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

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

Van Gelderen Lecture 2024 - "Protect the One Who Carries You": Amulets and Daily Life in Roman Egypt
2024-05-08 17:00 - 19:00 | HSSB 6020 (McCune Room), University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Evan Andersson will present this year’s Van Gelderen Lecture,
“‘Protect the One Who Carries You’: Amulets and Daily Life in Roman Egypt”
On Wednesday, May 8, 2024 at 5:00pm
In the McCune Room, HSSB 6020

Public History Colloquium
2024-05-10 12:00 - 13:30
Prof. Susan Burch will speak about her latest book, which has recently received the National Women’s Studies Association Alison Piepmeier Book Prize, and the Disability History Association’s Outstanding Book of 2022, Committed: Native Families, Institutionalization, and Remembering (University of North Carolina Press, 2021) The book centers on peoples’ lived experiences inside and outside the Canton Asylum, a federal psychiatric institution created specifically to detain American Indians.
ZOOM: https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/2149194281?omn=82668453269

Meeting ID: 214 919 4281

UCSB History Department’s Annual Senior Honors Colloquium
2024-05-17 08:45 - 16:00 | HSSB 4020, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Please join the History Department in celebrating the undergraduates at the Department’s Annual Senior Honors Colloquium 2024.
The program can be downloaded here.

Department of History Senior Honors Colloquium
Friday, 17 May 2024
HSSB 4020

Coffee: 8:45 am
First Panel, 9-10:30 a.m.: To Get Us Started…
Roselind Zeng, “Chinese Protein PR: Selling Soymilk to Build a Nation, 2010-Present” (Jacobson)
Comment: Professor Xiaowei Zheng
Daira Chavez, “Coal Oil Point: Ranching, Restoration, and their Effects” (Alagona)
Comment: Dr. Sarah Case
Harry Pardoe, “The Ever-Changing Dynamics of Control, Power, and Black Agency in Georgetown County, South Carolina from 1860 to 1900” (Majewski)
Comment: Professor Giuliana Perrone

Second Panel, 10:45 a.m.-12:15 p.m.: Gender, Memory, and Cultural Construction
Madison Dunkle, “‘Learn How to Mend Your Lives:’ Repentance and Restraint in Early Modern English Broadside Ballads, 1570-1630” (Bouley)
Comment: Dr. Jessica Zisa, Writing Program
Emilio Perez Williams, “A Blood Stained Brush: Societal Reaction to Female Military Command in Medieval Europe” (Lansing)
Comment: Professor Debra Blumenthal
Stephanie Gerson, “Triumphing Comprehensive Content Over Moral Messaging: Exhibiting the Holocaust at the Reagan Library” (Marcuse)
Comment: Professor Erika Rappaport

Third Panel, 1:15-2:15 p.m.: Contesting Boundaries in Early America
Nicole Knox, “Frontiers of Reciprocity: The Dynamics of Exchange, Diplomacy, and Power in the Dawnland” (K. Moore)
Comment: Professor Juan Cobo
Hanna Kawamoto, “‘Spiritually Unsexed’: Believers, Critics, and Early Histories of the Publick Universal Friend, 1776-1835” (Henderson)
Comment: Professor Katie Moore

Fourth Panel, 2:30-4 p.m.: Labor, Policy, and Power
Nikita Srinivas, “American Psychopharmacology and its Discontents: Tracing the Historical Underpinnings of the 2004 Regulatory Intervention in Antidepressant Use, 1950s-2004” (O’Connor)
Comment: Professor Lisa Jacobson
Jake Taylor, “‘Telesis: Progress Intelligently Planned’ for Whom? Deciding Who Counts in the Telecommunications Industry” (Stein)
Comment: Professor Nelson Lichtenstein
Matthew Mucha, “Singapore’s Labor Relations Reveal that People’s Action Party Pragmatism is Political (1958-1985)” (McDonald)
Comment: Professor Alice O’Connor

Annual Gender + Sexualities Graduate Colloquium
2024-05-31 09:00 - 17:00

Victor Seow, "The Human Factor: Work as Science in Twentieth-Century China"
2025-01-15 16:00 - 17:30 | McCune Conference Room (HSSB 6020), Humanities and Social Sciences Bldg, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
In 1935, the Commercial Press in Shanghai published a modest-sized volume on a subject most of its readers likely never heard of. Titled An Overview of Industrial Psychology (工業心理學概觀), this text was written by a young psychologist who was trained in and recently returned from Britain. It was the first in Chinese on the titular subject, which promised to (amid other things) “restore the rightful place of human beings in processes of production.” What was industrial psychology, and why did those who promoted or practiced it across multiple political and productive regimes choose to do so? In this talk, Victor Seow will trace the history of industrial psychology in China from the 1930s to the 1990s, focusing on how this science of work reflected shifts in the meaning and value of labor over those decades.
Victor Seow is John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University. He is a historian of technology, science, and industry, specializing in China and Japan in their global contexts and in histories of energy and work.
Event cosponsored by the Lawrence Badash Memorial Lecture Fund, the IHC’s Machines, People, and Politics Research Focus Group, and the Department of History’s History of Science field.

Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, "The Last Tsar: The Abdication of Nicholas II and the Fall of the Romanovs"
2025-01-22 16:00 - 17:30 | HSSB 6020 (McCune Room), University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
UCSB Professor of History (emeritus) Tsuyoshi Hasegawa and Michigan State Professor of History (emeritus) Lewis Siegelbaum will engage in a colloquy on Professor Hasegawa’s new book, The Last Tsar: The Abdication of Nicholas II and the Fall of the Romanovs. When Tsar Nicholas II fell from power in 1917, Imperial Russia faced a series of overlapping crises, from war to social unrest. Although Nicholas’s life is often described as tragic, it was not fate that doomed the Romanovs; it was poor leadership and a blinkered faith in autocracy.
Based on a trove of new archival discoveries, The Last Tsar narrates how Nicholas’s resistance to reform doomed the monarchy. Encompassing the captivating personalities of the era, it untangles the struggles between the increasingly isolated Nicholas and Alexandra and the factions of scheming nobles, ruthless legislators, and pragmatic generals who sought to stabilize the restive Russian empire either with the Tsar or without him. By rejecting compromise, Nicholas undermined his supporters at crucial moments. His blunders cleared the way for allout civil war and the eventual rise of the Soviet Union.
Definitive and engrossing, The Last Tsar uncovers how Nicholas II stumbled into revolution, taking his family, the Romanov dynasty, and the whole Russian Empire down with him.

Tsuyoshi Hasegawa is professor emeritus at the University of California at Santa Barbara. He is the author of numerous books, including The February Revolution, Petrograd 1917: The End of the Tsarist Regime and the Birth of Dual Power (2017), Crime and Punishment in the Russian Revolution: Mob Justice and the Police in Petrograd (2017); Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman and the Surrender of Japan (2006); The Northern Territories Dispute and Russo‑Japanese Relations (1998), and The February Revolution: Petrograd, 1917 (1981). He lives in Santa Barbara, California.

Sergey Saluschev, "Reluctant Abolitionists: Slavery and Abolition in the Nineteenth-Century Caucasus, 1801-1914"
2025-01-23 17:30 - 19:00 | HSSB 4020

History and Political Economy Colloquium
2025-01-31 12:00 - 13:50, 2025-02-28 12:00 - 13:50, 2025-04-25 12:00 - 14:00, 2025-05-16 12:00 - 14:00, 2025-06-06 12:00 - 14:00 | HSSB 4020, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States

Juan Cobo Betancourt, "The Coming of the Kingdom: The Muisca, Catholic Reform, and Spanish Colonialism in the New Kingdom of Granada
2025-02-07 17:00 - 18:30 | McCune Conference Room (HSSB 6020), Humanities and Social Sciences Bldg, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Book Presentation: “The Coming of the Kingdom: The Muisca, Catholic Reform, and Spanish Colonialism in the New Kingdom of Granada”
Juan Cobo Betancourt UC Santa Barbara | Associate Professor of History
Commentator: Yanna Yannakakis Emory University | Professor of History
The Coming of the Kingdom explores the experiences of the Indigenous Muisca peoples of the New Kingdom of Granada (Colombia) during the first century of Spanish colonial rule. Focusing on colonialism, religious reform, law, language, and historical writing, Juan F. Cobo Betancourt examines the introduction and development of Christianity among the Muisca, who from the 1530s found themselves at the center of the invaders’ efforts to transform them into tribute-paying Catholic subjects of the Spanish crown. The book explores how successive generations of missionaries and administrators approached the task of drawing the Muisca peoples to Catholicism at a time when it was undergoing profound changes, and how successive generations of the Muisca interacted with the practices and ideas that the invaders attempted to impose, variously rejecting or adopting them, transforming and translating them, and ultimately making them their own.

Juan Cobo Betancourt, "Christianity, Colonialism, & the Muisca peoples of the Northern Andes"
2025-02-20 18:00 - 19:00 | Alhecama Theater, 215 A East Canon Perdido Street, Santa Barbara, 93101, United States
Public Lecture: Juan Cobo Betancourt, “Christianity, Colonialism, & the Muisca peoples of the Northern Andes”
Alhecama Theatre, 215 E. Canon Perdido Street, located in El Presidio de Santa Bárbara State Historic Park
Free and open to the public. RSVP to historyassociates@ia.ucsb.edu
How does colonialism work without a strong colonial state? How does religious conversion work without an effective missionary project? How can historians work with an archive full of fictions? Taking the history of the Muisca peoples of the Northern Andes of what is now Colombia, who from the 1530s found themselves at the centre of efforts by Europeans to transform them into Catholic, tribute-paying vassals of the Spanish crown, this talk explores the complex and contradictory ways in which Christianity, Spanish colonialism, and Indigenous politics came together to produce a new kind of society to the disappointment of everyone involved.
Juan Cobo Betancourt is Associate Professor of History and Director
of the Latin American and Iberian Studies Program and
Center for Latin American and Iberian Research at UC Santa
Barbara. He has written three books on questions of religion,
race, law, and language in colonial Latin America.

Carlyle Constantino, Curating "Creative Currents: Student Expression in the Arts," Public History Colloquium
2025-02-21 12:00 - 13:30
Join the Public History Colloquium for a conversation with Carlyle Constantino, curator of the exhibition, “Creative Currents: Student Expression in the Arts,” at the Sara Miller McCune Arts Library.
We will meet at the Library, classroom 2332, Mountain Side. We will visit the exhibition after the discussion.

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

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

Lisa Jacobson, "Intoxicating Pleasures," Humanities Decanted Dialogue
2025-02-27 16:00 - 17:30 | McCune Conference Room (HSSB 6020), Humanities and Social Sciences Bldg, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Professors Lisa Jacobson and Erika Rappaport will discuss Jacobson’s new book Intoxicating Pleasures: The Reinvention of Wine, Beer, and Whiskey after Prohibition (University of California Press, 2024).

UCSB History on Ice FUNdraiser
2025-03-02 15:00 - 16:30 | Ice in Paradise, 6985 Santa Felicia Drive, Goleta, 93117, United States
Come skate with the UCSB History Department at Ice in Paradise on Sunday, March 2, 2025 from 3:00 – 4:30 PM. Ticket fee ($10 for undergrads/grads, $15 for faculty) includes skate rental, and as many laps of the studio rink as you can accomplish in an hour and a half. Don’t forget to RSVP here!
All funds raised will be split between the UCSB History Club (undergraduates) and the History Graduate Students Association (HGSA). Space is limited to 100 skaters.

Tiffany Caesar, “A Black Womanist Archival Tradition: Revising the Phillis Wheatley Poetry Festival 50th Anniversary," Public History Colloquium
2025-03-07 12:00 - 13:30 | 4041 HSSB, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Dr. Tiffany Caesar shares her efforts in preserving the legacy of Margaret Walker and the 1973 Phillis Wheatley Poetry Festival at Jackson State University. The 1973 Phillis Wheatley Poetry Festival served as the premiere gathering of black women, writers, artists, scholars, and activists to celebrate Phillis Wheatley and black women’s creativity. The original conference included Alice Walker, Paula Giddings, Audrey Lorde, and more. Dr. Caesar chaired the editorial committee of the recent 50th Anniversary of the Phillis Wheatley Poetry Festival, co-editing two journals focused on the conference, one with Callaloo Literary Journal and the other with the JSU Researcher. Dr. Tiffany Caesar shares her journey of using a black womanist archival tradition and her experience as a Mellon Fellow at the Margaret Walker Center, which further thrust her into public history as she continues preserving black women’s stories.

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

History and Political Economy Colloquium
2025-03-14 12:00 - 13:50 | HSSB 4080, 4080 Humanities and Social Sciences Building, UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States

Shelley Bookspan, The Historian as Detective, Public History Colloquium
2025-04-04 12:00 - 13:30 | HSSB 4041, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Shelley Bookspan, a graduate of UCSB’s public history program, will talk about her extensive and varied career as a consulting historian, and offer students tips and guidance about careers in consulting.
Please email shcase@ucsb.edu for suggested reading.

Public History Colloquium, Meleia Simon-Reynolds, Watsonville is in the Heart
2025-05-02 12:00 - 13:30
The Watsonville is in the Heart Research Initiative is a partnership between the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) and The Tobera Project, a Watsonville community organization founded by Dioscoro “Roy” Respino Recio, Jr. (b. April 19, 1968). The partnership is named after the novel America is the Heart by Filipino American immigrant poet and writer, Carlos Bulosan. The project team is composed of UCSC professors, UCSC undergraduate & graduate students, and community members. WIITH partners with community institutions including the Watsonville Public Library and the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History. The initiative is housed in The Humanities Institute at UCSC.
This event is virtual.
Zoom link: https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/83580616508
Meeting ID: 835 8061 6508

Talk: Erin Trumble, "Rebirth after Retirement: How Elderly Women Reinvented Femininity in Edo Japan"
2025-05-07 17:00 - 19:00 | McCune Conference Room (HSSB 6020), Humanities and Social Sciences Bldg, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Speaker: Graduate Student Erin Trumble

Title: “Rebirth after Retirement: How Elderly Women Reinvented Femininity in Edo Japan”

Description: The talk will focus on retirement as a life stage and examine how it represented a time when women had both more freedom after being liberated from daily tasks and more authority due to their age. I will examine prescriptive literature and its silences around responsibilities for retired women, as well as use examples from the lives of Nakako, Ieko, Shigako, and Aijo to show how women engaged with travel, literature, and religion in new ways as a result of this freedom and authority.

Public History Colloquium, Adam McNeil, "The Importance of Podcasting for the Study of Black Life"
2025-05-09 13:00 - 14:30
Adam Xavier McNeil is the 2025-26 postdoctoral fellow at the American Philosophical Society and is an incoming Assistant Professor at the University of Rhode Island’s Africana Studies department. McNeil defended his dissertation, “Contested Liberty: Fugitive Women & the Shadow of Re-Enslavement and Displacement in Revolutionary Virginia,” at Rutgers University in March 2025. He will speak about his work creating podcasts for New Books in African American Studies; examples of his interviews are available here.
Virtual event. Note later time than usual.
Zoom link: https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/81406494649
Meeting ID: 814 0649 4649

Public History Colloquium: Censoring Public Memory, Past and Present
2025-09-26 12:00 - 13:50

Gender & Sexualities Colloquium: "Commodifying Contraception: A Political Economy of Sex in Interwar Britain"
2025-10-03 12:00 - 13:50
October 3, 2025
12:00-1:50 pm HSSB 4020
Julie Johnson Warkentin (History, UCSB) will present a chapter of her dissertation, “Commodifying Contraception: A Political Economy of Sex in Interwar Britain.”

Public History Colloquium: National Parks and the Origins of Public History in the United States
2025-10-10 12:00 - 13:50
