Mónica Michelena: "We Are Charrúa Women: From Negation to Re-Existence in Our Body-Territory"
2021-02-26 16:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Zoom, CA
UCSB and UCSD have joined together to welcome Mónica Michelena, Secretary of the Charrúa Nation’s Council and former Advisor on Indigenous Affairs for Uruguay’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (2014-18).
Charrúa women have gone through dispossession, exclusion, and negation that left marks on their collective memory and body-territory. This genocidal process did not end in 19th-century Uruguay, but continues today and manifests itself every time that institutions or civil society denies their existence as an indigenous people. For fifteen years, together with Charrúa sisters from Argentina, Charrúa women from Uruguay have been working to demolish hegemonic narratives of the market and state. As subjects of legal right, they are reconfiguring their existence and re-existence in their great ancestral-territory-body. This collective search has led Michelena to academic spaces.
In 2011, Michelena began an investigation with rural Charrúa women in Uruguay’s interior to question the nation-state’s devices of invisibility and to expose counter-memories as part of an attempt to disarm the social and symbolic representation of their extinction. Through a methodological approach based on collaborative ethnography, Michelena’s research aims to rearm the great quillapí of memory. The metaphor of quillapí – a leather cape made from patchwork – implies that each woman is the bearer of a small piece of memory and, among all, they are sewing together its scraps. Down this path, Charrúa women began to slowly gain recognition from the Uruguayan feminist movement, in a slow process of internal decolonization.
Zoom link: https://ucsd.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJcscu2urjkpEtMCu4cVNRoiyQe_J-RtAr1Y
Password: [REDACTED]

This event is part of the Feminismos desde abajo, y hacia el sur/ Feminisms from Below, and Toward the South series. This speaker series welcomes feminist militants from Latin America to share their perspectives and experiences on building popular power towards a mass feminist movement. Over the past decade, Latin American feminists have identified manifestations of gender-based oppression under capitalism in everyday women’s conditions in order to successfully mobilize them as part of a political movement. Feminists produce analyses and subsequent strategies around reproductive rights, resource extractivism, housing, debt, and more. This mass feminism has grown to be arguably the most insurgent political force across the continent.

CWWG Workshop--Addison Jensen, "WITCHIEs, Chickies, and Donut Dollies: The Women’s Rights Movement and American GIs"
2021-02-27 14:00 - 16:00 | Zoom, CA
On Saturday, February 27, from 2 to 4 pm, the Center for Cold War Studies and International History (CCWS) will host a workshop. They will read and discuss a dissertation chapter, “WITCHIEs, Chickies, and Donut Dollies: The Women’s Rights Movement and American GIs,” by Addie Jensen, a doctoral candidate in the UCSB history department.
This workshop is part of a new CCWS initiative, the Cold War Working Group (CWWG), a collaborative, graduate student-led group designed to provide a supportive, welcoming environment for graduate students working on or around the Cold War and international history. The workshops provide an occasion for graduate students, faculty, and others to join together as peers to read, and provide feedback on, scholarly work in progress (dissertation chapters, journal articles, etc.) by members of our community. We strongly encourage other UCSB graduate students and faculty members to consider submitting their own work for discussion in future workshops.
If you wish to participate in the February 27 workshop, please email Addie (who is also serving this year as the CCWS Graduate Fellow) at addisonmjensen@ucsb.edu, and she will provide you with the password to access her dissertation chapter, along with a Zoom address.
Please join us for this exciting event!

Launch Party for the UCSB Undergraduate Journal of History
2021-03-02 16:00 | Zoom, CA
The UCSB Undergraduate Journal of History is about to release its first issue, and its editors and contributors cordially invite the public to its Zoom launch party on March 2. The event will feature a short Q&A featuring four of the ten undergraduate authors and moderated by members of the editorial team.

To celebrate the Journal‘s launch, use this Zoom link: https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/86005899456

Humanities Decanted--W. Patrick McCray, "Making Art Work: How Cold War Engineers and Artists Forged a New Creative Culture"
2021-03-04 16:00 | Zoom, CA
The IHC‘s Humanities Decanted series invites all to a dialogue between Patrick McCray (History) and Alan Liu (English) about McCray’s new book, Making Art Work: How Cold War Engineers and Artists Forged a New Creative Culture (MIT Press, 2020). Audience Q&A will follow.
Despite C. P. Snow’s warning, in 1959, of an unbridgeable chasm between the humanities and the sciences, engineers and scientists of that era enthusiastically collaborated with artists to create visually and sonically interesting multimedia works. This new artwork emerged from corporate laboratories, artists’ studios, publishing houses, art galleries, and university campuses and it involved some of the biggest stars of the art world. Less famous and often overlooked were the engineers and scientists who contributed time, technical expertise, and aesthetic input to these projects. These figures included the rocket engineer-turned-artist Frank J. Malina, MIT’s Gyorgy Kepes, and Billy Klüver, a Swedish-born engineer at Bell Labs who helped establish the New York–based group Experiments in Art and Technology. This book restores the role of technologists to the foreground, explores the era’s hybrid creative culture, and recounts the many ways that artists, engineers, and curators have collaborated over the past fifty years. Making Art Work shows that the borders of art and technology over the past half century are anything but fixed. Just as striking is that the original ideals and ambitions that animated the 1960s-era art-and-technology movement have not faded. Today, creativity, collaborations, and interdisciplinary research are promoted by academic and corporate leaders alike. What emerges is a long history of artists and technologists who have repeatedly built new creative communities in which they can exercise imagination, invention, and expertise.
W. Patrick McCray is a professor in the Department of History at UC Santa Barbara where his research, writing, and teaching focus on the histories of technology and science. Originally trained as a scientist, he is the author or editor of six books. McCray’s 2013 book, The Visioneers: How an Elite Group of Scientists Pursued Space Colonies, Nanotechnologies, and a Limitless Future, won the Watson Davis Prize in 2014 from the History of Science Society as the “best book written for a general audience.”
Registration is required in advance. Register at https://ucsb.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_YAKxHjklSWqDzHO5Vs8Ngg.
Sponsored by the IHC’s Harry Girvetz Memorial Endowment

History Club Weekly Meetings
2021-03-04 19:00 - 21:00, 2021-03-11 19:00 - 21:00, 2021-03-18 19:00 - 21:00, 2021-03-25 19:00 - 21:00, 2021-04-01 19:00 - 21:00, 2021-04-08 19:00 - 21:00, 2021-04-15 19:00 - 21:00, 2021-04-22 19:00 - 21:00 and 1 more date | HSSB 4020
UCSB’s new and improved History Departmental club is for majors, minors, and anyone with a passion for the past! Meetings are held every Thursday at 7:00 PM in HSSB 4020. See flier below for information about upcoming events. Please email histclub.ucsb@gmail.com with any questions.

Public History Colloquium Event–”Abina and the Important Men: Graphic History as Public History”
2021-03-05 12:00 - 13:30 | Zoom, CA
Join the History Department’s Colloquium in Public History on Friday, March 5 at noon for a Zoom talk by Trevor R. Getz (San Francisco State University).
Abina and the Important Men began as an attempt to address a classroom problem: how to teach students about the dual responsibilities of the historian to historical subjects and contemporary audiences. These goals both drove its development as a graphic history. Fortuitously, its publication caught the leading edge of the rehabilitation of that medium as a serious scholarly mode of communication. This great graphic shift is part of a wider realignment of both the history discipline and popular culture, and it provides both opportunities and pitfalls for the scholar who wishes to share their work with a broader public while retaining its authenticity and maintaining its accuracy. This is a discussion by the author of Abina and the Important Men about what he has learned since its publication in first edition in 2012, with some arguments about the future of the graphic history genre. The graphic novel can be obtained through the Oxford University Press website, or the community-built 2-D animated video version can be watched here (Password: [REDACTED]
Register for this Zoom event at http://bit.ly/abina-webinar.
Recommended video/reading/short links:
• “How to Design a Comix Page” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dQEfL2BfUM
• Julia Alekseyeva, “Form, Function, and Style in the Graphic Essay,” Sequentials Journal, 1.4 (May 2020).
https://www.sequentialsjournal.net/issues/issue1.4/alekseyeva.html?fbclid=IwAR0_bxgktwVoNr6TEcWjSeVogcZjM_U36FhvB6GpHXs8mhSfMKSc9PgTz0k
Rocky Cotard and Laurent Dubois, “The Slave Revolution That Gave Birth to Haiti,” The Nib (Feb. 5, 2018).
https://thenib.com/haitian-revolution/
• Nick Sousanis, “No Sides,” Spin, Weave & Cut (blog), http://spinweaveandcut.com/no-sides/
• Charis Loke & Max Loh, “The Word for World is Image,” Singpowrimo, 20.2:
https://www.singpowrimo.com/features/wordimage?fbclid=IwAR2WSiuLQKWT3EkbJvtBPdC7UmLWquXuduKUGLibIi9sA5jby-sCf1cLqLg
Other recommended readings:
• Trevor R. Getz, “Getting Serious about Comic Histories”, American Historical Review, 2018, 123, 1596-1597.
• Barbara Tversky, “Visualizing Thought”, Topics in Cognitive Science, 3 (2011), 499-535.
• Neil Cohn, “In defense of a ‘grammar’ in the visual language of comics”, Journal of Pragmatics, 127 (2018), 1-19.

History Associates: Luke Roberts, "A Samurai Wife Divorces her Lout of a Husband"
2021-03-06 16:00 | Zoom, CA
Join the History Associates for an engaging presentation from UCSB History Professor Luke Roberts on a specific case that influenced gender roles in 19th-century Japan.
Zoom link: ucsb.zoom.us/j/6855143149
Mori Nao, a young samurai wife in Japan, desired a divorce from her abusive husband in 1824. Legally a man could divorce his wife but a wife could not divorce her husband. Nevertheless, she persisted in the face of his adamant refusal to divorce her. Soon her relatives mobilized their social networks to convince his relatives to pressure him to give her a divorce, but he still refused. Eventually most samurai in her lord’s domain in southwestern Japan were working to get her a divorce and even the lord became involved in supporting what she had no legal right to demand, and threatened the well-being of the husband’s kin group.
Finally, the husband divorced her. His angry kin put him in a cage in his backyard where he was forced to live for some months. No formal record survives, but a detailed diary of the process made by one relative of his house who played an important role in the negotiations reveals much about gender roles, family networks and common disjunctures between law-as-written and law-as-it-operated.

ISRRAR Event–Dr. Samiha Rahman, "Redefining Black Excellence: Ihsan, Islamic Education, and the Tijani Sufi Order"
2021-03-09 16:00 - 18:00 | Zoom, CA
Since the 1980s, hundreds of predominantly working-class African American Muslim youth have migrated to the West African Tijani Sufi town of Medina Baye, Senegal. They hope to circumvent the antiblackness, Islamophobia, and economic inequality they face in the U.S. in search of a transformative educational encounter in a society where Blackness and Islam constitute the dominant norms. This talk chronicles these young people’s everyday experiences pursuing Islamic education in Medina Baye. Complicating popular notions that link Black excellence to individualistic material gain and Black capitalism, Dr. Samiha Rahman (CSU Long Beach) argues that Black Muslim excellence (ihsan) provides an alternative paradigm rooted in the pursuit of human excellence through spiritual and social practice. Grounded in a transatlantic Black Muslim tradition, Black Muslim ihsan offers African American Muslims pathways to individual and collective liberation.
Join this Zoom event here: bit.ly/3hVdvP4

This event is part of the ISRRAR Winter Quarter series.
Professor Butch Ware and the ISRRAR announce the Winter Quarter schedule for HIST 210RA: Race, Faith, Revolution. Graduate students are invited to register for this 2-unit seminar and to sign up for the listserv at http://tinyurl.com/ISRRARListServ.
How have Black metaphysics articulated with racial politics in order to advance efforts of justice, liberation, and self-actualization? In this very special year of 2021, our seminar will take on manifestations of anti-black racism and imperialism, as well as African and African Diasporic efforts to mediate between the seen and unseen worlds in struggles for justice.
This graduate seminar is part of a broader collaborative process meant to engage graduate students and faculty alike. The Initiative for the Study of Race, Religion, and Revolution (ISRRAR) seeks to foster a conversation on intersections of spirituality and social change wherein works on (and by) formerly colonized peoples are central, rather than peripheral.
This approach is driven by an axial critique of the ways in which modernity’s core contradictions shape our shared pasts and presents. An era of revolutionary enlightenment, we are told, brought humanity out of the ‘dark ages.’ Freedom dawned. But this ‘age of lights’ brought the darkest of racial taxonomies, and scales of slavery and human suffering unknown to ancient and medieval worlds. Reason proclaimed its mission: liberate humanity from the bondage of irrational religion. Yet rational political economies brought global empires, world wars, and ethnic genocides. Moreover, new nationalisms have drawn on older religious repertories to define citizens and subject them to moral authority. Self-congratulatory Western tropes, however, tend to overlook the ubiquity of race and the persistence of faith, portraying them as incidental rather than fundamental.
Colonized peoples in Africa and the Americas, tell different tales. A generation of emergent scholarship has brought these forward. Scholars (many trained in interdisciplinary fields) have recovered ‘native’ narratives and ontologies of the oppressed, often dislodging dominant meta-narratives in the study of the global West. In History 210 we engage live presentations of the works of scholars, activists, and artists whose conceptualization and execution of their research breaks new ground in these domains.

IHC Talk: Utathya Chattopadhyaya, "Cannabis and South Asia"
2021-03-09 16:00 - 18:00 | Zoom, CA
The IHC‘s Asian/American Studies Collective welcomes UCSB History professor Utathya Chattopadhyaya for a talk on the role of cannabis in South Asian experiences of empire.
Historical scholarship now conceives empire as a webbed uneven field of power relations and a multispecies enterprise. In other words, the anxious and breathless struggle of European imperialism to sustain itself subjected human, plant, animal, and insect bodies to its ambition to govern through logics of colonial difference. This paper argues that the cannabis plant in South Asia, in the nineteenth century, while being a subject of British revenue systems transformed into a race-d and gendered mode of explaining anticolonial insurgency by South Asian rebels. The intoxicating substance of the plant, in the discursive logic of empire, was seen to vitiate Asian bodies against European power. Cannabis also animated other imperial operations like the delegitimization of Indian sovereignty. Using the expansive reach of imperial periodical culture in the nineteenth century, this paper highlights the Asian and global contexts within which cannabis became an alibi for rebellion or violence against empire.
Utathya Chattopadhyaya is Assistant Professor of History at the UC Santa Barbara. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois and studies the history of modern South Asia, British imperialism, and agrarian commodities. His work has appeared in the South African Historical Journal, Historical Reflections, and Animalia: An Anti-Imperial Bestiary for our Times. He is currently writing a monograph on cannabis and empire in British India.
This event will be held on Zoom at https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/81976204749?pwd=[REDACTED]

FOCAL POINT Dialogues in History Webinar II: Empire and Liberation
2021-03-12 13:00 | Zoom, CA
Building on the collective knowledge shared in our first webinar, the History Department’s Colloquium Committee warmly invites you to attend the second session of our FOCAL POINT Dialogues in History series. Inspired by the History Department’s Statement on the George Floyd Uprising and its invocation to understand and interrogate our racialized past and the investments of disciplinary history within it, the series brings together UCSB History faculty and graduate students who have volunteered to lead a dialogue on Black life, race, and antiblackness in history. The conversations will engage Herman Bennett’s African Kings and Black Slaves, as a focal point to discuss themes like sovereignty, empire, and racial capitalism from different historical angles of vision.
Our second webinar will engage Prof. Herman Bennett’s emphasis on empire and colonialism in understanding Atlantic history and the politics of liberation from a wide diversity of scholarly standpoints. Registration for the webinar is required. Please click on the link below to register.
Date: Mar 12, 2021
Time: 1:00 PM Pacific Time (US and Canada)
Webinar II: Empire and Liberation
Zoom registration: Please register in advance for this webinar using the link below.
https://ucsb.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_kI2R6miRRO2blZUh_62shQ
Featuring presentations by Anthony Greco, Katie Moore, Stephan Miescher, and Ya Zuo
Comment by Evelyne Laurent-Perrault

Anthony Greco is a historian of engineering and technology, colonialism, and science in the modern Middle East. His dissertation research examines Egypt’s long tradition of scientific knowledge and pedagogy. Before this, he worked as a diesel mechanic, plumber, and carpenter which inspired his interest in builders and maintainers of public works.
Katie Moore is a historian of early American political economy, money, debt, and the Atlantic World, and the author of the forthcoming A Revolutionary Currency.
Stephan Miescher is a historian of nineteenth and twentieth century Ghana, masculinities, and environmental history, and the author of Making Men in Ghana (2005) and coeditor of Gender, Imperialism, and Global Exchanges (2015).
Ya Zuo is a historian of middle and late imperial China, epistemology, political philosophy, ethics, and emotions, and the author of Shen Gua’s Empiricism (2018).
Evelyne Laurent-Perrault is a historian of the African diaspora in colonial Latin America and the Caribbean, the political imagination of enslaved women, and the author of the forthcoming Claims of Dignity.

8th Annual Van Gelderen Lecture: Sasha Coles, “The Great Silk Experiment: Silkworms, Mulberry Trees, and Women Workers in Mormon Country, 1850s-1910s”
2021-03-14 16:00 | Zoom, CA
UCSB History Associates presents the eighth annual Van Gelderen Graduate Student Lecture, this year given by Dr. Sasha Coles.
From the 1850s to the early 1900s, Latter-Day Saint (or Mormon) women in both rural and urban Great Basin settlements planted mulberry trees, raised silkworms, and attempted to produce silk cocoons, thread, and cloth of a high-enough quality to use and sell. By most measurements, they failed. Homegrown silk was time-consuming, onerous, and practically impossible to profit from, primarily due to superior imported goods from Europe and Asia. Even so, this talk will show how the homegrown silk industry provided Mormon women with a venue to make their own money, shape transnational labor and commodity markets, and understand ever-changing environmental conditions. In these and other ways, Mormon women used silk production and consumption to resolve tensions between economic cooperation and competition, market isolation and integration, and religious exceptionalism and American citizenship.
Our speaker, Sasha Coles, defended her UCSB Ph.D. dissertation successfully in February 2021. She received her M.A. from UCSB in 2015 and her B.A. from Arizona State University in 2013. Her publications include two articles in historical journals, and she has developed a website on the Walt Disney theme parks.
The Zoom link for this year’s Van Gelderen Lecture is https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/6855143149.

ISRRAR Event--Dr. Maytha Alhassen, "The Ummic Imperative: A Decolonial Approach to Malcolm X's Islam"
2021-04-06 16:00 | Zoom, CA
Through an assemblage of multiple archives, Dr. Maytha Alhassen tracks the Malcolm X’s political and spiritual project the last year of his life as he travels across decolonizing geographies. Alhassen contends that undergirding Malcolm X’s Black liberation framework is a praxical commitment to an “ummic imperative.” Engaging Malcolm’s spiritual political philosophies will also serve to interrogate and complicate Third World movement politics.
Join this Zoom event at tinyurl.com/isrrarTalk
This event is part of the ISRRAR Spring Quarter series.

Public History Colloquium Event--"Presenting the Medieval Mediterranean: Museums and Archaeology in National Discourse"
2021-04-09 12:00 - 13:30 | Zoom, CA
Join the History Department’s Colloquium in Public History on Friday, April 9 at noon for a Zoom talk by William Tronzo (History of Art, UC San Diego).
From time immemorial, material artifacts have played an important role in political discourse: think simply of the use of the crown (in the United Kingdom) or the throne (for example, the throne of St. Peter in the Roman Catholic Church) in the process of national or institutional self-identification. Over the course of several years, Tronzo co-directed a collaborative project with Kimberly Bowes (University of Pennsylvania) and an international group of scholars funded by the Getty Foundation and housed at the American Academy in Rome. In this colloquium session, Tronzo describes the project and goes deeper, considering some of the ways in which this relationship between the realms of materiality and discourse ramified with regard to the modern period in the nations that form the Mediterranean world. Looking at objects, texts, and whole sites, Tronzo offers a number of case studies of such national self-fashioning, negotiated and managed through archeology, collecting, display and translation, and set to work within discourses that embrace narrative and ritual.
Register for this event at http://bit.ly/medieval-mediterranean
Recommended Readings:
All from Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome, vol. 62 (2017) (Available on JSTOR)

THE ROLE AND PERCEPTION OF ISLAMIC ART AND HISTORY IN THE CONSTRUCTION OF A
SHARED IDENTITY IN SICILY (ca. 1780–1900), pp. 5-40
Silvia Armando
https://www.jstor.org/stable/26787018

VISIGOTHS, CROWNS, CROSSES, AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF SPAIN, pp. 41-64
Francisco J. Moreno Martín
https://www.jstor.org/stable/26787019

ZIONISM, MEDIEVAL CULTURE, AND NATIONAL DISCOURSE, pp. 119-134
Judith Bronstein
https://www.jstor.org/stable/26787022

PRE-ISLAMIC ARCHAEOLOGY IN TUNISIA: THE STAKES OF A COLONIAL SCIENCE, pp. 193-208
Moheddine Chaouali
https://www.jstor.org/stable/26787025

What Really Happened at Waco?
2021-04-10 16:00 - 17:30 | https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/6855143149, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
The 51-day standoff between the FBI and David Koresh’s Branch
Davidians ended in tragedy on April 19, 1993. A fire consumed
the Branch Davidian compound during an FBI tear gas operation
that morning, resulting in 75 deaths. To this day conspiracy
theories about Waco continue motivating anti-government and
other militia movements in the United States. Join us for an inside
look at what really happened during the 51-day standoff between
the FBI and the Branch Davidians, featuring former federal
prosecutor Steve Zipperstein, who served as Counselor to
Attorney General Janet Reno during the Waco congressional
hearings.
Steve Zipperstein teaches at UCSB, UCLA and Tel Aviv University. He served as a federal prosecutor in Los Angeles and at the Justice Department in Washington, D.C. from 1987 to 1996. Former Attorney General Janet Reno appointed Zipperstein to co-lead the original Justice Department after-action investigation regarding the events at Waco. She also assigned Zipperstein to serve as her and the Justice Department’s lawyer for the Waco congressional hearings following the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. Following his government career, Zipperstein served as the Chief Legal Officer for Verizon Wireless and BlackBerry Ltd.

FOCAL POINT Dialogues in History Webinar III: Racial Capitalism and Liberalism
2021-04-16 13:00 | Zoom, CA
Building on the collective knowledge shared in the two previous webinars, the History Department’s Colloquium Committee warmly invites you to attend the third and final session of our FOCAL POINT Dialogues in History series. Inspired by the History Department’s Statement on the George Floyd Uprising and its invocation to understand and interrogate our racialized past and the investments of disciplinary history within it, the series brings together UCSB History faculty and graduate students who have volunteered to lead a dialogue on Black life, race, and antiblackness in history. The final webinar will engage Herman Bennett’s African Kings and Black Slaves, as a focal point to discuss themes like racial capitalism and liberalism from different historical angles of vision.
Our final webinar will transition into a Zoom meeting room format. Registration for the Zoom meeting is required. Please click on the link below to register, after which you will receive a passcode and meeting link. You will need the passcode to enter the meeting.
Date: April 16, 2021
Time: 1:00 PM Pacific Time (US and Canada)
Webinar III: Racial Capitalism and Liberalism
Zoom registration: Please register in advance for this webinar using the link below.
https://ucsb.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZcud-yvrj4iE9O-rnuoC1Vo4oW2d61R6HzW
Featuring presentations by Alice O’Connor, Manuel Covo, Mattie Webb, and Sherene Seikaly
Comment by Mhoze Chikowero

Alice O’Connor is a historian of poverty, capitalism, inequality, social science, and public policy in the U.S. and the author of Poverty Knowledge (2001) and Social Science for What? (2007).
Manuel Covo is a historian of French imperialism, the Atlantic World, and the Haitian Revolution and the author of the forthcoming The Entrepot of Atlantic Revolutions.
Mattie Webb is a historian of U.S. foreign policy, African History, and comparative race and ethnicity. Mattie’s archival and oral-historical research combines social and diplomatic history to study the impact and awareness of the Sullivan Principles in South Africa during the apartheid era.
Sherene Seikaly is a historian of political economy, capitalism, development, race, and dispossession in the modern Middle East and the author of Men of Capital (2016) and co-editor of A Critical Political Economy of the Middle East and North Africa (2021).
Mhoze Chikowero is a historian of music, colonialism, technology, and urban space in Zimbabwe and southern Africa and the author of African Music, Power, and Being in Colonial Zimbabwe (2015).

ISRRAR Event–Dr. Vincent Brown, "Tacky's Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War"
2021-04-20 16:00 | Zoom, CA
Warfare migrates. This has never been more apparent than in the era when the violence of imperial expansion and enslavement transformed Europe, Africa, and the Americas, as they interacted across the Atlantic Ocean. European imperial conflicts extended the dominion of capitalist agriculture. African battles fed captives to the transatlantic trade in slaves. Masters and their human property struggled with one another continuously. These clashes amounted to a borderless slave war: war to enslave, war to expand slavery, and war against slaves, precipitating wars waged by the enslaved against slaveholders. In this sense, Dr. Vincent Brown argues, Tacky’s revolt was but a war within other wars, which had diverging and overlapping provocations, combat zones, political alliances, and enemy combatants.
Join this Zoom event at tinyurl.com/isrrarTalk
This event is part of the ISRRAR Spring Quarter series.

CWWG Workshop–Mattie Webb, "Beyond Desegregation: Waging a Battle Against Apartheid in the South African Workplace"
2021-04-24 14:00 - 16:00 | Zoom, CA
On Saturday, April 24, from 2 to 4 pm, the Center for Cold War Studies and International History (CCWS) will host a workshop. They will read and discuss a dissertation chapter, “Beyond Desegregation: Waging a Battle Against Apartheid in the South African Workplace,” by Mattie Webb, a doctoral candidate in the UCSB history department.
This workshop is part of a new CCWS initiative, the Cold War Working Group (CWWG), a collaborative, graduate student-led group designed to provide a supportive, welcoming environment for graduate students working on or around the Cold War and international history. The workshops provide an occasion for graduate students, faculty, and others to join together as peers to read, and provide feedback on, scholarly work in progress (dissertation chapters, journal articles, etc.) by members of our community.
If you wish to participate in the April 24 workshop, please email Addie (who is also serving this year as the CCWS Graduate Fellow) at addisonmjensen@ucsb.edu, and she will provide you with a copy of Mattie’s dissertation chapter, along with a Zoom address.
Please join us for this exciting event!

History Beyond the Academy: A Conversation
2021-04-24 16:00 | Zoom, CA
Come and join us for a panel discussion with recent graduates from UCSB’s Department of
History (Mariel Aquino, Doug Genens, Caitlin Rathe, and Stephanie Seketa) to learn about their experiences working as historians beyond the Academy. Learn about work in academic administration, the non-profit sector and how to research and produce podcasts. The discussion will be moderated by current graduate students Addie Jensen and Mattie Webb. All are welcome!
Join this event on Zoom at https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/6855143149.
Click here to download the event flyer.

History Associates: Patrick McCray, "Making Art Work: Artists and Engineers in the Age of Apollo"
2021-04-25 16:00 | Zoom, CA
Join the History Associates this Sunday for an engaging presentation from UCSB History Professor Patrick McCray.
Artwork as opposed to experiment? Engineer versus artist? We often see two different cultural realms separated by impervious walls. But some fifty years ago, the borders between technology and art began to be breached. In this talk UCSB history professor (and former engineer) W. Patrick McCray shows how in this era, artists eagerly collaborated with engineers and scientists to explore new technologies and create visually and sonically compelling multimedia works. Today, we are in the midst of a new surge of corporate and academic promotion of projects and programs combining art, technology, and science. Making Art Work reveals how artists and technologists have continually constructed new communities in which they exercise imagination, display creative expertise, and pursue commercial innovation.
Zoom link: ucsb.zoom.us/j/6855143149

Interdisciplinary Conference on "Fallout: Chernobyl and the Ecology of Disaster"
2021-04-29 - 2021-04-30 | Zoom, CA
The interdisciplinary virtual conference Fallout: Chernobyl and the Ecology of Disaster will take place on Friday, April 30, 2021 at 9:00am-4:00pm (Pacific Time, US & Canada), when an international slate of speakers representing a variety of disciplines will share their insights on the 35th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster.

The day before, an associated Carsey-Wolf Center virtual discussion of the award-winning documentary “The Babushkas of Chernobyl,” with Director Holly Morris, will take place on Thursday, April 29, 2021 at 4:00pm (Pacific Time, US & Canada), before which registered participants can pre-screen the film. Information on registering for both events and the conference website are below:

Conference Website

Register for the Virtual Conference at 9am-4pm Pacific Time (US & Canada) on Friday, April 30, 2021

Register for the Carsey-Wolf Center Virtual Discussion at 4pm Pacific Time (US & Canada) on Thursday, April, 29, 2021

Thirty-five years after the 1986 nuclear accident at Chernobyl, the interdisciplinary virtual conference Fallout: Chernobyl and the Ecology of Disaster considers its afterlife and reverberations in various disciplines, including culture and the arts. Situated at a watershed moment during the Cold War, Chernobyl has spawned an unprecedented quantity of global responses from scientists, writers, filmmakers, and artists, and it has become a key moment for the global environmental movement. This conference views the accident and its aftermath in the context of broader global ecologies of disaster and considers how catastrophe is coded and understood — or fails to be understood — through the prism of science, art, literature, and film. How do all these disciplines and discourses confront the disaster, and where do they converge to produce the fiction, or the truth, of what we call “Chernobyl”? The conference brings together scholars and experts in Comparative Literature, History, Anthropology, Environmental Studies, Nuclear Engineering, Medicine, Art, Film, and Germanic and Slavic Studies.

Sponsored by the Division of Arts and Letters and the T. A. Barron Environmental Fund. Event partners include the Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies, the, and the Carsey-Wolf Center. Other sponsors include the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, Department of Global Studies, Comparative Literature Program, Environmental Studies, Cold War Studies, College of Creative Studies, and History Department. (Rescheduled from April 2020 when it was postponed due to COVID-19.)

ISRRAR Event–Dr. Sylvester Ogbechie, “Godbearer: Yoruba Orisa, Black Atlantic Modernisms and Afrofuturist Imaginaries”
2021-05-04 16:00 | Zoom, CA
Dr. Sylvester Ogbechie‘s work evaluates the resurgence of African gods in Black Atlantic modernisms, contemporary media and Afrofuturist visualities. African deities are everywhere in contemporary culture from the Akan trickster god Anansi and numerous Yoruba Orisa in the American Gods TV series, through images of the Kh’Met (Egyptian) goddess Bast in the Afrofuturist blockbuster movie Black Panther, to the cyberspace narratives of William Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy that centered the Loa (gods) of the Haitian Vodun pantheon as primary characters. This resurgence corresponds to a return of discourses of spirituality in narratives of modernity and contemporary art practice. What is the meaning of this contemporary focus on African deities and how does it allow us to engage anew or reinterpret Black Atlantic arts that foreground African spiritual and cultural registers?
Join this Zoom event at tinyurl.com/isrrarTalk
This event is part of the ISRRAR Spring Quarter series.

Nicole Archambeau, "War, Plague & Confession: Stories of Survival from Fourteenth-Century Provence"
2021-05-06 16:00 | Zoom, CA
The History Department is proud to welcome back alumna Dr. Nicole Archambeau (History, Colorado State University) for a virtual talk based on her new book Souls under Siege: Stories of War, Plague, and Confession in Fourteenth-Century Provence. You can read a glowing review of Souls under Siege in the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Dr. Archambeau’s book and talk draw on a rich evidentiary base of 68 narrative testimonials from the canonization inquest for Countess Delphine de Puimichel, which was held in the market town of Apt in 1363. Each witness in the inquest had lived through outbreaks of plague in 1348 and 1361, as well as violence inflicted by mercenaries unemployed during truces in the Hundred Years’ War. Faced with an unprecedented cascade of crises, the inhabitants of Provence relied on saints and healers, their worldview connecting earthly disease and disaster to the struggle for their eternal souls. Their testimonies unexpectedly reveal the importance of faith and the role of affect in the healing of both body and soul.
Advance registration is required for this event. You can sign up here.
Click here to download the flyer for Dr. Archambeau’s talk.
