Department of History, UC Santa Barbara

Sophie Desrosiers speaks on Precolumbian Andean Textiles
2016-11-03 16:00 - 17:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | HSSB 4020, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
“Looking at the Central Andes from a Textile Viewpoint: How Textiles Shaped Peruvian Space from the Early Horizon to the Incas”
Professor Sophie Desrosiers brings together archeological evidence and observations of contemporary practice in order to reconstruct historical textile practices. Her main areas of study are the Andes, Xinjiang archaeological textiles, and silk between China and Europe during the Late Antique and Medieval periods.
Professor Desrosiers is the maîtresse de conferences at the Centre de Recherches Historiques at the EHESS (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales).

Prof. Alice O'Connor on "Democracy Matters: The Road to Self-Governance in Isla Vista"
2016-11-03 17:00 - 19:00 | Davidson Library (UCSB), Davidson Library, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
On November 8 Isla Vista residents will take part in a historic vote that will determine the future of self-governance in the community. With ballot initiatives E and F, they will weigh in on proposals to create a new Community Services District with an elected board, and a utility tax to empower it to provide locally-controlled services. Drawing on the UCSB Library’s extensive historical holdings as well as the contemporary scene, Professor of History Alice O’Connor will discuss the issues, debates, and traditions of community-based activism that have brought Isla Vista to this important point of decision about its political future, and what’s at stake in the vote. The talk will be in the Library Special Research Collections Room, 3rd floor of UCSB Davidson Library, Mountain Side.

History Department Panel - UCSB Parents' Weekend - Protest and Politics in Historical Perspective
2016-11-04 16:00 - 17:30 | McCune Conference Room (HSSB 6020), Humanities and Social Sciences Bldg, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
“Protest and Politics in Historical Perspective,” Panelists:
Professor Giuliana Perrone, PhD UC Berkeley, “Black Lives Matter in Context: The Long HIstory of Black Activism in America”
Professor Nelson Lichtenstein, PhD UC Berkeley, “$15 an Hour: Is it a Social Movement?”
Professor Alice O’Connor, PhD Johns Hopkins University, “By the People: Self-Governance and the Isla Vista Ballot Initiatives”
Q&A and Reception to follow the presentations

Phi Alpha Theta Meeting: Learn About CSU Long Beach's M.A. in History Program
2016-11-07 15:30 - 17:00 | HSSB 4020, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Please join UCSB’s Phi Alpha Theta and the History Club in welcoming Dr. David Shafer, Chair of the Department of History at CSU-LB. Dr. Shafer will be on campus to introduce the M.A. in History Program at CSULB.

Five Centuries of Mortality: The Second Plague Pandemic in Comparative Perspective, Egypt, 1347 - 1844 CE Stuart Borsch (Assumption College)
2016-11-07 17:00 - 18:30 | HSSB 4080, 4080 Humanities and Social Sciences Building, UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
This talk will analyze the impact of the Second plague pandemic in Egypt (1347-1844 CE). The Second plague pandemic refers to the long series of epidemics that struck the Middle East and Europe, starting with the Black Death, 1347-1351 CE. This pandemic generally lasted until the early 1700s in Europe, but longer in the Middle East. Why was this? Professor Borsch explores this question and the possible connection to the economic and technological divergence between Europe and the Middle East between the 1300s and 1800s. Borsch also takes a comparative perspective, looking at the dynamics of this long-term catastrophe by studying the mortality of the urban (Cairo, Alexandria, Qus, Asyut) and rural plague outbreaks in the Mamluk and Ottoman periods and into the modern period, 1347-1844. His talk will include some comparative perspectives with Syrian population losses.
Co-sponsored by the King Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud Chair in Islamic Studies and the Center for Middle East Studies

Digital History Workshop: Mapping Spartacus: The Topography of Servitude and Rebellion --
2016-11-14 13:00 - 15:00 | Public History Reading Room, HSSB 3027, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Spartacus is a historical figure that has captured the imagination of millions since he escaped from that gladiatorial school in Capua over two millennia ago. This workshop looks at the historical sources for the Third Servile War (73-71 BCE) and then introduces basic digital approaches to mapping the movement of Spartacus and his supporters through the Italic peninsula, based on these surviving texts and using geodata from the Pleiades Project. No knowledge of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) is required for this workshop, just an interest in Roman history, the geography of rebellion, and the use of texts to reconstruct the topography of social history. Led by Sarah Bond, professor of History and Classics at the University of Iowa, and regular blogger for Forbes Magazine on connections between the ancient and modern worlds, this is another of our events to celebrate the 40th Anniversary of the founding of Public History at UCSB.
Please RSVP to Professor James Brooks.

Monumental Mausolea: Building Projects and Slave Labor from Antiquity to the World Cup
2016-11-14 17:00 - 18:30 | HSSB 3041, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Sarah Bond, Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of Iowa, will examine the use of slave labor in monumental building through a broad historical lens. The use of contracted and slave labor for large building projects has roots going back to antiquity. The Pyramids at Giza, the Baths of Caracalla, the Great Wall of China, and, now, the sports arenas being erected for the Qatar World Cup in 2022 have all relied upon thousands of workers in order to build these monumental structures. Despite the hands of thousands contributing to the creation of these landmark buildings, the lives of the contracted workers, slaves, and freed-persons who labored and often died while working on them have been largely invisible. This lecture examines the politics of celebrating a building such as the Colosseum or the White House while disregarding the contributions and sacrifices of the slaves that made these works possible. It also asks: what new landscapes of memory, commemoration, and public appreciation can be created when we notify the public of the extensive input of slaves?
Sponsored by the IHC’s Slavery, Captivity, and the Meaning of Freedom RFG, the Dept. of Classics, the Public History Program, and the IHC’s Ancient Borderlands RFG.

"China and the 2008 Riots in Tibet: What Happened, and How Do We Know?" with Prof. Zheng
2016-11-20 16:30 - 18:00 | Goleta Valley Public Library, 500 N. Fairview Avenue, Goleta, CA, 93117, United States
UCSB’s Professor Xiaowei Zheng (November 20 at 4:30PM at the Goleta Public Library) will discuss the difficulties in assessing the 2008 riots in Tibet. The rioting that began on March 14 in the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, spread quickly to other Tibetan cities. In Lhasa, rioters targeted Han Chinese merchants who suffered injuries, casualties, and massive property damage. In the crackdown that followed, the authorities arrested over a thousand Tibetans. Controversy quickly emerged over allegations that there had been serious inaccuracies and biases in reports about the coverage of the riots in the international media. Zheng will analyze the coverage, drawing upon video images and press accounts. The media stories shaped people’s understanding of the events, demonstrating how challenging it can be even to know the very recent past.

"The Devil's Wheels: Men and Motorcycling in the Weimar Republic," A Talk by Sasha Disko
2016-12-01 12:00 - 14:00 | HSSB 4020, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
During the high days of modernization fever, among the many disorienting changes Germans experienced in the Weimar Republic was an unprecedented mingling of consumption and identity: increasingly, what one bought signaled who one was. Exemplary of this volatile dynamic was the era’s burgeoning motorcycle culture. With automobiles largely a luxury of the upper classes, motorcycles complexly symbolized masculinity and freedom, embodying a widespread desire to embrace progress as well as profound anxieties over the course of social transformation. Through its richly textured account of the motorcycle as both icon and commodity,The Devil’s Wheels teases out the intricacies of gender and class in the Weimar years.

Gender and Sexualities Research Cluster Brown Bag
2016-12-05 12:00 - 13:00 | HSSB, location TBD, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
The Gender and Sexuality Research Cluster will meet periodically throughout the year for brown bag lunches to read and workshop works-in-progress from members of the research cluster.
On December 5th, Sarah Case will discuss, “Juliette Derricotte, Mildred Rutherford Mell, and the Limits of Interwar Interracialism.” Draft papers will be distributed before the event, and all participants will be invited to offer feedback to the author.
Contact history-gender-cluster@history.ucsb.edu for more information or to join the Gender and Sexuality Research Cluster

Mariel Aquino, "'A unique case in the world of football": Athletic Club de Bilbao, Nationalism, and Basque Exceptionalism.”
2017-01-09 12:00 - 13:00 | HSSB 4080, 4080 Humanities and Social Sciences Building, UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
The Gender and Sexualities Research Cluster invites all to attend a paper workshop by Mariel Aquino. The paper explores the construction of masculinity and Basque nationalism through an examination of football (soccer), specifically the Athletic Club de Bilbao. This is a paper workshop so please try to read the paper in advance.
Mariel Aquino is graduate student in the history department, writing a dissertation on Basque immigration and national identities in the American West in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.
Click Here to Download Paper: Aquino

American History & Institutions Exam 9/27/2016
2017-01-11 09:00 - 12:00 | HSSB 3038
American History & Institutions Exam
Alternative way of satisfying UCSB AH & I GE requirement, 01/11/2017 9:00-12:00 am in HSSB 3038
Well in advance of the exam date, contact Monica I. Garcia Ph.D. for information regarding the exam to satisfy the American History and Institutions general education requirement and to obtain the required reading list, please contact:
Monica I. Garcia, Ph.D.
Undergraduate Advisor, History
HSSB 4036
http://www.history.ucsb.edu/advisingcalendar.php
Email: migarcia@hfa.ucsb.edu
EXAM DATE AND TIME:
WEDNESDAY JANUARY 11, 2017
9:00am -12:00pm HSSB 3038
The exam is administered once per quarter during the first week. Students are only allowed to take the exam once for pass/no pass.

Talk by Prof Rui Kohiyama on American Women Missionaries and Romantic Love in Meiji Japan
2017-01-11 16:00 - 17:30 | HSSB 4080, 4080 Humanities and Social Sciences Building, UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Please join us in welcoming Professor Rui Kohiyama (American and Gender Studies, Tokyo Woman’s Christian University) to UCSB. Professor Kohiyama will give a talk on “American Woman Missionaries, Christian Homes, and Romantic Love in Meiji Japan.” American women missionaries are well known for their educational and reformatory intervention in various mission fields in Asia. Although their initiatives in criticizing child marriage and widowhood in india and foot-binding in China are famous, those in Japan are vague: all we have been told is that they introduced “modern education for women” in Japan. This presentation will clarify the relationship between “modern education for women” and the missionary aim of creating Christian homes, and point out the unexpected outcome of missionary education: nurturing “romantic love” in mission schools.
Professor Rui Kohiyama is author of As Our god Along Will Lead Us: The Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Foreign Missionary Enterprise and its Encounter with Meiji Japan (in Japanese, 1992) and co-editor/co-author of Introduction to the History of Gender in the United States (in Japanese, 2010).

Critical Race Theory and The Health Sciences
2017-01-13 08:00 - 17:00 | Boston University School of Law, 765 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, MA, 02215, United States
This symposium, organized in part by UCSB History and Black Studies Professor Terence Keel, will explore the embedded nature of race in the health sciences and identify opportunities to disrupt and rethink these arrangements in pursuit of racial justice and health equity. We will examine the interconnected histories of science, medicine, and law that lead racial differences and disparities to be mistakenly understood and experienced as natural phenomena, obscuring their social, political, and economic determinants. We will also discuss the theoretical and empirical interventions that bring attention to the constructed nature of our racial imaginations in the health sciences. Additionally, the methodological challenges associated with developing intersectional approaches that do not obscure (and indeed support) the centrality of other identity standpoints—such as sex, gender, class, sexuality, and disability—when exploring race in health sciences research will be considered through the symposium presentations and discussions.
All—including faculty, students, and the general public—are welcome to attend the symposium on Friday, January 20, 2017. For academic questions, contact the AJLM Symposium editors at ajlmsymposium@gmail.com.

Trevor Burnard, History, University of Melbourne, "Slavery and British Industrialisation: the 'New History of Capitalism Movement' and Eric Williams' Capitalism and Slavery."
2017-01-13 13:00 - 15:00 | CA
Trevor Burnard is the author of Planters, Merchants, and Slaves: Plantation Societies in British America, 1650-1820 (2015) and The Plantation Machine: Atlantic Capitalism in French Saint Domingue and British Jamacia (2016, with John Garrigus) A copy of his paper, “Slavery and British Industrialisation: The ‘New History of Capitalism Movement’ and Eric Williams’ Capitalism and Slavery” can be found here: Slavery and British Industrialisation

The Bisno Schall Gallery at the Santa Barbara County Courthouse
2017-01-14 14:15 - 15:45 | Santa Barbara County Courthouse, 1000 Anacapa Street, Santa Barbara, CA, 93101, United States
The UCSB History Associates invite you to a docent-led tour of the Bisno Schall Gallery in the tower of the Santa Barbara County Courthouse. From 1929 until 2011 the magnificent Seth Thomas masterpiece that moves the hands on the tower clock was out of sight. Dr. David Bisno and the late Dick Schall funded a renovation project (complete with murals on the walls and ceiling) that was completed in 2011. See the flyer for details, and sign up for space with Sears McGee (jsmcgee@history.ucsb.edu). BSG-flyer-pub

Black Classicism in the United States- Lecture by Prof. Michele Ronnick, Wayne State University
2017-01-19 17:30 - 19:00 | Art, Design, and Architecture Museum, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Professor Michele Ronnick of Wayne State University will give a lecture as part of the new exhibit, “14 Black Classicists,” at the Art, Design, and Architecture Museum. The talk describes the work of African-American classical scholars who taught Greek and Latin at the college or university level following the Civil War. These scholars made pathbreaking achievements, opening up fields like philology (the study of language) and paving the way for African-Americans to attend college.
The exhibit, 14 Black Classicists, is organized by Professor Ronnick and was brought to UCSB by Professor Helen Morales, the Hellenic Studies Committee, and the Department of Classics, thanks to the generosity of UCSB’s Argyropoulos endowment in Hellenic Studies and is co-sponsored by the Department of Black Studies.

Roman Historian, Eric Rebillard, speaks Friday
2017-01-20 17:00 - 18:00 | HSSB 3041, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
The Ancient Borderlands Research Focus Group welcomes Prof. Eric Rebillard of Cornell University’s Departments of History and Classics. The title of his talk is “Res gestas martyrum digerere: North African Hagiography until the Time of Augustine.” He is the author of Christians and Their Many Identities in Late Antiquity (Cornell, 2012).

Salim Yaqub, History, "Imperfect strangers: Americans, Arabs, and U.S.-Middle East Relations in the 1970s"
2017-01-25 17:00 - 19:00 | McCune Conference Room (HSSB 6020), Humanities and Social Sciences Bldg, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Salim Yaqub will be giving a talk on his new book, Imperfect Strangers: Americans, Arabs, and U.S.-Middle East Relations in the 1970s, which was published by Cornell University Press in September 2016. In this book Yaqub argues that the 1970s were a pivotal decade in U.S.-Arab relations—a time when Americans and Arabs became an inescapable presence in each other’s lives and perceptions, and when each society came to feel profoundly vulnerable to the political, economic, cultural, and even physical encroachments of the other. Throughout the seventies, these impressions aroused striking antagonism between the United States and the Arab world. Over the same period, however, elements of the U.S. intelligentsia grew more respectful of Arab perspectives, and a newly assertive Arab American community emerged into political life. These patterns left a contradictory legacy of estrangement and accommodation that continued in later decades and remains with us today.
Yaqub is Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Director of UCSB’s Center for Cold War Studies and International History. He is the author of Containing Arab Nationalism: The Eisenhower Doctrine and the Middle East (University of North Carolina, 2004) and of several articles and book chapters on the history of U.S. foreign relations, the international politics of the Middle East, and Arab American political activism.

Marshall Steinbaum, Economics, The Roosevelt Institute, "Student Debt and the Labor Market: Challenges to Theory and Policy"
2017-01-27 13:00 - 15:00 | CA
Marshall Steinbaum, who holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Chicago, is Senior Economist and Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. He has authored numerous papers on job mobility, economic inequality, student debt, entrepreneurship and the corporate economy.

Jeff Sklansky, History, University of Illinois at Chicago, "The Fund of Trust: Monetary Reform and the Ethic of Investment in the Gilded Age"
2017-02-03 13:00 - 15:00 | CA
Sklansky is the author of The Soul’s Economy: Market Society and Selfhood in American Thought, 1820-1920 (2002) and the forthcoming Sovereign of the Market: The Money Question in Early America. A copy of his paper, “”The Fund of Trust: Monetary Reform and the Ethic of Investment in the Gilded Age” can be found here: Sklansky

Panel Discussion: Historical Perspectives on President Trump's Jan. 27 Executive Order on Immigration
2017-02-08 17:00 - 18:30 | HSSB 6020 (McCune Room), University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Three faculty of the UCSB History Department will provide historical perspectives on immigration in the U.S.:
Giuliana Perrone, “The History of Exclusion in American Law”
Nelson Lichtenstein, “Immigrants Built the American Left and They Will Do It Again”
Paul Spickard, “Immigration in a Time of Hate”
Feb. 8 Poster

Ann Little (Colorado State University) - Blogging, Tweeting, and Instagramming the Borderlands of Public and Academic History: Social Media as a Tool for Public Engagement
2017-02-09 12:00 - 13:30 | HSSB 3208, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
College and university History departments (once again?) say they’re in crisis: nationwide, our numbers of majors have shrunk dramatically over the past decade, not to mention the “job crisis” of the past 45 years that has outlived the expansion of the profession from 1945-1970 nearly twice over. What’s an academic historian to do about this? Social media like Facebook, blogs, Twitter, and Instagram can be tools for building interest and support for our work as historians, and can help build careers to boot.
This talk by Ann M. Little (from Colorado State University’s Department of History) will examine the promise (mostly) and perils of being a historian in public online.

In keeping with the theme, if you want to check out Ann on Twitter, she’s at @historiann or read her blog.

Professor Ann Little (Colorado State University) - The Many Captivities of Esther Wheelwright: Communities of Women in the Northeast Borderlands.
2017-02-09 15:00 - 16:30 | HSSB 4080, 4080 Humanities and Social Sciences Building, UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Join us for a talk by Prof. Ann Little who will be speaking about her new book, The Many Captivities of Esther Wheelwright: Communities of Women in the Northeast Borderlands.

Esther Wheelwright (1696-1780) embodies the imperial conquest of North America like no other eighteenth-century figure, yet she has been largely written out of the story of American history. Born and raised to age seven in a New England garrison town, she was taken in wartime by the Wabanaki in 1703 and taught to pray as a Catholic and to live like a Native girl. At age twelve, she was enrolled in the Ursuline convent school as a student, where she would remain for the rest of her life as a choir nun, eventually becoming the first and only foreign-born Mother Superior of the order. Learn why she has been forgotten, and what remembering her can teach us.

This talk is sponsored by the Slavery, Captivity, and Meaning of Freedom Research Focus Group

Nicole De Silva, History UCSB, "Fashioning Chinese America Cultural Citizenship and the Transpacific Boycott of Japanese Silk Stockings, 1937-1940”
2017-02-15 15:30 - 17:00 | HSSB 3001E, 3001E Humanities and Social Sciences Building, UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
The Commerce, Commodities and Material Culture Research Cluster will be hosting its first paper workshop this year to discuss Nicole De Silva’s paper “Fashioning Chinese America Cultural Citizenship and the Transpacific Boycott of Japanese Silk Stockings, 1937-1940.”

The paper positions the Japanese silk stocking boycott of 1937-1941 as a staging ground that fostered the development of a Chinese American cultural and political identity in the midst of the Exclusion Era. It tells a story unbound by US national borders to demonstrate how contact and collaboration between US/ Chinese residents enabled boycott participants to articulate their biculturalism, perform their image of modernity, and find their political voices. By fitting this movement into larger historical disputes around trade, diplomatic policy, labor politics, and US anti-fascism, the project suggests that the debate over the buying and selling of Japanese silk hosiery was more than it might have “seamed.”

Please read the paper before coming to the workshop. It is available here: NDS Silk Stockings Fall 2017 Revisions

Hail the Maintainers! or - How to Give Up the Innovation Fetish (Prof. Lee Vinsel)
2017-02-16 16:00 - 17:30 | HSSB 4080, 4080 Humanities and Social Sciences Building, UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Hail the Maintainers! or – How to Give Up the Innovation Fetish
Join us for a talk by Prof. Lee Vinsel, Stevens Institute of Technology – 16 February 2017 in HSSB 4080 at 4PM
Our culture is obsessed with innovation. Innovation is thought to be the goal of business, policy-making, philanthropy, education, even play. Yet, the vast majority of human activity aims not at creating or adopting innovative things but in maintaining old ones. While our society celebrates Innovators, the simple truth is that most of us are Maintainers. This talk first traces the rise of innovation-speak in the USA. The Cult of Invention that developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries laid the foundation, but rise of the word “innovation” itself was a distinctly post-World War II phenomenon. Ironically, the term was used more and more after 1970—and particularly after 1990—when the United States experienced low economic growth and fewer meaningful innovations than in the previous hundred years.
Innovation-speak was a reaction to and antidote for economic malaise, and all institutions, including universities, were to be reformed in its name. After laying out this history, I will put forward an alternative view of human life with technology, drawing on a tradition of thought, including historians like Ruth Schwartz Cowan and David Edgerton. I will conclude by exploring the consequences of this more grounded view of technology and society for both the future of historical and social scientific technology studies and for policy-making.
This talk is co-sponsored with the Machines, People, and Politics RFG
A flyer for Lee’s talk is here.

David Moss, Harvard Business School, “E Pluribus Unum: Thoughts on the Perils (and Promise) of an Aging Democracy”
2017-02-17 13:00 - 15:00 | CA
David Moss is the Paul Whiton Cherington Professor at Harvard Business School, where he teaches in the Business, Government, and the International Economy (BGIE) unit. He earned his B.A. from Cornell University and his Ph.D. from Yale. A founder of the Tobin Project, Professor Moss is the author of Socializing Security: Progressive-Era Economists and the Origins of American Social Policy (1996); When All Else Fails: Government as the Ultimate Risk Manager (2002); and editor of Preventing Regulatory Capture: Special Interest Influence and How to Limit It (2014). A copy of his paper, “E Pluribus Unum: Thoughts on the Perils (and Promise) of an Aging Democracy,” will be available soon.

Cheryl Jimenez Frei, UCSB, "Shaping and Contesting the Past: Monuments, Memory and Identity in Buenos Aires"
2017-02-26 12:30 - 15:00 | Alumni Hall, Mosher Alumni Center, UCSB, Santa Barbara , CA, 93106, United States
UCSB History Associates invites you to attend the Fourth Annual Van Gelderen Graduate Student Lecture
Cheryl Jimemez Frei, a PhD Student in Latin American History, will be giving a lecture related to her work on memory and the built environment in Argentina. A luncheon will follow. To attend the luncheon, please fill out the form here: 2017-Frei flyer-3
In 2013, then-President of Argentina Cristina Fernández de Kirchner sparked both protest and praise after announcing the removal of a nearly century-old monument of Christopher Columbus in Buenos Aires. It had been a gift from Argentina’s prominent Italian immigrant community, to celebrate the nation’s centen-nial of independence. After two years of contentious public debates, Kirchner celebrated the inaugural of the massive monument that replaced it—a sculpture of Jua-na Azurduy de Padilla, a nineteenth-century female rev-olutionary fighter of indigenous heritage, and a histori-cal figure previously unknown to most.
The controversy over these statues provides a flashpoint to examine the history and iconography of monuments in Buenos Aires’s commemorative core, to question how history, identity, and memory are pro-duced and internalized through public spaces. How did monuments perform specific didactic functions in the past, and do they continue to do so in the present? If so, who has authority in representation? What should be-come of monuments to now-questionable heroes and narratives of the past?
Cheryl Jimenez Frei is completing her PhD dissertation in Latin American History. Her research specialties include Argentina, memory, and the built environment, visual culture, and public history. Her article, “Contesting Columbus: Monuments, Memory and Identity in Buenos Aires,” was recently accepted by the Journal of Latin American Studies.

Film—"Nasser's Republic: The Making of Modern Egypt"
2017-02-28 19:30 - 21:20 | HSSB 6020 (McCune Room), University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
The Center for Cold War Studies and International History will show Icarus Film’s new documentary, “Nasser’s Republic: The Making of Modern Egypt,” a stirring but unflinching portrayal of Gamal Abdel Nasser and his impact on Egyptian, pan-Arab, and international politics. After the screening of the film, which runs about 80 minutes, Sherene Seikaly, Associate Professor of History at UCSB, will offer commentary and lead a discussion of the film.
The event is free an open to the public. Delicious refreshments will be served!
Nasser’s Republic Flyer

"The Beach Boys: Classified Research with a Southern California Vibe" - Bill Leslie; The Johns Hopkins University
2017-03-02 16:00 - 17:30 | HSSB 4080, 4080 Humanities and Social Sciences Building, UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Long before companies such as Apple and Google learned how to attract and indulge their high tech workforces with espresso bars, climbing walls, flextime, and other perks, laboratories likeRAND in Santa Monica, Hughes Research Laboratories in Malibu, and Nortronics in Palos Verdes perfected the art of concierge science. These were venues designed to recruit, retain, and inspire researchers with bold architecture, scenic views, challenging problems, brilliant colleagues and a lifestyle best described as “cold war avant-garde”. Whether through curated contemporary art collections, guest lecture series by recent Nobel prize winners, or simply the opportunity to live and play in some of the area’s best beachfront resorts, these companies reimagined the scientific life as a aesthetic choice for members of an emerging ‘creative class,’ with a distinctly regional flair. Southern California promised a new style of doing science where researchers themselves called the shots, where the bottom line did not constrain blue sky thinking, and where youthful exuberance had the chance to prove itself.

About the Speaker: Bill Leslie has taught the history of science and technology at Johns Hopkins University since 1981. He has written on industrial research, Cold War science, corporate architecture, and most recently the architecture of science. Much of his recent work looks at science and technology in the developing world—Iran, India, and Pakistan—and at the aerospace industry in Southern California. He is currently writing a history of Johns Hopkins University.
A flyer for the talk is here.
