

"The Journey: Domestic Violence Legislation in Ghana" by Prof. Akosua Adomako Ampofo
2016-04-15 15:00 - 16:30 | HSSB 4020, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Daily, all over the world, women and children (especially) are abused by intimate partners and family members, friends and colleagues. While a legal infrastructure and legal responses will not end gender-based violence (GBV) and domestic violence (DV), they can provide reliefs for survivors of violence. They can serve as spaces from which GBV and DV can be discussed and explained, as well where advocacy can occur. This talk chronicles the journey traveled by women’s rights advocates for the passage of DV legislation in Ghana. The advocates faced considerable resistance but also built strong alliances and learned about effective methods of strategizing among different constituencies helpful in other areas of struggle. They learned more about “deconstructing” notions of GBV. The lessons learned in Ghana suggest strategies for mobilizing and advocacy that are useful for women and men globally, including the United States.
Professor Akosua Adomako Ampofo, Director of the Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana, Legon, is a sociologist who has published widely on gender (including masculinities), sexuality, children and socialization, and feminism. She was the first head of the Centre for Gender Studies and Advocacy at the University of Ghana.
Organized by the IHC’s African Studies RFG, with co-sponsorship from the Hull Chair in Feminist Studies and the Department of History.

Download event flyer
See more events sponsored by the IHC’s African Studies RFG

The Just Prince and the Nation: Muslim Patriotism and the Politics of Notables in late Ottoman Egypt, 1860s - Adam Mestyan (Harvard University)
2016-04-19 17:00 - 18:30 | UCEN Santa Barbara Mission Room, University Center, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Speaker: Adam Mestyan (Harvard University)
About the Talk:
In this presentation Mestyan will argue that in nineteenth-century Ottoman Egypt the symbolic unification between the Ottoman governor (khedive) and the homeland was based on vocabularies of kingship in the Koran and in Arab-Persian-Ottoman traditions. During this process of constructing patriotism by rural men of distinction, the perceived ‘justice’ of the Muslim prince meant the local elite’s participation in state affairs and in rural capitalist enterprises.
Based on archival documents, petitions to the ruler by local village notables, and Arabic political poetry and plays, this presentation also introduces the notion of Muslim patriotism as an ideological tool of legitimating power in khedivial Egypt before and during the British occupation.”

About the Presenter:
Adam Mestyan is a historian of the modern Middle East, specialized in cultural and social history. He has been undertaking research in various archives, especially in the Egyptian National Archives. At the moment, he is a Junior Fellow of the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. Previously, he taught at the Faculty of Oriental Studies at Oxford University and was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the “Europe in the Middle East – the Middle East in Europe” program of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (Institute of Advanced Studies). He holds a PhD in History from the Central European University and another PhD in Art Theory from the Eotvos Lorand University (both in Budapest). His articles were published in the International Journal of Middle East Studies, the Journal of Semitic Philology, Die Welt des Islams, and Muqarnas. His first book, Arab Patriotism – The Ideology and Culture of Power in Modern Egypt is forthcoming at Princeton University Press.
Sponsored by the Center for Middle East Studies

"Survivors into Minorities: Armenians in Post-Genocide Turkey" with Lerna Ekmekcioglu (MIT)
2016-04-20 17:00 - 18:30 | HSSB 4020, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Speaker:
Lerna Ekmekcioglu is McMillan-Stewart Associate Professor of History at Massachusetts Institute of Technology where she is also affiliated with Women and Gender Studies Program. She specializes on Turkish and Armenian lands in the beginning of the 20th century and the history of Armenian feminism. In 2006 she co-edited a volume in Turkish about the first five Armenian feminists of the Ottoman Empire and Turkish Republic. Her most recent book, Recovering Armenia: The Limits of Belonging in Post-Genocide Turkey, came out from Stanford University Press in early 2016.
About the Talk
This talk follows the trajectories of the survivors of the 1915 Armenian Genocide who remained inside Turkish borders after the signing of the 1918 Mudros Armistice (and during the Allied occupation years of Istanbul) and after the 1923 establishment of the new country as the Turkish Republic. How did the Kemalist state treat the remaining Armenians? What were Armenians’ responses to the new (but also old) Turkish regime? I will discuss multiple strategies Armenians –including feminist Armenians– improvised in order to cohabit with unapologetic perpetrators and survive the new Turkey.

Farina Mir: "Reconsidering Modernity in an Indian Vernacular: Punjabi Literature and the Writing of Colonial History"
2016-04-21 16:00 - 18:00 | SSMS 2135, Social Sciences and Media Studies Building, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
FARINA MIR
University of Michigan, Associate Professor of History
KAPANY ENDOWMENT VISITING LECTURE SERIES
About the Talk
This talk considers the literary history of one Indian vernacular tradition, Punjabi, to interrogate assumptions about the temporality of literary history embedded in today’s normative mode of writing the history of literature, assumptions critically linked to notions of modernity. Identifying at least two types of temporality in existing literary history, an even temporality, on the one hand, and one that emphasizes rupture, on the other it argues for the adoption of a third mode: “lumpy time”, a concept drawn from the work of sociologist William Sewell. The broader aim of the talk is to show how assessments of modernity in literary history mirror a broader tension in South Asian historiography between indigenous agency and colonialism.
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“The Visual Archive: Ho-Chunk Cultural Performance, Modern Labor, and Survivance in Wisconsin, 1879-1960.”
2016-04-22 14:00 - 16:00 | HSSB 4020, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
This presentation explores the intersections of photographic images, family history, tourism, and Ho-Chunk survivance through an examination of two photographic collections housed at the Wisconsin Historical Society: the Charles Van Schaick Collection and the H.H. Bennett Collection. The Van Schaick collection includes nearly taken between 1879-1936, and the H.H. Bennett Collection is comprised of hundreds of images of tribal members taken from 1865-1960. Also contained within the Bennett Collection are film reels of the Stand Rock Indian Ceremonial, a major tourist attraction that employed tribal members in Wisconsin Dells, WI from the 1920s through the 1960s. The stories that these images convey of the importance of kinship, place, modern labor, cultural performance, settler colonialism, and survivance are the central themes of the Ho-Chunk experience in the 20th century, and my presentation will address these intersecting themes and the ongoing meanings that these images have for contemporary tribal citizens.
Amy Lonetree, a member of The Public Historian editorial board, is author of Decolonizing Museums: Representing Native America in National and Tribal Museums (University of North Carolina Press, 2012), and co-editor with Amanda Cobb of The National Museum of the American Indian: Critical Conversations (University of Nebraska Press, 2008).
Sponsored by the UCSB Public History Program, the Department of Anthropology, and the Department of History.
Lonetree Poster for the event flyer.

"Was the Rise of Islam a Black Swan Event?" Michael Cook, 2016 R. Stephen Humphreys Distinguished Visiting Scholar
2016-05-02 17:00 - 18:30 | McCune Conference Room (HSSB 6020), Humanities and Social Sciences Bldg, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
A Black Swan Event is by definition a highly improbable happening with a massive impact. No one questions the impact of rise of Islam, but just how improbable was it? Two of its central features look very unlikely against the background of earlier history: the appearance among the Arabs of a new
monotheistic religion, and the formation of a powerful state in Arabia. Does that add up to two Black Swans, or do they cancel out?
Michael Cook is the Class of 1943 University Professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. He is the author of Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong in Islamic Thought and A Brief History of the Human Race, among other books, and he is also the general editor of The New Cambridge History of Islam.
Sponsored by the Center for Middle East Studies, R. Stephen Humphreys Distinguished
Lecture Series
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Wolfenden's Witnesses: Making Sense of Homosexuality in Postwar Britain
2016-05-03 15:30 - 17:00 | HSSB 4202, 4202 Humanities and Social Sciences Building, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Brian Lewis, Professor of History at McGill University, Montreal will be giving a lecture related to his recently published book Wolfenden’s Witnesses: Homosexuality in Postwar Britain (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. In addition to two other books, Professor Lewis has published two collections of essays on British Queer History. He is currently writing a study of sexologist and criminologist George Ives, tentatively titled Greek to the Soul: George Ives and Homosexuality in Britain from Wilde to Wolfenden.

Senior Honors Seminar Informational Meeting
2016-05-04 14:00 - 15:30 | HSSB 4020, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
The Senior Honors Seminar is a two-quarter seminar for majors in History, History of Public Policy, and Medieval Studies to be held in fall 2016 and winter 2017.
The informational meeting for interested and eligible students is scheduled for Wednesday, May 4th from 2-3:30 pm in HSSB 4020. Please contact Prof. Hilary Bernstein at bernstein@history.ucsb.edu with any questions.

2016 Annual Medieval Studies Program Conference: "Gender & Religious Practice in the Middle Ages"
2016-05-07 09:00 - 16:00 | McCune Conference Room (HSSB 6020), Humanities and Social Sciences Bldg, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Keynote talk:
“Men in Women’s Monasteries: Nuns’ Priests in the Central Middle Ages”
by Fiona Griffiths,
Professor of History at Stanford University
The Medieval Studies Program would like to invite you to join us for our annual conference, May 7, 2016.
The theme of this year’s conference is “Gender and Religious Practice in the Middle Ages.” There will be a keynote talk from Fiona Griffiths, Associate Professor of History at Stanford University, entitled “Men in Women’s Religious Spaces in the Central Middle Ages.”
Additionally, a number of students from the department will be presenting at or moderating panels. Attached please find a flyer advertising the event, along with a schedule of speakers. Please also note that there will also be a reception following the conference.
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Seeking Peace Amid Violence: Professor James F. Brooks to Speak on Awat'ovi Massacre
2016-05-11 19:00 - 20:00 | Alhecama Theatre, 914 Santa Barbara Street, Santa Barbara, CA, 93101, United States
Modern Americans love thinking that the Hopi people of the Southwest represent the epitome of peacefulness. But in the year 1700, in the populous village of Awat’ovi, Hopi slaughtered Hopi by the hundreds in a predawn raid, showering crushed red pepper, fire, and arrows into subterranean kivas while kidnapping the women and children who survived. This massacre is well documented, but UCSB history and anthropology professor James Brooks wanted to find out why, and whether the tragic incident resonates in today’s world.
James Brooks will speak about Mesa of Sorrows at the Alhecama Theatre (914 Santa Barbara St.) on Wednesday, May 11, at 7 p.m. in an event hosted by the S.B. Trust for Historic Preservation and the UCSB History Associates. Free for members; $10 otherwise.
Read more @ http://www.independent.com/news/2016/may/02/finding-peace-amid-hopi-violence/

Talk by Neil Maher: Cold War Star Wars: The New Left and the Space Race During the Vietnam War
2016-05-13 11:00 - 12:45 | HSSB 4020, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
In the mid-1960s, NASA began building space technologies for the war in Vietnam. Students from the New Left vigorously protested against the space agency, which responded in the early 1970s by scrapping several of its military projects and instead developing satellites that could collect useful ecological data on natural resources around the world. Soon scientists, engineers, and politicians from Latin America, Africa, and Asia—including even Vietnam—were cooperating with the U.S. government to acquire satellite data about their countries’ natural resources. The Soviets did similarly with their own space technology and developing communist nations. The result was a more subtle, but still hegemonic, superpower rivalry
Neil M. Maher is Associate Professor in the Federated History Department at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and Rutgers University at Newark, where he teaches environmental history and political history. He has published widely in academic and has edited a collection of essays by historians, scientists, and policy analysts titled New Jersey’s Environments: Past, Present, and Future (Rutgers University Press, 2006). His first monograph, Nature’s New Deal: The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Roots of the American Environmental Movement (Oxford University Press, 2008), received the Charles A. Weyerhaeuser Book Award for the best monograph in conservation history. He has recently completed his second book, tentatively titled Ground Control: How Apollo Scrubbed the Age of Aquarius (Harvard University Press, 2017), which will examine how efforts to put humans on the Moon influenced the social and political movements of the “long 1960s.”
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"The Calorie, Development, and War in Mandate Palestine, 1915-1945"
2016-05-15 13:30 - 15:00 | Santa Barbara Mission Archive Library,, 2201 Laguna Street, Santa Barbara, United States
Sherene Seikaly
Event Description:
This talk explores British economic policy in the Middle East in general and Palestine specifically during WWII. Scholarly depictions have focused on the importance of measuring and realizing economic growth. This analysis looks instead at the construction and provision of basic needs during times of scarcity. It shows how British officials sought to realize economy through new technologies such as the calorie and the emerging science of nutrition. Far from an imperative to rationalize the colonized body, this effort was born of the exigencies of war. British colonial officials introduced new conceptions of development, poverty, health, and productivity throughout the war. Their failures reveal the politics of basic needs. They also show how paradigms such as colonial development and sciences like nutrition promised the universal but instead enforced and were constituted by exclusion.
About the Speaker:
Sherene Seikaly is Assistant Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the editor of the Arab Studies Journal, co-founder and co-editor of Jadaliyya e-zine, and an editor of Journal of Palestine Studies. Her book, Men of Capital: Scarcity and Economy in Mandate Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2016) explores how Palestinian capitalists and British colonial officials used economy to shape territory, nationalism, the home, and the body. She has published in academic journals such as International Journal of Middle East Studies and Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies and several online venues.
RSVP:
This event is free, but please download the event flyer, detach the included RSVP form, fill it out, and mail to UCSB History Associates, Department of History, UCSB, 93106-9410 so we can insure that we have enough refreshments on hand.

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Film Screening/Talk: "American Umpire"
2016-05-18 19:00 - 21:00 | HSSB 6020 (McCune Room), University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Elizabeth Cobbs and James Shelley grant us a sneak preview of their forthcoming PBS documentary film, “American Umpire,” based on Prof. Cobbs’s acclaimed history book of the same name. The film recounts America’s post-World War II role as the world’s policemen and explores whether the United States can, and should, continue to play that role in the future. After screening the film, which runs for 56 minutes, Professor Cobbs and Mr. Shelley, the film’s director, will discuss the making of the documentary and engage the audience members in dialogue.
Elizabeth Cobbs is Professor and Melbern G. Glasscock Chair in American History at Texas A & M University. Her first book, The Rich Neighbor Policy: Kaiser and Rockefeller in Brazil (Yale, 1992), won the Allan Nevins Prize from the Organization of American Historians and the Stuart Bernath Prize from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. Professor Cobbs has also authored All You Need is Love: The Peace Corps and the Spirit of the 1960s (Harvard, 2000), along with works of historical fiction. Her most recent historical monograph, American Umpire (Harvard, 2013), is the inspiration for the featured documentary film.
James Shelley is the owner of Shell Studios, a San Diego-based production company that specializes in award-winning documentaries and commercial films. Having retired from a 35-year career as a global risk management executive, Shelley is now pursuing a lifelong interest in filmmaking. He is a graduate of Johns Hopkins University and of the University of California, San Diego’s video production program. He is currently pursuing his Master of Fine Arts degree in Television, Media, and Film at San Diego State University.
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History Honors Seminar Colloquium
2016-05-20 08:00 - 17:00 | HSSB 4020, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
UCSB History Department’s Annual Senior Honors Seminar Colloquium

Friday, May 20th

4020 HSSB

8:30 AM Coffee and pastries

9:00 AM Welcome

– Professor Sharon Farmer, Chair of the History Department

– Professor Debra Blumenthal, Director of 2015-16 Senior Honors Seminar

9:15 AM

Bruno Tomasini, “The Danger of Moral Necessity: The Dissolution of the Civil Rights Congress” (advisor: Professor Randy Bergstrom)

Comment: Professor Nelson Lichtenstein, History Department

9:45 AM

I-Wen (Winnie) Wang, “The New Chinese-American Baby: Chinese Birth Tourism in Southern California” (advisor: Professor Paul Spickard)

Comment: Professor Xiaojian Zhao, Department of Asian and Asian-American Studies

10:15 AM COFFEE BREAK

10:30 AM

Paola Villegas, “‘Vivimos en conflicto’: University-Induced Displacement in Isla Vista, CA” (advisor: Professor George Lipsitz, Sociology)

Comment: Professor Paul Spickard, History Department

11:00 AM

C.J. Key, “Dogwhistle Disarmament: A History of Racialized Gun Control in 20th Century America (advisor: Professor Laura Kalman)

Comment: Professor Mary Furner, History Department

11:30 – 1:00PM LUNCH BREAK

1:00 PM

Lovepreet Brah, “The Mixed Race Issue: A Curious Case of a Muslim Nawab, his Jewish Lover and the Late 19th Century Calcutta High Court” (Advisor: Professor Erika Rappaport)

Comment: Professor Mary Hancock, History Department

1:30 PM

Audrey Dalton, “The First World War in Contemporary Juvenile Fiction” (advisor: Professor Alice O’Connor)

Comment: Professor Lisa Jacobson, History Department

2:00 PM

Remy Bogna, “From Nothing to Something: Recognizing Hidden Children as Holocaust Survivors” (Advisor: Professor Harold Marcuse)

Comment: Professor Stephan Miescher, History Department

2:30 PM COFFEE BREAK

2:45 PM

Meghan Brown, “Three Million Slaves and a Celebration of Progress: Slavery and The London Great Exhibition of 1851” (Advisor: Professor John Majewski)

Comment: Professor Jeannine DeLombard, English Department

3:15 PM

Jacob Weeks, “No One Reads this Rag: Punk Rock and the Zine-Scene Dynamic” (Advisor: Professor Alice O’Connor)

Comment: Jesse Halvorsen, History Department

2016 Islamic Studies Graduate Student Conference - Identity, Memory, & Diaspora
2016-05-20 14:30 - 2016-05-22 12:30 | McCune Conference Room (HSSB 6020), Humanities and Social Sciences Bldg, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Please join the History Department for its 6th annual Islamic Studies Graduate Student Conference, beginning on May 20th and concluding on the 22nd in HSSB’s McCune Conference Room. For additional information, including the schedule of speakers, please review the conference program which is provided below.
Download the Conference Program

U.S. Senate Historian on Career Opportunities in Public History
2016-05-20 16:00 - 18:00 | HSSB 4080, 4080 Humanities and Social Sciences Building, UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Betty K. Koed is the U.S. Senate Historian and Director of the Senate Historical office. Koed earned her Ph.D. in political and public history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she also taught history and provided editorial assistance to The Public Historian. A Senate Historian, Koed supervises all historical and archival projects, provides talks and presentations to senators, staff, and the public on wide-ranging topics of Senate history, and conducts oral history interviews with former senators and staff. She oversees more than 10,000 pages of historical material on the Senate website, is senior editor of the Biographical Directory of the U.S. Congress, and provides research and reference assistance to the Senate community and the media. Her current Senate projects include online documentary histories of Senate impeachment trials and a series of oral history interviews to explore the decision-making process during the 2008-2009 financial crisis.
Some Questions Dr. Koed Will Address:

How and why did you pursue a career in public history?
What does the Senate Historian do?
What do you like the most, and the least, about your job?
As a professional public historian, how do you interact with those working in the broader historical profession?
What are the unique challenges of being a Senate historian?
What are your thoughts on the state of public history and how well that field is served by academic departments and professional organizations?
As the Senate historian, how do you define professional success?

A reception follows the session: light refreshments and libations included.

Department of History and the History Associates Annual Awards Ceremony
2016-06-01 16:00 - 17:00
The UCSB History Associates and the Department of History honor the recipients of this year’s History Associates and Department of History awards at the Annual Awards Ceremony:
Wednesday June 1, 2016 at 4:00pm
UCSB Interdisciplinary Humanities Center
McCune Conference Room Sixth floor
Humanities and Social Sciences Building
