Department of History

History Department Statement  George Floyd’s slow, excruciating, and brutal death on May 25, 2020 has sparked a global uprising. The UCSB History Department grieves and stands in solidarity with colleagues and students on campus and in the community, and with Black people around the world. The Floyd Uprising has, like many Black led movements in the past, launched our reckoning […]

On Sunday, June 14th 2020, the History Department held a virtual gradation ceremony to honor our undergrads and PhD students graduating this year. If you weren’t able to attend, you can view the ceremony below!

The History Department held their annual awards ceremony over Zoom this year, with campus still closed to in-person meetings. If you weren’t able to attend, you can view the ceremony below. Congratulations to all of our 2020 History Associates and Department of History award recipients!      

History Professor Brad Bouley gave a lecture on “The Black Plague, 1346-1351″ that was recorded recently by UCSB Admissions and made available to our incoming students for the coming academic year and their parents. You can view his lecture on the UCSB admissions youtube channel here!

To help support students as they face current  covid-19 and remote learning challenges, the university has created a new “Student Wellbeing” website. This website includes resources for financial and food insecurity, technology rentals, mental health, physical health, support groups and much more. Please visit the website HERE for more information. 

In honor of Black History Month, the Journal of American History asked Professor Peniel Joseph of the University of Texas to curate a special on-line issue designed to highlight ten key articles, previously published in the JAH, illuminating the theme, “Black Power, American Democracy, and Dreams of Citizenship.” Among those selected was “Opportunities Found and Lost: Labor, Radicals, and the […]

Doctoral Candidate in Public History, Melissa Barthelemy, was interviewed by CBS News KCAL9 about the Spontaneous Memorials created for Kobe Bryant and the other victims of the helicopter crash near Calabasas that occurred on Sunday January 26th. Check it out here.

The Department of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara invites applications for a pool of qualified temporary lecturers to teach a course (or courses) in History for upcoming openings. The number of positions varies from quarter to quarter and may include summer terms, depending on the needs of the department. Courses needed may include: • Hist 2A, 2B, […]

The special issue, “Gender and Intimacy across the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands,” with guest editors Miroslava Chávez-García and Verónica Castillo-Muñoz has just been released! This issue focuses on the primacy of gender and intimacy in the 19th and early 20th C borderlands. Features articles by Celeste R. Menchaca on sexual regulation at the border, Erika Pérez on several generations of the biethnic […]

The Latin American and Iberian Studies Program’s undergraduate conference has been featured in the UCSB Current! Check it out here. Several members of the History department faculty are part of the program, including Professor Cecilia Méndez, who is program director. She is featured in the article and discusses why the theme of displacement and migration is a potent one for […]

Professor Rappaport’s new book A Thirst for Empire has been chosen as the featured review in the next issue of the American Historical Review. Check it out here!

Professor De Hart and her book were featured in the online publication of the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts at UCSB. The article details not only the book itself but the long process of writing and publication. Check it out here!

Congratulations to Stephanie Seketa, a department graduate who has just been hired as the Director of Academic Affairs at Marist College in New York. This position manages college-wide projects (under the office of the Vice President of Academic Affairs) including: academic events such as commencement, convocation, and high-profile lectures; public relations; regulatory compliance and accreditation oversight such as leading faculty in […]

Studies in Late Antiquity is edited by Prof. Elizabeth DePalma Digeser of the UCSB History Department.  Check out the contents of the latest issue below. Studies in Late Antiquity Spring 2019; Vol. 3, No. 1 THE EDITOR Embodying the Past Elizabeth Depalma Digeser Stud Late Antiq 2019; 3.1: 1-3 doi:10.1525/sla.2019.3.1.1 http://sla.ucpress.edu/content/3/1/1 VIEWPOINT ESSAY Advancing Feminism Online: Online Tools, Visibility, and […]

Both Professors Cobo and Castillo-Muñoz have been awarded prestigious library fellowships, which is a testament to the quality of their scholarship. Professor Cobo won a yearlong John Carter Brown Library fellowship for his project “The coming of the kingdom: the Muisca, the Catholic Reformation, and the Spanish monarchy in the New Kingdom of Granada.” The John Carter Brown Library, at Brown University, […]

Congratulations to Tim Paulson, who has accepted a faculty position at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan. Tim’s graduate research, which combined economic, labor, social, and environmental history, focused on the history of the American beef cattle industry–from ranch to table–and its place in a changing world economy. In addition to his dissertation, Tim taught courses in three departments, held […]

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. 

Congratulations to Cheryl Jiménez Frei, who just accepted a position in Public History at the University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire, and to Ben Ma, who has accepted a position at the University of Macau after a year-long post-doc at the University of Freiburg in Germany. Future professors Frei and Ma graduated in 2017 under Professors Sarah Cline and Anthony Barbieri-Low, […]

Bodies and Structures 1.0: Deep-Mapping Modern East Asian History is now live. The website, a collaboration between Kate McDonald and North Carolina State University professor David Ambaras, is a platform for researching and teaching spatial histories of Japan, its empire, and the larger worlds of which they were a part. It begins from the premise that space and place are fundamental […]

You can read the article here: https://www.dissentmagazine.org/blog/l-a-teachers-prepare-to-strike

The Department of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara invites applications for a pool of qualified temporary lecturers to teach a course (or courses) in History for the upcoming openings. The number of positions varies from quarter to quarter and may include Summer terms, depending on the needs of the department. Courses needed may include: • Hist 2A, […]

Anita Guerrini, a Horning Professor of the Humanities and Professor of History at Oregon State University and an adjunct professor at UCSB, has won the 2018 Pfizer Award for her book, The Courtiers’ Anatomists: Animals and Humans in Louis XIV’s Paris, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2015. Pfizer Book Prize is one of the top awards in […]

Professor de Hart’s new book, Ruth Bader Ginsburg: A Life, is the first full-life biography of the pioneering Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.   It has been getting a great deal of attention with reviews in Newsday, the Wall Street Journal, and other media outlets. Congratulations on the accomplishment, Professor de Hart!

The Department of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara invites applications for a tenure-track assistant professorship in Early North American history, c. 1700-1830. Appointment begins July 1, 2019. PhD expected at time of appointment or candidate must have completed all requirements for a PhD in History or a related field (or equivalent degree), except the dissertation (or equivalent), […]

UCSB History graduate student Brian Griffith has been awarded a 2018-2019 Fulbright Fellowship to conduct research in Italy on his doctoral dissertation, “Bacchus’ Blackshirt: Winemaking and Making Italians in Fascist Italy.” While residing primarily in Rome, he will conduct archival research in Rome and Florence, and he will interview vintners in Tuscany.

UCSB Emeritus Professor of History, Harold Clark Kirker, died in San Francisco on May 30, 2018, just a few days before his 97th birthday.  Professor Kirker, who served in the 10th Mountain Division of the U.S. Army from 1943-45, received his PhD from U.C. Berkeley in 1957.  After teaching at M.I.T. for nine years, he served on the faculty at […]

Rudy Guevarra, a 2007 UCSB History PhD, has been named one of two recipients of a 2018 Ford Foundation Senior Fellowship.  They give this description of his pathbreaking work: Rudy P. Guevarra Jr., Associate Professor Arizona State University, Asian Pacific American Studies, School of Social Transformation“Aloha Compadre: Latinxs in Hawai’i, 1832-2010” My research over the last eighteen years has focused […]

The History Department was saddened by the death of Professor Emeritus Carl Harris on May 14 of this year. Professor Harris, who joined the UCSB history faculty in 1968 and retired in 2011, combined theoretical breadth, innovative social science, and in-depth research in primary sources to produce influential scholarship on the nature and sources of political power in the United […]

Studies in Late Antiquity is edited by Prof. Elizabeth DePalma Digeser of the UCSB History Department.  Check out the contents of the latest issue below.   Studies in Late Antiquity Summer 2018; Vol. 2, No. 2   THE EDITOR The Chain of Hermes: Late Ancient Founders and Traditions Elizabeth Depalma Digeser Stud Late Antiq 2018; 2.2: 145-146 doi:10.1525/sla.2018.2.2.145 http://sla.ucpress.edu/content/2/2/145 ARTICLES […]

Last week, a number of UCSB History graduate students organized and participated in the biannual UCSB Graduate Student Medieval Studies Conference. This year’s conference theme was “The Politics of Pleasure: Social Networking in the Middle Ages.” The planning committee invited a number of scholars from diverse backgrounds to present on the varied ways in which pleasure leisure competition, entertainment, friendly […]

Dr. Holly Roose completed her PhD in History at UCSB last June. Since then, Holly received offers of tenure-track professorships, but she has decided to pursue a higher calling.  She is now the Director of UCSB’s Promise Scholar Program.  The program guides several hundred students who have extremely high financial need through their university careers.  She advises them, makes sure they […]

Professor Zheng has just published her monograph The Politics of Rights and the 1911 Revolution in China with Stanford University Press. China’s 1911 Revolution was a momentous political transformation. Its leaders, however, were not rebellious troublemakers on the periphery of imperial order. On the contrary, they were a powerful political and economic elite deeply entrenched in local society and well-respected both for […]

Professor Alagona has been awarded a visiting fellowship for fall, 2018 at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, where he will be working on his next monograph, Menagerie: People and Wildlife in the American City.

The UCSB History Department excelled with the most number of donors in the Humanities and Fine Arts during UCSB Give Day 2018.   Thank you to everyone who supported our department and our students!

Two UCSB History faculty — Giuliana Perrone and Sherene Seikaly — have been awarded UC Presidents’ Research Fellowships in the Humanities, which will enable them to spend the 2018-2019 academic year working on their next monographs. Professor Perrone’s project, Reconstructing the Law: Slavery in Post-Emancipation Southern Courts, tells the story of “legal Reconstruction,” which was the process by which all […]

Prof. Erika Rappaport’s book A Thirst for Empire: How Tea Shaped the Modern World was recently awarded the biannual Book Prize at the Pacific Coast Conference on British Studies (the PCCBS is an affiliate of the North American Conference on British Studies). A Thirst for Empire previously won the Gourmand award for Best Book on Tea in the World and has received excellent reviews in […]

Prof. Patrick McCray is the newest recipient of the Smithsonian Institution’s Arthur Molella Distinguished Fellowship. The position is offered for 2018-2019 by the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. The fellowship was awarded to McCray for his project “Artists as Inventors, Inventors as Artists” which aims to broaden our understanding […]

Dr. Sarah Case, who is Managing Editor for The Public Historian, published her book Leaders of Their Race: Educating Black and White Women in the New South last year. It has just been reviewed for H-Net. Professor Case has also been invited to be a feature author at the Decatur book festival this coming August/September.

Click here to read the full interview in the UCSB Current.

  Senior Honors Thesis student Zingha Foma has been chosen as the first  Parker-Tiampo Family Scholar.  The scholarship will support Foma’s research on her senior honors thesis, “The Origin of Dutch African Prints: An Investigation into the history of the Dutch owned African textile company, Vlisco.”  The project emerged from her discovery that today Vlisco, a European company, is the […]

With Spring 2018 registration beginning soon, here are some History classes to consider.  And, check out our full Spring 2018 schedule of classes. History 9: Introduction to Historical Methods– Hiroshima in History and Memory MWF 2:00-2:50pm, GIRV 2108. Professor Kate McDonald. How has the atomic bombing of Hiroshima been remembered and commemorated in the United States and Japan? This course […]

Professor McDonald appears in this week’s edition of the “Meiji at 150” podcast, hosted by Dr. Tristan Grunow at the University of British Columbia. Listen to the podcast here.

Studies in Late Antiquity (SLA) is a forum for innovation and reflection on global Late Antiquity (150 – 750 CE) which questions and expands on received models and methods. Primary points of interest include interconnections between the Mediterranean and Africa, Iran, Arabia, the Baltic, Scandinavia, the British Isles, China, India and all of Asia, as well as disrupting the assumed connection […]

A new study from the American Academy of Arts & Sciences challenges the myth of the underemployed, unhappy humanities graduate.  The study analyzed data from the U.S. Census and other government sources, plus Gallup polling of workers nationwide.  In contrast to stereotypes about humanities majors, the study reveals that workers with BA degrees in the humanities had a very low unemployment […]

Congratulations to Sergey Saluschev, who has been awarded a 2018-2019 research fellowship from the American Councils Title VIII Research Scholar Program.  Funded by the U.S. Department of State’s Program for Research and Training on Eastern Europe and the Independent States of the Former Soviet Union (Title VIII), the American Councils Research Scholar Program provides full support for graduate students, faculty, and independent scholars […]

Professor Manuel Covo has been awarded a research fellowship at the Huntington Library for the 2018-2019 academic year. During the tenure of the fellowship he will be finishing his first monograph, The Entrepôt of Atlantic Revolutions: Saint Domingue, Commercial Republicanism and the Remaking of the French Empire. This monograph will place the American, French, and Haitian Revolutions within a global context […]

Emerita Professor Sarah Cline has been appointed to a two year post on the General Council of the Conference on Latin American History

Anthony Barbieri-Low’s co-authored 2 volume work, Law, State and Society in Early Imperial China  (Brill 2015), has been accorded Honorable Mention status in this year’s Patrick D. Hanan Prize for translation from the Association for Asian Studies.  The prize is awarded biennially to an outstanding English translation of a significant work in any genre, from any work from any era that […]

Professor Juan Cobo Betancourt has won a $15,000 grant from the UC Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI) to support his work on a digital archive of texts from Colonial Latin America.  Prof. Cobo has co-founded a non-profit foundation devoted to digitizing the holdings of endangered archives and libraries in Colombia, making the results available and accesible online for free, and promoting […]

A Thirst for Empire, Professor Rappaport’s recent book on how tea shaped the British empire, has won a Gourmand World Cookbook Awards for the Best Book on Tea in the United States and the World. The Gourmand World Cookbook Awards were founded in 1995 by Edouard Cointreau and are the only international competition that features food writing. Every year, they honor […]

Professor Brownlee, author of Federal Taxation in America: a History and professor of economic history, appeared this week in the “Taxes” episode of the Washington Post podcast Constitutional. In the episode, he and Joseph Fishkin, professor of law at the University of Texas, Austin, discuss the history of the income tax in the United States in light of Congress’s historic tax reform bill. The […]

Professor Hasegawa was recently featured in a cover interview with Rorotoko: Cutting Edge Intellectual Interviews discussing his recently published book on the Russian Revolution, Crime and Punishment in the Russian Revolution: Mob Justice and Police in Petrograd. 

Click here to watch a short interview with Prof. McDonald about her recent book, Placing Empire: Travel and the Social Imagination in Imperial Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017).

Stephan Miescher, along with Javiera Barandiaran (Global Studies), Mona Damluji (Film and Media Studies), David Pellow (Environmental Studies), and Janet Walker (Film and Media Studies) has been awarded, by the Andrew F. Mellon Foundation, a yearlong grant to support a Sawyer Seminar on “Energy Justice in Global Perspective” for the 2018-19 academic year. Sawyer Seminars aim to engage productive scholars […]

Secondary-level female education played a foundational role in reshaping women’s identity in the New South. In Leaders of Their Race: Educating Black and White Women in the New South, Sarah H. Case examines the transformative processes involved at two Georgia schools–one in Atlanta for African American girls and young women, the other in Athens and attended by young white women […]

9/21/17 update: On Friday October 13 there will be a book launch with Prof. Rappaport and guest speakers, in UCSB Theater-Dance West 1701 auditorium, from 5 to 7pm. Recent books have revealed how certain commodities, such as sugar and cotton–and now tea–have shaped the global economy and the rise of mass consumerism. Tea has been one of the most popular […]

In addition to Prof. Kate McDonald’s first book, a study on travel in imperial Japan, and Prof. Hal Drake’s examination of miracles in the fourth century Roman empire, summer and fall 2017 will see the publication of Prof. Erika Rappaport’s  A Thirst for Empire: How Tea Shaped the Modern World and Prof. Toshi Hasegawa’s Crime and Punishment in the Russian Revolution: Mob […]

Professor Drake’s new 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. Contemporary readers engaged in religious discourse will find the analysis […]