Latest News

The departmental support group has been bringing historians and community members together since 1987. This year is the 20th anniversary of the UCSB History Associates. The departmental support group was […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Congratulations to Stephan Miescher who has been awarded the 2023 Sidney M. Edelstein Prize from the Society for the History of Technology, honoring A Dam for Africa: Akosombo Stories from […]

The Academic Senate has announced that the P/NP grading exceptions implemented in the Winter 2021 quarter will now be extended to the Spring and Summer 2021 quarters as well. All history […]

Alumni and supporter newsletter reports on the end-of-year awards garnered by undergrads, grads and faculty In this issue: –Chinatown event set for June 13 –Honors for Sarah Cline and Paul […]

Dr. Giuliana Perrone has been named as one of this year’s Kathryn T. Preyer Scholars by the American Society for Legal History for her paper entitled “Slaves into Citizens: Legitimizing […]

Op-ed on “The Myth of Nuclear Necessity” references Hasegawa’s research. In December 2012 the BBC’s National Geographic Channel aired a program: “Nagasaki: the Forgotten Bomb,” in its series titled, “Seconds […]

The History Department extends a warm welcome to its 21 newest members! ALL SMILES. The 2007-08 entering class of grad students takes a break from their orientation meeting. Pictured (l. […]

The History Department faculty and students, along with the staff of HASC, and numerous colleagues from around UCSB, mourn the tragic, untimely death of Alan Vu, our beloved undergraduate advisor. […]

Prof. Manuel Covo’s new book, Entrepôt of Revolutions: Saint-Domingue, Commercial Sovereignty, and the French-American Alliance has been awarded the prestigious Gilbert Chinard Book Prize. The Gilbert Chinard Prize is awarded annually by […]

The History Department extends a warm welcome to its 11 newest members! From left to right: Samantha Thompson (History of Science), Clinton Smith (U.S. history), Melissa Barthelemy (U.S. history), Peninah […]

“Confederate Monuments Always Embodied a White Heritage of Hate” in Haaretz, Aug. 17, 2017 The coupling of neo-Nazism with neo-Confederate hate displayed in Charlottesville has helped strip away the thin […]

Professor John Majewski (19th century American History) has been appointed as Dean of Humanities and Fine Arts here at UCSB! The following is the message Chancellor Henry T. Yang sent […]

Job #JPF01087 About: The Department of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara invites applications for a tenure-track assistant professorship in Modern South Asian history, c. 1500-Present. Appointment begins […]

Professor April Haynes, a 2009 PhD graduate of the UCSB History Department, has been awarded the Mellon New Directions Fellowship, which will pay for a two-year research leave and one […]

View the slideshow featuring the research projects of undergraduates who graduated at the virtual June ceremony. Included are students’ senior honors theses, History of Public Policy and Law senior theses, […]

Contributes to UCSB’s 2013-14 Critical Issues in America Series on “The Great Society at 50.” Prof. Alice O’Connor, an expert on poverty and U.S. social policy, appeared on NPR’s Marketplace […]

Listen to his interview on the PRI syndicated show, accompanied by Thomas Mapfumo’s music. UCSB History professor Mhoze Chikowero recently completed the first of two books based on his PhD […]

April 27-29th marked the 49th annual conference of the Western Association of Women Historians in San Diego. UCSB was extremely well represented at the conference, with more than a dozen historians on […]

Prof. Mendez was the recent recipient of the 2010 LAIS Faculty Mentor Award, an award selected by LAIS graduates and undergraduates to recognize faculty who have displayed exemplary mentorship. The […]

“In the 1940s the United States seemed to be on the cusp of adopting an economy that looked a lot like those found today in Northern Europe and Scandinavia. It […]

Brian Griffith, who earned his PhD in the department in January 2020 and is currently The Eugen and Jacqueline Weber Post-Doctoral Scholar in European History at UCLA, has been awarded the 2021 […]

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 […]

Award of $238,700 to support Barbieri-Low’s comparative research on ancient civilizations. Professor Anthony Barbieri-Low has won a three-year (2013-2015) Mellon New Directions Fellowship to support his comparative research on ancient […]

Dozens of scholarships and fellowships were distributed. For more information on the individual awards and what they are for, see our Awards page. If you click on the name of […]

UCSB alum Jacob Darwin Hamblin is the most recent winner of the Watson and Helen Miles Davis Prize from the History of Science Society. The prize – awarded for the […]

History Dept. continues to dominate campuswide awards Apr. 11, 2010: The History Department is pleased to announce that Prof. Sarah Cline has been selected as a recipient of an Outstanding […]

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 […]

This Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum fellowship will support research on artist-engineer collaborations in the Apollo era. Patrick McCray, has been selected to hold the 2015-16 Charles A. Lindbergh […]

What lessons can we draw from the Great Depression for the Great Recession? What We Can Learn From E. Wight Bakke: Recovery without jobs is no recovery. As part of […]

The following are the transcripts from the Academic Senate’s recent awards ceremony during which Professor Erika Rappaport and Professor Salim Yaqub received their distinguished teaching awards. Professor Rappaport joined the Department […]

His 2013 book The Visioneers chosen for American Astronautical Society award; also named Fellow of the American Physical Society. In late November 2013, the American Astronautical Society announced W. Patrick […]

Professor Miroslava Chavez-Garcia has just published her new monograph, Migrant Longing: Letter Writing Across the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, with the University of North Carolina Press. Drawing upon a personal collection of more […]

With news about many recent faculty and graduate student awards and accolades The new issue of Historia, the UCSB History Department’s newsletter for alumni and supporters, is now available for […]

Students and their families visited the History Dept. table to learn about studying History at UCSB. On Saturday, April 11, the History Department’s information table at the Spring Insight Open […]

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, […]

Matthew Avery Sutton — who received his PhD in History at UCSB in 2005 — has been awarded a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship for the 2016-2017 academic year. His Guggenheim Fellowship will support […]

The History Department was saddened to learn that our colleague Professor Emeritus Jeffrey Russell passed away on April 12. We would like to share with you the message of condolence […]

We are sad to report that Professor Robert Collins passed away on April 11, 2008. The UCSB Daily Nexus of April 15 has an article describing Professor Collins’ contributions to […]

Professor W. Patrick McCray‘s new book Making Art Work: How Cold War Engineers and Artists Forged a New Creative Culture (The MIT Press, 2020) has made a splash. The book […]

10:00am – 12:00pm; HSSB 4020 We are pleased to invite you to the Annual UC Santa Barbara History Department Graduation Reception. Please join the History faculty and your fellow students […]

Prof. Lindemann was able to save his house from the firestorm. See his story and a Santa Barbara Independent article about how. The photos on the left are some shots […]

Humanities and Fine Arts Prize will be awarded at Commencement April Haynes has won the UCSB Lancaster Dissertation Award in Humanities and Fine Arts, for the best dissertation over a […]

The new National Research Council study puts our program squarely among the very best in the nation. Update Sept. 14, 2011: US News & World Report ranked UCSB as the […]

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 […]

Doctoral candidates Addison Jensen and Mattie Webb announce the formation of the Cold War Working Group (CWWG), a subset of the Center for Cold War Studies and International History (CCWS). The […]

A collection of essays co-edited by Prof. Elena Aronova titled Science Studies during the Cold War and Beyond: Paradigms Defected, has recently been published. This book – a contribution to the history of science […]

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 […]

Thanks to the collective efforts of Professors John Lee, Giuliana Perrone, Jarett Henderson, and Anthony Barbieri, Veronica Castillo-Munoz, and graduate student (and VP Advocacy of History Grad Student Association) Emma […]

The Department of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara invites applications for a tenure-track assistant professorship in twentieth-century African American history, to begin July 1, 2023. We welcome […]

UCSB Professor Emerita Sarah Cline published a reflection on the life and career of UCSB Professor Francis A. Dutra in the American Historical Association’s Perspectives newsmagazine. Dr. Dutra was an […]

The May 2021 issue of the academic journal The Public Historian has been published and can be viewed here. Since 1978, The Public Historian has made its mark as the definitive voice of the […]

Full color versions are available as pdfs on the History Associates web page. The March issue of Historia contains, among other things, news items about two prizes won by Pekka […]

Cover stories: Hire of new environmental historian; “Did Comanches call the shots?” [12/10/08: temporarily unavailable] The current and all past issues of Historia, the newsletter of the UCSB History Associates, […]

Perlstein’s new book is on “The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan.” The August 31, 2014 New York Times Book Review section’s interview with Rick Perlstein contained this […]

The UCSB Community Labor Project invites applications for a Lecturer in Labor Studies. Responsibilities include teaching core courses for the Minor in Labor Studies, which is administered by the History […]

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).

We offer here this short tribute by Prof. Sears McGee. A former member of this department, Leonard M. Marsak, died in Santa Barbara at age eighty-nine on February 4, 2013. […]

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 […]

Studies in Late Antiquity, edited by UCSB’s Professor Elizabeth DePalma Digeser, is a forum for innovation and reflection on global Late Antiquity (150-750 CE) which questions and expands on received […]

Listen to the podcast by Professor Sherene Seikaly as part of the Ottoman History Podcast series. [soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/230675809″ params=”color=ff5500″ width=”100%” height=’166′ iframe=”true” /]

Awat’ovi Pueblo is among the loneliest of places I’ve walked. Once the most vibrant town in the ancient Puebloan Southwest, center of a vast exchange network of decorated pottery, maize, […]

With articles on political mudslinging in history, power teachers, student bloopers and more. In this issue: — John Majewski to speak on political mudslinging — Ingrid Dineen-Wimberly starts new fund […]

Dr. Stephanie Seketa, who recently earned her PhD from the History Department in the field of Modern Britain, has published an article in the journal Enterprise & Society. You can […]

UCSB Receives $175,000 from Mellon Foundation for Seminar on Comparative Study of Pacific Cultures. UCSB’s proposal for the Mellon Foundation’s 2012 Sawyer Seminar competition has been approved by the Foundation’s […]

Congratulations to this year’s winner of the Phi Alpha Theta Best First Book Award, Dr. Mateo M. Farzaneh, for The Iranian Constitutional Revolution and the Clerical Leadership of Khurasani. Dr. […]

Prof. Castillo-Muñoz’s Hist 168A class (History of the Chicanos) visited the Santa Barbara Mission Archive this quarter to get first-hand experience with primary documents. hm 11/29/14

Kristen Thomas-McGill is a PhD Candidate in the History Department and is a cultural historian of gender and sexuality who draws on the fields of literary studies, queer theory, and […]

In July 1969—less than two weeks after Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin cavorted on the moon—The New York Review of Books published a controversial essay by John McDermott, “Technology: The […]

Nineteen new students joined the History graduate program this Fall.We extend a warm welcome to all! U.S. history drew eight of the new students, followed by Medieval Europe with four, […]

Historia has more in-depth articles about many of the News items on this webpage, as well as features such as the Chair’s column. The current issue (and all past issues) […]

The first episode of a podcast that alumna Caitlin Rathe (PhD, 2019) has been a part of creating since August 2018 has gone live! The NEH-funded project, LBJ and the […]

“Education gets pounded on a lot… As local educators we need to redeem history by coming together with the community, sink our teeth into the truths of history, and to […]

Sarah Case and Norah Kassner have curated a UCSB Library exhibition about UCSB forerunner Anna Blake Normal School, which runs until Dec. 20, 2018. See this Aug. 7 UCSB Current […]

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 […]

With articles on new faculty hires, the new class of Ph.D. students, upcoming events and more. The new issue of Historia, the UCSB History Department’s newsletter for alumni and supporters, […]

David Baillargeon, who works with Prof. Erika Rappaport on the British colonial empire, has just accepted a position as college fellow at the University of Nottingham. It is a three […]

Seventeen new students joined the History graduate program this Fall.We extend a warm welcome to our newest colleagues! Pictured at this year’s orientation meeting are (standing, left to right): Chichi […]

April Haynes (UCSB History PhD 2009) has won the 2016 SHEAR (Society for the History of the Early American Republic) book prize for her 2015 monograph, Riotous Flesh: Women, Physiology […]

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 […]

A celebration of Dimitrije’s life was held in Santa Barbara on Saturday, May 16. We record with sadness the death of our colleague, Professor Emeritus Dimitrije Djordjevic. Dimitrije was born […]

Historia has more in-depth articles about many of the News items on this webpage, as well as features such as the Chair’s column. The current issue (and all past issues) […]

Display in Library’s Special Collections runs through April 30, 2012. History professor John Majewski and Ph.D. student Maria Fedorova have curated a wonderful exhibit on the Emancipation Proclamation in the […]

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 […]

Seven external awards, and 17 campuswide fellowships and awards for 2008-09. The following UCSB History graduate students have won major fellowships or honors this year. The winners are listed below […]

The program of courses, panel discussions, conferences, public lectures, and symposia runs throughout the 2013-14 academic year. A new History Department webpage has been launched as part of an ongoing […]

Congratulations to Professor Nelson Lichtenstein for winning the Academic Senate’s Faculty Research Lecturer Award.  This is a very prestigious award granted to professors for a career of truly superb scholarship, […]

Congratulations to Dr. Anthony Barbieri-Low, who has been awarded a year-long fellowship from the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange (Senior Scholar Grant program) for his book project “The Many Lives […]

The current and all past issues of Historia, the newsletter of the UCSB History Associates, are now available on the History Associates web page.

President Janet Napolitano and the Chancellors of the University of California on Jan. 29 issued the following statement: We are deeply concerned by the recent executive order that restricts the […]

Prof. Spickard publishes op-ed in June 16 Silicon Valley Mercury-News, generates lots of discussion in “comments” section “Paul Spickard: Birthers’ attack on Obama is not only bogus, it’s irrelevant“ This […]

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 […]

The Premio del Rey is awarded to the best book on medieval Spain published in the past two years. Prof. Blumenthal’s 2009 book has won the AHA’s Premio del Rey […]

In honor of Professor Sherene Seikaly‘s thirteen years of service as editor of Arab Studies Journal, the Spring 2020 issue–the final issue under her supervision–has graciously been made open access. You […]

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 […]

Mexican peasants played an important role in the sourcing of synthetic hormones for birth control. Twenty years ago, NAFTA — the North American Free Trade Agreement — removed barriers to […]

Frank Frost, who taught in the UCSB History Department from 1965-1990, passed away on January 9, 2026.  Click the links below to read more about Prof. Frost’s life and accomplishments. […]

In addition to the latest US News & World Report rankings, updates link to Times Higher Education and Washington Monthly‘s rankings —————— Update 12/9/10: edhat.com: “UCSB in Citation Leader.” Update […]