Department of History, UC Santa Barbara

Dr. Nancy Winter, "Traders & Refugees: Contributions to Etruscan Architecture"
2018-04-30 12:00 - 13:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | HSSB 4020, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States

Nate Citino, History, Rice University, "Envisioning the Arab Future: Modernization in U.S.-Arab Relations, 1945-1967."
2018-04-27 13:00 - 15:00 | HSSB 4041, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Citino discusses his most recent book, Envisioning the Arab Future: Modernization in U.S. – Arab Relations, 1945-1967 (2017). He is also the author of From Arab Nationalism to OPEC: Eisenhower, King Sa’ud, and the making of U.S. – Saudi Relations (2002). Co-Sponsored with the Blum Center for Global Poverty Allevation and Sustainable Development. A chapter from his recent book can be found here.
A light lunch will be served.

Humanities in Prison (Critical Issues in America Co-Sponsored Event)
2018-04-26 09:00 - 17:30 | HSSB 6020 (McCune Room), University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States

Talk on the 1968 Student Massacre in Mexico City: the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Polytechnic "Brigadistas" in the 1968 Student Movement
2018-04-25 12:00 - 13:30 | Multicultural Center (MCC) Theater, Multicultural Center, Isla Vista, CA, 93117, United States
In 1968, hundreds of students were killed by the Mexican military and police for organizing student protests against government repression. On the fiftieth anniversary of this massacre, activists/survivors Gabriel Vega, Felipe Galvan, and Jesus Gutierrez will reflect on the meaning of student activism, memory, and social justice in times of repression. See the flyer for the event here.

Ian Coller - "The French Revolution and the Rights of Muslims" Monday, April 23rd at 5:00pm in the UCEN Flying A Studio
2018-04-23 17:00 - 18:30 | UCEN Flying A Studio, United States
The French Revolution and the Rights of Muslims
Ian Coller, University of California, Irvine
On 24 December 1789, a deputy named François de Hell proposed to the National Assembly an explicit decree that would allow Muslims to enjoy “all the rights, honors and advantages enjoyed by French citizens.”Coller Flyer
Some historians have read this proposition as no more than a feint to appear universalist while seeking to exclude other religious minorities—and Jews in particular— from the enjoyment of equal rights. On the assumption that there were no Muslims in France in this period, they concluded that such a proposal could have no independent content.
This paper will suggest that the question of Muslim rights was both substantive and significant in terms of the direction of the Revolution. It responded to a longer tradition of reciprocal rights guaranteed by treaties between France and the Ottoman Empire. Already during the 1770s and 1780s Muslims in France were beginning to assert these rights. Yet the rights they claimed were not equal rights as citizens, but differentiated rights as subjects.
In this sense, then, rather than an empty gesture of universalism, Hell’s proposal was in fact a concrete attempt to institute unequal rights. By offering Muslims equivalent rights, but as Muslims, rather than as citizens, Hell was drawing on the existing precedents to establish differentiated categories—which could offer Jews “rights” as second-class citizens.
Instead, the Assembly voted to abolish the impediments to non-Catholic participation, while retaining the temporary suspension of a decision regarding Jews. In September 1791, when the disqualification of Jews was fully lifted, the precedent of Muslims was cited in support. In the years that followed, this conception of Muslims as citizens would become a key contention of those claiming the Revolution was an affront against Christianity and the Church. It would also set the scene for further struggles over just what role Muslims might play in the Revolution.

Critical Issues in America presents Prof. Dan-el Padilla Peralta, "Citizenship's Insular Cases"
2018-04-23 16:00 - 18:00 | HSSB 6020 (McCune Room), University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States

Rosie Bermudez, Chican@ Studies, UC Santa Barbara. "Economic Justice is a Women's Issue: The Chicana Welfare Rights Organization's Challenge to Welfare Reform in the 1970s."
2018-04-20 13:00 - 15:00 | HSSB 4041, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Rosie Cano Bermudez is a doctoral candidate in the department of Chicana and Chicano studies at UC Santa Barbara. Her dissertation “Doing Dignity Work: Alicia Escalante and the East Los Angeles Welfare Rights Organization, 1967-1974,” focuses on the human dignity struggles waged by single Chicana welfare mothers in East Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s at the confluence of multiple social movements. Her research interests are centered on the histories of Chicana and Mexican American women’s activism, identity, and feminisms during the second half of the Twentieth century in Los Angeles. She is currently a Woodrow Wilson Women’s Studies Fellow and Ford Fellow at UC Santa Barbara.
Her chapter for discussion can found here.
A light lunch will be served.

International Conference, "Ancient China in a Eurasian Context"
2018-04-20 09:00 - 2018-04-21 13:00 | SSMS 2135, Social Sciences and Media Studies Building, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Please join us for our international conference from April 20-21 at UCSB (SSMS 2135), “Ancient China in a Eurasian Context!”
The goal of our conference is to place the history and archaeology of early China in a Eurasian context, through papers that either address “connections” across Eurasia, or “comparisons” between China and other cultures in West Asia and Europe.
Highlights include a keynote by Jessica Rawson of Oxford on the role of the steppe in the rise of the Qin Empire, a second-day address by Duan Qingbo, the archaeologist of the First Emperor’s mausoleum near Xi’an, and Peter S. Wells, one of the leading pre-historians of Europe.
All are welcome to join and this event is free and open to the public.
Download the program HERE.

Transregional Connections: Architectural Monuments and the Construction of Early Modern Empires: Gulru Necipoglu
2018-04-17 16:00 - 18:00 | CA
Transregional Connections:
Architectural Monuments and the Construction of Early Modern Islamic Empires
The Center for Middle East Studies at UCSB presents
Tuesday, April 17th, 4:00pm, HSSB 6020
Gülru Necipoğlu (Harvard University)
Aga Khan Professor and Director of the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture
Focusing on the 16th and 17th centuries, this lecture presents comparative reflections on the architectural cultures of the Mediterranean-based Ottomans, the Safavids in Iran, and the Mughals in the Indian subcontinent, with an aim to highlight transregional interactions and intercrossings. From such a perspective, the tri-continental landmass dominated by these three early modern empires can be conceptualized asan interconnected contact zone. Th e premise of the lecture is that in the realm of architectural culture, the physical, mental, and social spaces interrelate and overlap with one another. Th e intimate connection between empire building and architectural construction is exemplified by the differing socio-religious and palatial building types favored in each of the three centralizing empires as expressions of distinctive theories of dynastic legitimacy. By emphasizing the deliberateness of these choices, the lecture challenges prevailing assumptions about an unmediated and self-propelled evolution of regional architectural and ornamental forms in the early modern era.

Talk by Professor Emeritus Hal Drake on "A Century of Miracles"
2018-04-14 14:00 - 16:00 | Santa Barbara Mission Archive Library,, 2201 Laguna Street, Santa Barbara, United States
Professor Drake will be discussing his latest book, A Century of Miracles: Christians, Pagans, Jews, and the Supernatural, 312-410. The book offers a fresh examination of a complex polytheistic period in Roman history, surveying a wide range of faiths and belief systems during this eventful century. It offers a thoroughly researched assessment of the supernatural and its sociological and cultural effects on history down to the present. Anyone engaged in religious discourse will find the analysis especially illuminating.

Center for Cold War Studies and International History 2018 Graduate Student Symposium
2018-04-13 09:00 - 16:00 | HSSB 4020, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
This symposium is sponsored by the Center for Cold War Studies and International History and co-sponsored by the Department of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara in order to showcase the new and exciting work being done by UCSB graduate students on Cold War and related international history topics. The CCWS is a project of the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center and the History Department.
Please find the program here, and find out more about the CCWS here.

Dr. Jessica Wright, "Preaching Phrenitis: The Medicalization of Religious Deviance in Early Christianity"
2018-04-12 16:00 - 17:30 | HSSB 4041, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, 93106, United States

Critical Issues in America Event: Julie Chávez Rodríguez
2018-04-09 14:00 - 16:00 | Multicultural Center (MCC) Theater, Multicultural Center, Isla Vista, CA, 93117, United States
Julie Chávez Rodríguez

POSTPONED — Ada Ferrer, NYU: "Visionary Aponte: History, Art, and Black Freedom"
2018-04-04 17:00 - 18:30 | HSSB 4020, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, 93106, United States
Professor Ada Ferrer’s talk at the Colloquium on Latin American and Caribbean History has unfortunately been cancelled.

Prof. Susanna Elm: Eutropius the Consul: Power, Ugliness & Imperial Representation in Late Antiquity
2018-04-02 16:00 - 17:30 | HSSB 4041, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, 93106, United States

45th ANNUAL MEETING of the PACIFIC COAST CONFERENCE ON BRITISH STUDIES
2018-03-23 12:00 - 2018-03-25 12:30 | HSSB Multiple Rooms, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, 93106, United States

Talk by Deborah Coen (Yale), "Climate Science in the Age of Empire"
2018-03-13 16:00 - 18:00 | HSSB 4020, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States

5th Annual Van Gelderen Lecture: Ships and Saints: Mapping the World of Athanasius of Alexandra, Chris Nofziger
2018-03-11 14:00 - 16:00 | HSSB 4020, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Please join us for this year’s Van Gelderen Lecture, which will feature Chris Nofziger. Chris is currently an advanced PhD candidate in Roman history under the the direction of Beth Digeser. He will be presenting his work on Athanasius of Alexandria, bishop of Alexandria from 328 to 373 CE. Athanasius was sent into exile five times by four different emperors during his forty-four year career. His bombastic rhetoric, conspiracy theories, and penchant for political troublemaking earned him followers who were fervent and enemies who were dangerous, not the least of whom was the son of Constantine, Constantius II. One can see many things in the writings of Athanasius: the image of a saint, a gangster, or simply an adherent of one kind of Christianity struggling with ideas of belonging and otherness against the backdrop of imperial pressure toward the achievement of a single monolithic Christianity. Regardless of how one interprets his legacy, Athanasius’s stories proved astonishingly resilient and continued to haunt Christians’ ideas of orthodoxy and their sense of history for millennia. New interdisciplinary and digital tools allow us to explore the other stories behind the persistence of Athanasius’s works and tell a different story of early Christianity: a story told from the shores of Alexandria where waves, wind, topography, and a network that stretched from Indian to the shores of the Mediterranean Sea all play a role in the tale.
Admission $5 for members and guests; $7 for non-members; free for students. Please call (805) 300 4016 to reserve seats by March 9.

The Museum of Methodology and the Criminalization of Culture, Rio c. 1938 (Amy Buono, UCSB/UERJ)
2018-03-07 17:00 - 18:30 | Engineering Science Building 1001, University of California Santa Barbara, Lagoon Rd, Santa Barbara, CA, United States
Please join us for the next meeting of the Colloquium on Latin American and Caribbean History as we welcome Amy Buono, Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at UCSB and Researcher at the Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, who will be presenting a paper entitled “The Museum of Methodology and the Criminizalization of Culture, Rio c. 1938”.
The talk will be held at 5pm on Wednesday, March 7th, in the Engineering Science Building 1001, and will be followed by a small reception.
Abstract: The Civil Police Museum of Rio de Janeiro, established within the Police Academy in 1912, went by many names: it was also known as the “Museum of Crime” and, tellingly, the “Museum of Methodology.” This lecture examines the museum, its collections, and the role of objects and visual culture in building a civic culture that linked collecting and seeing with police training. By 1938, the Civil Police Museum became Brazil’s earliest institutional collection of Afro-Brazilian heritage, one eventually under the domain of IPHAN. This talk explores the contradictory ways a particular collection within a collection, the inner “Museum of Black Magic,” was understood and preserved in the period, highlighting how police violence and museum preservation are intertwined.
About the Speaker: Amy Buono is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and affiliated as a Researcher at the Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro. Her scholarship centers on materiality, memory, and museums, with a special focus on Brazil and the Atlantic world. Amy’s is the author of the forthcoming book Tupinambá Feathercraft in the Brazilian Atlantic (University of Pennsylvania Press). Her current book project centers on race, pedagogy, and the visuality of crime in the Civil Police Museum of Rio de Janeiro.

Onontio’s Reward: When Louis XIV’s head hung from Native American necks
2018-03-05 15:00 - 16:30 | HSSB 3001E, 3001E Humanities and Social Sciences Building, UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
French royal medals crossed into a radically different cultural context when awarded to the Amerindian people of Canada in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. So it may come as a surprise that the symbolic potential of these medals was only fully realized by the indigenous warriors that they were gifted to. These small sculptures, designed in emulation of ancient Roman coins, are quintessentially Western objects designed to function as instruments of communication across spatial, cultural and temporal divides. Small in scale and easily transported; relatively inexpensive, depending on the material from which they were made; produced in large quantities—they had the potential to convey messages far and wide.
The guest lecture examines the fate of the Louis XIV Royal Family medal awarded to Amerindian allies. To Algonquin and Iroquois speaking warriors the king was Onontio, the great mountain, a father to their people. The concept of family that this medal represents thus functions an allegory for the bond between the King of France and his subjects; a powerful ideological message for those living in French colonies far from the center of empire. The positive reception of these medals by the Indigenous supporters of the French colonists reveals the shifting talismanic and political power that these objects could carry across surprisingly diverse cultural contexts. Functioning like the ornaments worn by Indigenous people for centuries before the arrival of European settlers, French royal medals were endowed with new symbolic power by the First Nations people of Canada.
Robert Wellington is a senior lecturer at the Centre for Art history and Art Theory at the Australian National University. His research focuses on the role of material culture in history making and cross-cultural exchange in ancien régime France. Robert Wellington’s monograph Antiquarianism and the Visual Histories of Louis XIV: Artifacts For a Future Past, explores the place of medals in the project of documenting the history of Louis XIV for posterity.

Marcia Chatelain, History, Georgetown University, “Burgers in the Age of Black Capitalism: Fast Food and the Remaking of Civil Rights after 1968”
2018-03-02 13:00 - 15:00 | HSSB 4041, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Chatelain is currently writing a book about race and fast food, From Sit-In to Drive-Thru: Black America in the Age of Fast Food (under contract, Liveright, an imprint of W.W. Norton). Her first book South Side Girls: Growing up in the Great Migration was published by Duke University Press in 2015. Chatelain co-edited, with Britta Waldschmidt-Nelson, Staging a Dream: Untold Stories and Transatlantic Legacies of the March on Washington (2015).
Chatelain is a regular commenter on current events and social issues across a variety of media platforms. She also created the Twitter campaign #Fergusonsyllabus in August 2014.

Amy Stanley, "Finding Echigo in Edo: Snow Country Migrants and Their Urban Worlds"
2018-02-28 16:00 - 17:30 | HSSB 4080, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, 93106, United States
The Echigo province migrant was a familiar type in nineteenth-century Edo. Every year in the tenth month, snow country peasants would come down the mountains on the Nakasendō Highway and enter the city through Itabashi Station. They wandered down the main street in Hongō, where they were met by labor scouts who had learned to recognize their bewildered expressions and country accents. Many ended up in hitoyado, the city’s notorious boarding houses for laborers, where they were dispatched to rice polishers and bathhouses. Others found work in service with the help of migrants who had come before. Most went home eventually, but others stayed on in the city – they became shop owners, peddlers, and even low-ranking samurai. This talk examines the lives of Echigo people in Tenpō-era Edo to illuminate the importance of regional connections and rural-urban migration in the development of Japan’s largest city. It also considers how documents kept in far-flung places (in this case Niigata Prefecture) can illuminate urban space.

Amy Stanley is an associate professor in the History Department at Northwestern University, where she teaches early modern and modern Japanese and global history. She is also the author of Selling Women: Prostitution, Households, and the Market in Early Modern Japan (UC Press, 2012) and “Maidservants’ Tales: Narrating Domestic and Global History in Eurasia, 1500-1800” (AHR, 2016), as well as articles in The Journal of Asian Studies and The Journal of Japanese Studies. She is on Twitter @astanley711.

Prof. Michele Salzman (UC Riverside) - Lay Aristocrats and Roman Bishops
2018-02-22 12:00 - 13:30 | Arts 1332, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, 93106, United States
Felix III, who held the papal seat from 483-492, is called by several scholars “Rome’s first aristocratic bishop.” As the first elected pope after the fall of the last western emperor, his aristocratic origins would bestow a distinctly new status to the office of bishop of Rome on the eve of new challenges to his authority from the Eastern Patriarch in Constantinople, Acacius. But was Felix the first aristocratic bishop? And how important were social background and aristocratic networks after the fall of the western empire? The Letters of Felix and close reading of contemporary sources shed new light on Felix’s social standing and how he used his social networks to become the first Roman pope to break with Constantinople in what is today known as the Acacian schism. Sponsored by the California Consortium for Late Antiquity, the Department of Art History and the Cordano Endowed Chair in Catholic Studies.

Professor Terence Keel, "The Ghost in the Machine: How Christianity Haunts the Biological Sciences"
2018-02-18 14:00 - 15:30 | Goleta Valley Public Library, 500 N. Fairview Avenue, Goleta, CA, 93117, United States
Keel argues that the enduring belief that race comes from “nature” reflects the haunting influence of Christian intellectual history on the development of modern scientific thinking about human ancestry.2018-Keel-flyer-pdf

Citizens of Nowhere: The Case for Embracing the Stateless - David Baluarte, Washington & Lee University
2018-02-16 16:00 - 18:00 | HSSB 6020 (McCune Room), University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States

Seth Rockman, History, Brown University, "Plantation Labor Outsourced: Rethinking New England Outwork and the National Economy of Slavery in Antebellum America"
2018-02-16 13:00 - 15:00 | HSSB 4041, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Rockman is the author of Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore (2008) and co-editor, with Sven Beckert, of Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development (2016). Scraping By won the OAH’s Merle Curti Prize, the Philip Taft Labor History Book Award, and the H.L. Mitchell Prize from the Southern Historical Association. Rockman spent the 2016-17 year at re:work, a research institute on global labor history at the Humboldt University in Berlin.

Professor Tracy Adams, University of Auckland, New Zealand, "The French Political Royal Mistress and Gallic Singularity"
2018-02-16 12:00 - 13:30 | HSSB 4020, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
We are so used to the idea of the royal mistress as a constituent element of the French king’s grandeur that we tend not to think about how strange it is that in Ancien Régime France nine women who were not part of the royal family exercised significant political influence.
Adams suggests that the key moment in the emergence of influential royal mistresses comes when the royal family, traditionally assimilated with the Holy Family, began to be assimilated with the more fluidly composed family of classical deities. Focusing on the period between Agnès Sorel (1422-1450), whose representation as the Virgin Mary can only be described as a “one-off” and the Duchess of Etampes (1508-1580), who performed her role with François I in the “theater” of Fontainebleau where massive frescoes drawn from classical mythology provided a gloss for her career, Adams draws attention to the convergence of theatrical reading practices and renewed interest in the chaste but fierce huntress Diana that made the role of politically influential royal mistress thinkable.Tracy Adams

Royal Manuscripts of the Moroccan Royal Library: An Introduction and Overview
2018-02-08 18:00 - 19:30 | HSSB 4080, 4080 Humanities and Social Sciences Building, UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Speaker: Dr. Khalid Zahri, Royal Library, Rabat, Morocco.
Sponsored by the UCSB Center for Middle East Studies.

Slave Revolt on Screen: The Haitian Revolution in Film and Video Games
2018-02-07 17:00 - 18:30 | Engineering Science Building 1001, United States
You are invited to join us for the third meeting of the Colloquium for Latin American and Caribbean History as we welcome Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall from the California State University, San Marcos who will be presenting a paper entitled “‘Slave Revolts on Screen: The Haitian Revolution in Film and Videogames”.
The lecture considers existing films and video games on the Haitian Revolution in light of anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s arguments about the “unthinkability” of this event. It will compare existing cinematic representations of the Revolution to current historiography on the Revolution, as well as to recent video games which touch upon slave revolt in colonial Saint-Domingue. Is it possible that despite conventional wisdom about video games representing the past simplistically, that such games could offer a better depiction than existing films, let alone many textbooks? In examining video games as well as films, the paper will consider larger issues about the representation of slavery and of slave revolt in twenty-first century popular culture.
Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall is professor of history at California State University San Marcos. Prof. Sepinwall’s research focuses on the late 18th and early 19th centuries, particularly in France and Haiti. Her scholarship centers on the origins of modern thinking about difference, whether religious, racial, linguistic or gender. She published The Abbé Grégoire and the French Revolution: The Making of Modern Universalism (University of California Press, 2005), Haitian History: New Perspectives (Routledge, 2012) and many articles and book chapters.
The event is cosponsored by the Department of History, the Center for Black Studies, the Colloquium for Caribbean and Latin American History, and the Slavery, Captivity, and the Meaning of Freedom RFG Interdisciplinary Humanities Center.
Download the flyer here

Professor Jeremy Johns, Oxford University, "Documenting Multiculturalism in Norman Sicily"
2018-02-06 17:00 - 18:00 | HSSB 4020, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
