The History Department’s Colloquium Committee warmly invites you to attend this year’s FOCAL POINT Dialogues in History series. Inspired by the History Department’s Statement on the George Floyd Uprising [hyperlink: https://www.history.ucsb.edu/2020/07/02/ucsb-history-department-statement-on-floyd-uprising/] and its invocation to understand and interrogate our racialized past and the investments of disciplinary history within it, the series brings together History faculty and graduate students to engage in […]
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When: Saturday, March 4, 11 AM to 12:30 PM Where: West Campus Point Faculty Housing Community’s Outdoor Plaza The Center for Cold War Studies and International History (CCWS) and the Cold War Working Group (CWWG) will host an in-person workshop at the West Campus Point faculty housing community’s outdoor plaza. We will be reading and discussing a paper, “Forging an International […]
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To commemorate the 90th anniversary of beer’s re-legalization in the United States, Lisa Jacobson will explain how a coalition of brewers, scientists, and labor leaders persuaded Congress that a beer capable of producing a mild euphoria could be legalized without violating the 18th Amendment’s ban on intoxicating beverages. Insisting that alcohol potency alone did not determine intoxication, this anti-prohibitionist […]
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The Self-Defense Force— Japan’s post-World War II military—and specifically the Ground Self Defense Force (GSDF), struggled for legitimacy in a society at best indifferent to them and often hostile to their very existence. This talk focuses on the GSDF and its efforts, in the form of natural disaster relief operations, civil engineering projects, and support for the events such as […]
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Please join us for our final Gender + Sexualities Paper Workshop of the Winter Quarter on Thursday, 16 March, at 2 PM. We will meet in HSSB 4041 to discuss Kandra Polantis, “Deadly Curves: Dissection and Desire in Japan, 1879-1930.” You can find a copy of Kandra’s paper here. Please read the paper in advance and be prepared to share […]
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Please join us for our second Gender + Sexualities Paper Workshop of the Winter Quarter on Thursday, 16 February, at 2 PM. We will meet in HSSB 4041 to discuss Kristen Thomas-McGill’s paper, “Reputation and Habitual Misbehavior on a ‘Spicy Little Isle Where Ladies were Few.’” You can find a copy of Kristen’s paper here. Please read the paper in […]
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The Gender + Sexualities Cluster is pleased to welcome Professor Marc Stein to campus. Marc is a historian of U.S. law, politics, and society, with research and teaching interests in constitutional law, social movement s, gender, race and sexuality. His books and articles have focused on twentieth-century urban gay and lesbian history; U.S. Supreme Court decisions on sex, marriage and reproduction; […]
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The Gender + Sexualities Cluster is pleased to welcome Professor Marc Stein to campus. Marc is a historian of U.S. law, politics, and society, with research and teaching interests in constitutional law, social movements, gender, race and sexuality. His books and articles have focused on twentieth-century urban gay and lesbian history; U.S. Supreme Court decisions on sex, marriage and reproduction; queer […]
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The Gender + Sexualities Cluster is pleased to welcome Professor Marc Stein to campus. Marc is a historian of U.S. law, politics, and society, with research and teaching interests in constitutional law, social movements, gender, race and sexuality. His books and articles have focused on twentieth-century urban gay and lesbian history; U.S. Supreme Court decisions on sex, marriage and reproduction; queer […]
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The colloquium offers a forum for open, substantive discussions on how to approach political economy from a historical perspective; how to grapple with and benefit from the epistemological diversity surrounding political economy; and how a historical take on political economy can help contextualize and address urgent contemporary issues– at UCSB, in Santa Barbara/Southern California, in the U.S., and around the […]
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Western stereotypes of Ancient Persia often focus on images of exotic harems, scheming queens, and decadent court life. Prof. Lee explains what the ancient textual and archaeological sources actually reveal about women’s lives in the empire of Achaemenid Persia (550-330 BC). The lecture examines the economic, political, and social power of women across the Achaemenid Empire, from the Aegean Sea […]
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Hannibal’s success as a military commander in the Second Punic War (218-202 BCE) – surprising and severely defeating Rome after crossing the Alps at the Trebbia, Trasimene and Cannae battles and trickery against Fabius Maximus and others – is usually not focused on his brilliant weaponization of nature and his important use of Iberian silver to secure excellent military intelligence […]
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From Table to Text: Borders and Boundaries in Food History March 3rd and 4th, 2023 A Virtual Conference Hosted by the History Department, University of California at Santa Barbara Organizers: Erika Rappaport and Elizabeth Schmidt All paper panels will take place via Zoom. If you need assistance setting up a Zoom account, please let us know. For questions please contact: […]
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On April 5th, 2000, President William Clinton stepped to the microphone at the White House Conference on the New Economy and told those gathered that the United States was experiencing “an economic transformation as profound as that that led us into the industrial revolution.” The 1990s was a heady moment for chatter about technological change, especially around personal computers and […]
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The Desert Russian History Workshop meets annually and brings together historians of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union from universities throughout the western United States. Previous venues have included the University of Nevada at Reno, the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, Arizona State University, and U.C. Riverside. The Desert Workshop offers a unique format in which papers on […]
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Admitted graduate students are invited to visit the Department of History and get to know its faculty and current graduate students. Panels, roundtables and social events will introduce prospective grad students to our department. Download the program and schedule here: 2023 Recruitment Day Schedule
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Adrienne Edgar‘s new monograph, Intermarriage and the Friendship of Peoples, is the first book to examine ethnic and racial mixing in the Soviet Union. In marked contrast to its Cold War rivals, the Soviet Union celebrated mixed marriages among its diverse ethnic groups as a sign of the unbreakable friendship of peoples and the imminent emergence of a supra-ethnic “Soviet people.” Yet the official […]
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In recent scholarship, family archives in the form of a manuscript have been posited as sites for more broadly rethinking archives in the pre-modern Islamicate world.In the context of Isfahan, household anthologies provide a particularly rich ground for theorizing and reassessing pre-modern archival mechanisms and spaces. The anthology referred to in Persian as the majmuʿa (from the Arabic root j.m.ʿ), […]
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Seventeenth century Isfahan witnessed a craze in the composition of a new kind of book, the majmuʿa, or anthology. Curated and written in the domestic sphere of the household, anthologies archive city-writings once in circulation; they illustrate the practices of urban knowledge and their valorization by communities who took possession of them. The imaginations that anthologizing generated, and the choices […]
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HISTORY AND POLITICAL ECONOMY COLLOQUIUM Julie Johnson and Erika Rappaport: “The business of pleasure” The colloquium offers a forum for open, substantive discussions on how to approach political economy from a historical perspective; how to grapple with and benefit from the epistemological diversity surrounding political economy; and how a historical take on political economy can help contextualize and address urgent […]
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Dr. Rob Boddice, Senior Research Fellow at Tampere University, Finland, is going to deliver a talk titled “Consensus without Collaboration? The Future of Emotion Research from the Perspective of History,” Wednesday January 11, 2023 at 4-5:30PM (PST). The Zoom attendance link is https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/3239408139. Everyone is welcome! The talk is going to address the discipline of history’s positionality in the rising consensus among social neuroscientists, […]
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The History Department will host SHARON FARMER, Professor Emerita (UCSB), who will present a talk, entitled “Fowl Play: France and beyond, 1979…” When: 12:00 PM, Thursday, January 12th. Where: HSSB 4020. The chapter from which Farmer will be reading deals with the time she spent in France in 1979-80, when she first began the research for her doctoral dissertation in medieval history. […]
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Mika Thornburg will share her in-progress dissertation chapter: “Selling Self-Discovery: Constructing a Desire for Female Travel in Postwar Japan, 1960-1985.” Please read the paper in advance and be prepared to share your observations and insights with the group.
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Plant Life and Imperialism: Histories of Cannabis in British India Are histories of social structures, imperial systems, and the subjecthood of peoples not also histories of plant life? Taking one plant genus, that modern botany labels cannabis, this talk explores how and why we should embrace the contiguity between human and nonhuman life as a basic condition for narrating […]
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States of Dis/armament: Reading Statemaking in Africa’s Recent History When: WEDNESDAY, NOV 9, 2022 at 4:00 PM Where: Miller McCune Conference Room, HSSB, UC Santa Barbara Free and open to the public. Please RSVP to historyassociates@ia.ucsb.edu History Associates Members can request a complimentary parking permit for this event! What is a state? What is statemaking? What is disarmament–and rearmament? A scholar […]
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We want to invite you to the upcoming virtual conference – Eugenic Legacies Across Latin America, October 12 & 13, 2022. The conference invites scholars, activists and artists, to look at what we can do to address the legacies of eugenics across Latin America. We are attaching a flyer, as well as the full programme to the event. If you are interested in […]
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This presentation will walk through Santa Barbara’s recently completed African American Historic Context Statement on how the built history of a community plays a role in helping uplift African-American and Black people today. This is a unique collaboration of social justice leaders and historic preservation specialists in Santa Barbara who worked to compile Santa Barbara’s Black history—one overlooked for decades. […]
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After 18 years in the making, Anthony J. Barbieri-Low, professor of Chinese history in at the Department of History here at UCSB, released his fifth book on July 28th, 2022. This book titled The Many Lives of the First Emperor of China is based on his interpretations of Ying Zheng, founder of the Qin Empire, China’s First Emperor. The Many […]
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The Department of History is hosting their annual Awards Ceremony, this Wednesday, June 1, from 4 – 6pm to celebrate the wonderful achievements of our students! The event will begin in the McCune Conference Room (HSSB 6020), with a reception on the HSSB 2nd Floor Terrace. Light refreshments will be served. Click here for the Zoom link […]
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Click here to Register and receive the Zoom link. Click here for the flyer
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In this lecture, Paul Pickowicz will screen compelling clips from Chinese silent-era films of the 1920s and 1930s. Pickowicz will emphasize the diverse roles played by women and ask questions about why the women seen on screen, including such iconic figures as Ruan Lingyu, Li Lili, and Wang Renmei, were far more important than men to the success of Chinese […]
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Join the UCSB Undergraduate Journal of History and the History Club at UCSB to celebrate the launch of the Spring 2022 Volume. There are rumors of pizza. We will meet in HSSB 4020, starting at 6:30. There will be treats. Hear from undergrad editors and authors who will answer your questions about the whole process.
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This talk sponsored by History Associates. follows U.S. women and their allies around the globe who worked to organize household consumers into movements that they believed could improve chances for international peace and security. These “consumer diplomats” used their buying practices to portray themselves as world citizens capable of both influencing and upholding a conception of global community. This […]
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The 1921 Tulsa race massacre was the worst single incident of racial violence in American history. But for decades its very existence was denied. Official records went missing, incriminating articles were torn out of bound volumes of old newspapers, and researchers even had their lives threatened. Award-winning author and historian Scott Ellsworth, author of The Ground Breaking: An American City […]
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The Center for the Study of Work, Labor and Democracy hosts a conference, May 20 and 21, 2022 entitled: “Work, Capitalism, and Democracy: Past, Present, and Future.” It will be held in the McCune Room, HSSB 6020. Many former students and contemporary colleagues of Nelson Lichtenstein will deliver papers on a wide variety of topics bearing on the conference theme. […]
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The very best majors in the history department share the research that they have undertaken on their senior theses. When : May 13th, 8:45 AM – 5:00 PM Venue : HSSB 4020 and Zoom Click here to join the zoom meeting. Senior Honors Thesis Colloquium Schedule May 13, 2022 HSSB 4020 or via zoom at https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/2796093108 8:45-8:55 Arrive. […]
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Join Zoom Meeting (https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/87526376038)
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This year’s Open House event (formerly known as Spring Insight) is scheduled for Saturday, April 9, 2022, from 9:00 am to 3:00 pm PST. The Open House is coordinated by the Office of Admissions and traditionally has been the most important opportunity to introduce prospective students and their families to UCSB. In the past, most, if not all, academic and […]
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Date: April 8th, 2022 Time: 5:00 PM Venue: Click here to join Zoom Meeting ID: 822 6050 0131 Passcode: 990314 Click here to download the flyer: Thinking About Career Options with a Degree in History
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When: SUNDAY APRIL 3, 2022, 2:00 PM PST Where : In person and on Zoom Address: East Side Library 1102 E Montecito Street Santa Barbara, CA 93103 Register to receive the zoom link: https://bit.ly/HAtalkapril3 You can find more details here: History Associates April 3 Event Flier_final
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The Interdisciplinary Humanities Center is hosting a dialogue between John W. I. Lee (History) and Krzysztof Janowicz (Geography) about Lee’s new book, The First Black Archaeologist: A Life of John Wesley Gilbert. Audience Q&A will follow. The First Black Archaeologist reveals the untold story of a pioneering African American classical scholar, teacher, community leader, and missionary. Born into slavery in […]
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Focal Point Dialogues was an initiative born in 2020 as a Department commitment to educate ourselves in the history of anti-Blackness. The idea was conceived in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd and the national and international uprising it triggered. This education starts by understanding when did “blackness” become a thing, to begin with, and it requires from all […]
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Focal Point Dialogues was an initiative born in 2020 as a Department commitment to educate ourselves in the history of anti-Blackness. The idea was conceived in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd and the national and international uprising it triggered. This education starts by understanding when did “blackness” become a thing, to begin with, and it requires from all […]
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Graduate student, Giulia Giamboni shares the 3rd chapter of her dissertation – “Women’s donations of Textiles” (here)– with the Gender and Sexualities Research Cluster. This chapter investigates the construction of political affiliation and religious patronage through the donation of textiles in the cross-cultural context of fourteenth-century Zadar (Croatia). I argue that these gifts, in particular those involving textiles, constituted a public expression of […]
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Two members of the History Department Faculty, Anthony Barbieri and Sherene Seikaly were awarded two prestigious National Endowment of Humanities grants and fellowships. NEH Fellowships are a set of competitive fellowships awarded to individual scholars pursuing projects that embody “exceptional research, rigorous analysis, and clear writing.” Projects are evaluated based on their value to humanities scholars, general audiences, or both. […]
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On Thursday, 20 January 2022, Anna Rudolph will share her chapter – Chapter 6_Revolutionary Radegund– with the Gender and Sexualities Research Cluster. This chapter presents an in-depth study of the cult of Radegund, a sixth-century Frankish queen-saint, from the French Revolution through the turn of the twentieth century. The Revolution had a devastating effect on the cult of Radegund […]
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“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 showcase that history is not a one-sided narrative.” Helen Murdoch, an alumnus of the MA program in history at UCSB, took her place as the newly-elected President of UCSB History […]
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Professor Jérémie Foa, Fellow, Institute for Advanced Study and Maître de conférences, HDR, Aix-Marseille Université, will present a lecture entitled, “Faces of the Massacre: Victims and Killers of the Saint-Bartholomew’s Day Massacre (France, 1572).” Friday, November 19, 2021 at 2 pm over Zoom; Please email bernstein@history.ucsb.edu for the Zoom link. In his new book, Tous ceux qui tombent. Visages du […]
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SUNDAY MARCH 6, 2022 at 2:00 PM PST East Side Library 1102 E Montecito Street Santa Barbara, CA 93103 This event will be presented in-person and live-streamed via zoom. Click here to register and receive the zoom link. You do not need to register if attending in-person.
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History Associates presents, in collaboration with UCSB Multicultural Center, a special online performance from opera-singer and scholar, Tanyaradzwa Tawengwa. Tawengwa is a close collaborator of UCSB Associate Professor of History, Mhoze Chikowero, who will be moderating the post performance Q&A. Tawengwa and Chikowero worked together to adapt her senior thesis from Princeton, “Dawn of the Rooster,” into an abridged one-hour performance which […]
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Recent research, discoveries and restorations are dramatically changing how scholars view medieval Rome. The city was hardly the artistic and cultural backwater we had imagined: instead, as Julian Gardner writes, it was a crucible for the arts. This talk will set out some of those finds. The Aula Gotica frescoes are just one fascinating example. In the 1240s a cardinal constructed […]
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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 Society for Italian Historical Studies Article Prize for Modern Italian History for his article in Contemporary European History, “Bacchus among the Blackshirts: Wine Making, Consumerism and Identity in Fascist Italy, 1919-1937.” […]
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Round Table: Hispanic Heritage Month & A New History of Iberian Feminism The Department of Spanish and Portuguese invites you to a Round Table on Iberian Feminism, on the occasion of Hispanic Heritage Month and the publication of Una nueva historia de los feminismos ibéricos (Tirant lo Blach, 2021) edited by Prof. Silvia Bermúdez (UCSB) and Prof. Roberta Johnson (University of […]
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The Department of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara invites applications for a tenure-track position (rank open). We seek applications from scholars in any geographic and chronological specialization, with a preference for candidates with demonstrated experience in conducting field-related projects in collaboration with museums, archives, preservationist organizations, historical justice initiatives, local communities, and public agencies. The department is […]
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If you weren’t able to attend our New Majors’ Meeting this morning, you can view the slideshow below! New Majors’ Meeting 2021
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Please join us at the annual History Department New Majors‘ Meeting! This meeting is geared towards incoming freshmen and transfer students, and any student that is new to our department. The meeting will be held on Tuesday, September 21st at 11am in HSSB 4080. Meet your future professors and classmates, listen to an impressive faculty panel speak about topics such as undergraduate research, the senior honors […]
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“The Politics of Food and Occupation During the Second World War.” Erika Rappaport, Lisa Jacobson, and Elizabeth Schmidt would like to invite you to register for this workshop, which will take place on August 28th, 2021 at 9:00-11:30am PDT. Once you register, you will receive a link to the three pre-circulated papers up for discussion in the workshop. Food & […]
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We are pleased to announce that five students have been awarded Steve and Barbara Mendell Graduate Fellowships in Cultural Literacy from UCSB’s Walter H. Capps Center for the 2021-2022 academic year. Amy Fallas is working on a dissertation that examines how a network of philanthropic societies socially engineered inter-religious partnership and became a pillar of Egypt’s landscape during the late […]
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Professor Barbieri has published another ground-breaking new book. Ancient Egypt and Early China: State, Society and Culture (University of Washington Press, 2021), is the first extended comparative study of New Kingdom Egypt and early imperial China. While it has become common in recent scholarship to compare Early China with Classical Greece or the Roman Empire, he argues that a comparison with Ancient […]
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Congratulations are in order for graduating senior Ebelechukwu Eseka, a History minor and Sociology major. At the end of her undergraduate career, UCSB has recognized her impressive accomplishments in three high-profile ways. Eseka is this year’s winner of UCSB’s highest undergraduate honor, the Thomas More Storke Award for Excellence. At the June 12 College of Letters & Science commencement celebration, […]
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UC Santa Barbara Public Affairs asked faculty, staff, and students to reflect on Asian and Pacific Islander American (AAPI) Heritage Month in May. Professor John W.I. Lee responded to the question “What AAPI people, past or present, have impacted, influenced, or inspired you?” with a story about his father.
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The UCSB Africa Center cordially invites you to a special guest lecture on June 4 by Dr. Zoé Samudzi on indigenous demands for restitution, long-contested histories of colonial dispossession and property ownership in the aftermath of the German genocide of the Herero and Nama peoples in Namibia. Her talk will interrogate the trajectories of colonial ideology and practice from the scientific racism-inflected racial geographies […]
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A whole spate of good news has come through at the end of the academic year! Congratulations to the following current and former graduate students on their accomplishments. The community is invited to celebrate these and other achievements at the History Department Awards Ceremony on June 2. Dr. Ryan Abrecht (PhD 2014, supervised by Beth Digeser) has just been granted […]
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Join the History Department’s Colloquium in Public History on Friday, June 4 at noon for a Zoom talk by Christopher E. Johnson (National Park Service), Anne Lindsay (Public History, CSU Sacramento), and Jenni Sorkin (History of Art and Architecture, UCSB). This presentation describes collaborative work completed under the Women’s History Initiative, one of three national initiatives authorized by the Secretary of […]
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The May 2021 issue of the Archive, the History Department’s newsletter, is now available! Click here for the full interactive version.
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Please join us for an interdisciplinary webinar on the past and present of tea in South Asia. The history of tea is both fascinating yet one fraught with tensions inherent in the history of global capitalism. The attraction of a cup of tea seeped only gradually into the lives of the common people and involved much effort and investment on […]
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Darnovsky_reproductive genetic technologies_June2021“Eugenics in California & the World: Race, Class, Gender/Sexuality, & Disability” A Virtual Symposium, Friday & Saturday, June 4-5, 2021 ASL & Live Captioning YouTube Links: DAY ONE & DAY TWO Transcripts Day One Plenary & Sessions 1 and 2 Day Two Sessions 3 & 4 Day Two Session 5 Day Two Closing Panel V: Reproductive Genetic Technologies, Darnovsky […]
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The History Department’s Colloquium Committee warmly invites you to attend the keynote lecture of our FOCAL POINT Dialogues in History series. The lecture, “Body, Soul & Subject: A History of Difference in the Early-Modern African Atlantic,” will be delivered by Prof. Herman L. Bennett. Herman L. Bennett is Professor at the Graduate Center at the City University of New York. A scholar […]
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The East Asia Center welcomes UCSB History alumna Dr. Lily Anne Welty Tamai (Asian American Studies, UCLA) for a talk on “Mixed-Race Black Identities in Postwar Japan and Okinawa.” Mixed-race people born at the end of World War II made history quietly with their families and their communities. Wars and the military occupations that followed, coupled with increased migration across […]
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Andrew Young, one of Martin Luther King’s top aides and a former member of Congress, served as Jimmy Carter’s ambassador to the United Nations. Outspoken and controversial, Young questioned prevailing Cold War assumptions. “Communism has never been a threat to me,” he said. “Racism has always been a threat—and that has been the enemy of all of my life.” Nancy Mitchell […]
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I am excited to invite you all to the 2021 History Department Virtual Awards Ceremony! The ceremony will take place on Wednesday, June 2nd at 4pm via Zoom. Please join us in honoring the recipients of the 2021 History Associates and Department of History awards. Friends and family are welcome to attend! Zoom link: https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/6855143149
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Registration is now open for the virtual conference “Imperial Foodways: Culinary Economies and Provisioning Politics.” The full program, with panel and paper titles, can be viewed here. To Register, please click here. Because papers are pre-circulated, organizers Elizabeth Schmidt and Erika Rappaport ask attendees to indicate which panels they plan to attend on the registration form. Once you complete the registration, a conference […]
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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 public history profession, providing historians with the latest scholarship and applications from the field. The Public Historian publishes the results of scholarly research and case studies and addresses the broad substantive […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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Join the History Department’s Colloquium in Public History on Friday, May 7 at noon for a Zoom talk by Stephen Vider (History, Cornell University). Histories of queer and trans politics and culture have centered almost exclusively on public activism and spaces. Stephen Vider will discuss how his forthcoming book, The Queerness of Home: Gender, Sexuality, and the Politics of Domesticity After World War II (University […]
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Hilary Bernstein and Patricia Fumerton will each provide short introductions to their new books, followed by a conversation between the authors and then with the audience. Hilary Bernstein, Associate Professor of History, specializes in early modern France, with a particular focus on the history, culture, and politics of provincial towns in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Her new book is […]
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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 […]
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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. […]
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Professor Utathya Chattopadhyaya has been named a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) for 2021. The fellowship, which comes with a $60,000 stipend, will support his research project, Bengal Ganja: Cannabis and Empire in British India. “I am quite humbled and grateful for the award, especially given the kinds of financial pressures resulting from the pandemic,” he […]
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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 […]
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We are heartbroken to note the passing of Paul Baltimore, who received his PhD in History from UCSB in 2014. Paul died in Sacramento on April 8, 2021, having taught for several years at community colleges in the area. He was forty-nine. A native of Philadelphia, Paul joined UCSB’s History doctoral program in 2006 to study the history of U.S. […]
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Frank Dutra should be remembered not only as a careful archival scholar of early modern Portugal and Brazil, superb mentor to generations of graduate students in the History Department and the Latin American and Iberian Studies program, but also as a kind and generous colleague. Frank came to UCSB in 1967, shortly before completing his PhD in History at New […]
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Chi-yun Chen, a devoted husband, father, and mentor, passed away peacefully in his sleep on December 1, 2020 after spending several quiet hours with his wife by his side. Professor Chen was a UCSB Professor Emeritus and a renowned scholar of Han Dynasty Chinese history and medieval Confucianism. His later research interests included East-West comparative perspectives on Chinese history and, […]
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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 […]
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Journalists, politicians, and historians are comparing the Biden Administration’s ambitious economic and social agenda to that of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Illuminating that tentative and provocative judgement are two new collections of historical essays that were first offered as talks at a 2015 UC Santa Barbara conference. Entitled “Beyond the New Deal Order,” the conference was sponsored by the […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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The History Department is now accepting applications for the 2021-22 Senior Honors Thesis Program (HIST 194AH/BH). If you will be a senior next year, have at least a 3.5 GPA in the upper division major, and have completed or are currently enrolled in at least 4 upper division history courses, you may be eligible to apply! Please read the Invitation […]
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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 […]
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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 department major/minor courses may be taken for a P/NP grade in Spring and Summer 2021. You can find the Academic Senate memo with more information on this policy change HERE, and I highly […]
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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. […]
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The UCSB Department of History stands in solidarity with the Asian Pacific Islander Graduate Student Alliance and with all of our colleagues, students, and family members who have been touched by the events in Atlanta and other instances of violence against Asians, Asian-Americans, and Asian Pacific Islanders. UCSB APIGSA Statement on the Murders of Daoyou Feng, Hyeon-Jeong Park, Julie Park, […]
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Congratulations to Professor Hilary J. Bernstein whose new monograph, Historical Communities: Cities, Erudition, and National Identity in Early Modern France, has been published by Brill. The book explores the outpouring of French local history writing from the 1560s to 1660s, with a special focus on how local scholars from a range of French cities, from large provincial capitals to much […]
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