Recent books, articles, awards & achievements of UCSB historians
UCSB Historians keep busy publishing new and innovative historical research. Here are the most recent titles, awards and achievements, listed alphabetically by author.
2016 Updates:
POSTDOCTORAL FELLOWSHIPS
Sarah Watkins (Ph.D. 2014; currently Visiting Assistant Professor at Colby College, Maine) has won a Junior Faculty Fellowship at the Center for Historical Research, Ohio State University, on the theme “Family, Kinship, and Households: New Perspectives,” for AY 2016-17.
PREDOCTORAL FELLOWSHIPS
David Baillargeon has won the Mellon-Council for European Studies Completion Fellowship for his dissertation: “A Burmese Wonderland: British World Mining, Finance, and Governmentality in Colonial Burma, 1879-1935.”
UCSB History Graduate Student Andrew Elrod has been awarded a 2016 doctoral fellowship from the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. This is the second year in a row that a UCSB graduate student in History has been awarded such a fellowship; most such fellowships go to doctoral candidates in the social sciences.
Travis Seifman (advisor Luke Roberts) has won a Japan Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Research Fellowship for 2016-17. Travis will spend the next academic year in Japan carrying out research on relations between the Ryukyu Kingdom and Tokugawa era Japan (1600-1868).
Kali Yamboliev (advisor Carol Lansing) has won a Fulbright Fellowship to conduct Medieval History research in Rome during 2016-17.
NEW TENURE-TRACK APPOINTMENTS
Jessica Elliott (Medieval Europe, PhD 2014) – Assistant Professor of History, Missouri State University.
Chrissy Lau (Asian American History, PhD 2014) – Assistant Professor of History, Texas A&M–Corpus Christi.
Bianca Murillo (African History, PhD 2009) – Associate Professor of History, CSU Dominguez Hills.
Victor Schmagin (Modern Japan, PhD 2015) – Assistant Professor of History, Fort Lewis College.
NEWLY-TENURED UCSB HISTORY ALUMNI/AE
Bianca Murillo (African History, PhD 2009) – Associate Professor of History, CSU Dominguez Hills.
Mateo Farzaneh (Middle East History, PhD 2010) – Associate Professor of History, Northeastern Illinois University.
MAJOR FELLOWSHIPS FOR HISTORY ALUMNI/AE
Mark Hendrickson (PhD 2004), now a professor at UC San Diego, has won a Mellon New Directions Fellowship for the 2016-2017 academic year to study economic geology and industrial archaeology.
Matthew Sutton (PhD 2005), now a professor at Washington State University, has been awarded a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship for the 2016-2017 academic year to support his book project tentatively entitled FDR’s Army of Faith: Religion and Espionage in World War II.
2015 Updates:
- Ryan Abrecht (Ph.D. Digeser, 2014) has accepted a tenure-track position in Ancient History at the University of San Diego.
- Nicole Archambeau (Ph.D. Farmer, 2009) has accepted a tenure-track position at Colorado State University.
- April Haynes (Ph.D. Cohen, 2009) has accepted a position in Early North American Gender and Women’s History at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
- Mark Hendrickson (Ph.D. Furner, 2004) has been awarded tenure and promoted to Associate Professor II at the University of California, San Diego. Mark’s recent book is titled American Labor and Economic Citizenship: New Capitalism from World War I to the the Great Depression (Cambridge University Press, 2013) (CUP book page)
- Paul Hirsch (Ph.D. Yaqub, 2013) has accepted a postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute for Historical Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. (Apr. 2015).
- Kristoffer Smemo‘s article, “The Little People’s Century: Industrial Pluralism, Economic Development, and the Emergence of Liberal Republicanism in California, 1942-1946” will be published in the March 2015 issue of the Journal of American History (full text).
- Rachel Winslow (Ph.D. Jacobson, 2012) has accepted a tenure-track position at Westmont College. She will also be the director of Westmont’s new Center for Social Entrepreneurship. Rachel’s dissertation on international adoption is under contract with University of Pennsylvania Press.
Faculty Listing
- Peter Alagona, After the Grizzly: Endangered Species and the Politics of Place in California (UC Press, 2013) (amazon.com page)After the Grizzly traces the history of endangered species and habitat in California, from the time of the Gold Rush to the present. Peter S. Alagona shows how scientists and conservationists came to view the fates of endangered species as inextricable from ecological conditions and human activities in the places where those species lived. Focusing on the stories of four high-profile endangered species—the California condor, desert tortoise, Delta smelt, and San Joaquin kit fox—Alagona offers an absorbing account of how Americans developed a political system capable of producing and sustaining debates in which imperiled species serve as proxies for broader conflicts about the politics of place. The challenge for conservationists in the twenty-first century, this book claims, will be to redefine habitat conservation beyond protected wildlands to build more diverse and sustainable landscapes.
- James Brooks co-edited Keystone Nations: Indigenous Peoples and Salmon across the North Pacific (SAR Press, 2012). (SAR press page)
The histories and futures of indigenous peoples and salmon are inextricably bound across the vast ocean expanse and rugged coastlines of the North Pacific. Keystone Nations addresses this enmeshment and the marriage of the biological and social sciences that have led to the research discussed in this book. Salmon stocks and Indigenous peoples across the northern Pacific region represent a significance beyond their size in maintaining the viability and legitimacy of ecological and political systems. Both species’ futures are simultaneously a matter of the conservation concerns of natural scientists and the political agenda of Indigenous sovereignty movements that arc across the northern hemisphere. If wild salmon vanish in the North Pacific, as they largely have in the North Atlantic, their absence will herald the cascading failure of a complete marine system. If Indigenous peoples vanish from the North Pacific, as they largely have in the North Atlantic, their absence will sound the failure of the world’s dominant political powers to recognize the human right to cultural expression and survival. - Patricia Cohen appears in a TLC (The Learning Channel) series Who Do You Think You Are?, which aired July 23, 2014. It is about Cynthia Nixon, whose 3rd-great-grandmother served time in the Missouri State Penitentiary in the 1840s for murdering her alleged abusive husband. Cohen writes: “It promises to be a fairly dark show, featuring bigamy, out of wedlock children, wife battering, an ax murder, and rape. I spent four hours with Nixon and the film crew in that unheated prison, and the result will be about 5 or 6 minutes of airtime for me, I expect. But I did have a major piece of the story to deliver: an eyewitness account of the woman’s prison travails, from an 1848 book written by an young abolitionist in prison for “man stealing” (he and two others were attempting to liberate a few slaves and get them to Illinois). He kept a diary and wrote the book, 300 pages worth, describing in detail the daily life of the prison (including a horrific account of water boarding of prisoners).” view trailer with a short clip of Prof. Cohen.
- Elizabeth DePalma Digeser, A Threat to Public Piety: Christians, Platonists and the Great Persecution (Cornell University Press, 2012) (Cornell page, extract of AHR review).DePalma Digeser reexamines the origins of the Great Persecution (AD 303–313), the last eruption of pagan violence against Christians before Constantine enforced the toleration of Christianity within the Empire. Making use of evidence that has only recently been dated to this period, Digeser shows that a falling out between Neo-Platonist philosophers, specifically Iamblichus and Porphyry, lit the spark that fueled the Great Persecution. In the aftermath of this falling out, a group of influential pagan priests and philosophers began writing and speaking against Christians, urging them to forsake Jesus-worship and to rejoin traditional cults while Porphyry used his access to Diocletian to advocate persecution of Christians on the grounds that they were a source of impurity and impiety within the empire.
- Hal A. Drake and Claudia Rapp (eds.), The City in the Classical and Post-Classical World: Changing Contexts of Power and Identity (New York: Cambridge, 2014) (amazon.com page).
This volume examines the evolving role of the city and citizenship from classical Athens through fifth-century Rome and medieval Byzantium. Beginning in the first century CE, the universal claims of Hellenistic and Roman imperialism began to be challenged by the growing role of Christianity in shaping the primary allegiances and identities of citizens. An international team of scholars considers the extent of urban transformation, and with it, of cultural and civic identity, as practices and institutions associated with the city-state came to be replaced by those of the Christian community. The twelve essays gathered here develop an innovative research agenda by asking new questions: What was the effect on political ideology and civic identity of the transition from the city culture of the ancient world to the ruralized systems of the middle ages? How did perceptions of empire and oikoumene respond to changed political circumstances? How did Christianity redefine the context of citizenship? - Cecilia Méndez, La república plebeya: Huanta y la formación del Estado peruano, 1820-1850 (Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 2014; publisher’s book page). In this updated and substantially revised Spanish version of her award-winning book The Plebeian Republic (Duke, 2005), Prof Mendez questions long-established assumptions about political history, rural society, “warlordism,” the State, and about what it means to be a liberal, a monarchist, a Peruvian and a citizen, by stressing the political role of peasants in national history. You can see her discuss the book in Spanish in this 34 minute youtube clip.
Update 2/28/15: This book was voted “the best book of history of 2014” in a survey of 35 international and Peruvian historians specializing in Peru. It ranked Number 1 on a list of over a hundred books of history including books published by Peruvian, Spanish, Mexican, U.K. and United States academic presses.
The detailed survey results are available here:
Estos son “Los Diez Mejores Libros de Historia del 2014” - Stephan Miescher, Modernization as Spectacle in Africa (Indiana Univ. Press, 2014) (Indiana UP page, amazon).For postcolonial Africa, modernization was seen as a necessary outcome of the struggle for independence and as crucial to the success of its newly established states. Since then, the rhetoric of modernization has pervaded policy, culture, and development, lending a kind of political theatricality to nationalist framings of modernization and Africans’ perceptions of their place in the global economy. These 15 essays address governance, production, and social life; the role of media; and the discourse surrounding large-scale development projects, revealing modernization’s deep effects on the expressive culture of Africa.
- Ann Marie Plane, Dreams and the Invisible World in Colonial New England: Indians, Colonists, and the Seventeenth Century (UPenn Press, 2014) (UPenn page, amazon).From angels to demonic specters, astonishing visions to devilish terrors, dreams inspired, challenged, and soothed the men and women of seventeenth-century New England. English colonists considered dreams to be fraught messages sent by nature, God, or the Devil; Indians of the region often welcomed dreams as events of tremendous significance. Whether the inspirational vision of an Indian sachem or the nightmare of a Boston magistrate, dreams were treated with respect and care by individuals and their communities. Dreams offered entry to “invisible worlds” that contained vital knowledge not accessible by other means and were viewed as an important source of guidance in the face of war, displacement, shifts in religious thought, and intercultural conflict. Using firsthand accounts of dreams as well as evolving social interpretations of them, Dreams and the Invisible World in Colonial New England explores these little-known aspects of colonial life as a key part of intercultural contact. With themes touching on race, gender, emotions, and interior life, this book reveals the nighttime visions of both colonists and Indians. Ann Marie Plane examines beliefs about faith, providence, power, and the unpredictability of daily life to interpret both the dreams themselves and the act of dream reporting. Through keen analysis of the spiritual and cosmological elements of the early modern world, Plane fills in a critical dimension of the emotional and psychological experience of colonialism.
- Adam Sabra was named Bayard Cleveland Dodge Distinguished Professor for 2015 at the American University in Cairo. This honor has been given in the past to such figures as Edward Said and Josef van Ess. It is a well-earned recognition of Professor Sabra’s research, publications, and standing in the field. Professor Sabra will travel to Cairo to deliver the B. C. Dodge Lectures in March 2015. (Oct. 2014)
Alumni and Graduate Student Placements, Publications, Awards & Achievements
- Ryan Abrecht (Ph.D. Digeser, 2014) has accepted a tenure-track position in Ancient History at the University of San Diego. (March 2015)
- Nicole Archambeau (Ph.D. Farmer, 2009) has accepted a tenure-track position at Colorado State University. (March 2015)
- Abby Dowling and Jessica Elliott (Ph.D. Farmer) were appointed as Visiting Assistant Professors at Grand Valley State University in Michigan. (June 2014)
In March 2015 Abby accepted a tenure-track position at Mercer University in Macon Georgia. - Olivier Dufault (Ph.D. Digeser) won a two-year Postdoctoral Fellowship in the “Distant Worlds” Program of the Graduate School for Ancient Studies at Munich’s Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat. (Sept. 2014)
- Eric Fenrich‘s (Ph.D. Yaqub. 2014) paper, “Détente and Dissent: Apollo-Soyuz, Ruth Bates Harris, and NASA’s Rhetoric of Cooperation” won the 2014 Sacknoff Prize for Space History, which is given out by the Society for the History of Technology. (Sept. 2014)
- Rudy Guevarra (Ph.D. Spickard) has now published his third book, Becoming Mexipino: Multiethnic Identities and Communities in San Diego (Rutgers University Press, 2013).
- Jacob Darwin Hamblin (Ph.D. Badash, 2001), (now at Oregon State University), Arming Mother Nature: The Birth of Catastrophic Environmentalism (Oxford University Press, 2013), which won the AHA Paul Birdsall Prize. (Oct. 2014)
- Sarah Hanson (Ph.D. Farmer) was named first runner-up by the Medieval Association for the Pacific Founders’ Prize, for the paper that she gave at the annual MAP conference, titled “Gender, Work, and Coming of Age in Late Medieval Douai.” (Apr. 2014)
- April Haynes (Ph.D. Cohen, 2009) has accepted a position in Early North American Gender and Women’s History at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. (Apr. 2015) Gerda Lerner inaugurated the field of US Women’s History at Madison in the 1970s and 80s; Linda Gordon next held the position, followed by Jeanne Boydston. April was previously a Mellon Post-Doctoral Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Mass, then taught for a year as a visiting assistant professor at Case Western University, then for four years at the University of Oregon. Her dissertation, which won the Lancaster Prize at UCSB, will appear on the fall 2015 list from the University of Chicago, as Riotous Flesh: Gender, Race, and the Solitary Vice in Antebellum Physiology.
- Mark Hendrickson (Ph.D. Furner, 2004) has published his first book, American Labor and Economic Citizenship: New Capitalism from World War I to the Great Depression (Cambridge University Press, 2013). In March 2015 Hendrickson was awarded tenure and promoted to Associate Professor II at the University of California, San Diego. (CUP book page)
- Paul Hirsch (Ph.D. Yaqub, 2013) has accepted a postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute for Historical Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. (Apr. 2015).
- Moonsil Lee Kim (Ph.D. Barbieri-Low, 2014) was awarded a post-doc at the Smithsonian Institution’s Freer Sackler Gallery to work on the project titled “The Use-Context and the Potential Poisoning of Food and Liquid Caused by Containers from the Bronze Age to the Early Imperial Period (c. 1600 BCE-220 CE).”
- Henry Maar‘s (Ph.D. Yaqub) paper, “Three Megatons of ‘Peace’: The Revolutionary MX Missile and the Meaning of Survival in the Atomic Age,” received honorable mention from the John A. Adams Center for Military History & Strategic Analysis at the Virginia Military Institute. (Sept. 2014)
- Journden Travis Moger (PhD Friesen, McGee), published his first monograph Priestly Resistance to the Early Reformation in Germany (Pickering & Chatto, 2014).
- Tanya Stabler Miller (PhD Farmer), published her first monograph, The Beguines of Medieval Paris (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014).
- Paulo Polanah (Ph.D. Dutra, 2004): Exceptionalism and the Imperial Mystique: National and Colonial Discourse and the Forging of a Portuguese Imperial Identity, 1928-1945. Paulo was awarded tenure at Virginia Tech in 2012. He also published an outstanding article “‘The Zenith of our National History:’ National Identity, Colonial Empire, and the Promotion of the Portuguese Discoveries, Portugal 1930s.”
- Caitlin Raithe (Ph.D. O’Connor, Lichtenstein) published an op-ed based on her dissertation: “The right’s food stamp embarrassment: A history lesson for the haters” on salon.com. (Sept. 2014)
- Holly Roose (Spickard) won the Fiona Goodchild Award for Excellence as a Graduate Student Mentor of Undergraduate Research. (May 2014)
- Paul Sandul (PhD Public History) published California Dreaming: Boosterism, Memory and Rural Suburbs in the Golden State (West Virginia, 2014). WVa UP page.
At the turn of the 20th century, the California dream was a suburban ideal where life on the farm was exceptional. Agrarian virtue existed alongside good roads, social clubs, cultural institutions, and business commerce. The California suburban dream was the ultimate symbol of progress and modernity.
Paul is also co-editor and contributor to another ground-breaking work, Making Suburbia: New Histories of Everyday America, to be released in 2015 by University of Minnesota Press. (And, he and his partner, Tosha, had a son, Max, in July 2014!) - Kristoffer Smemo (Ph.D. Lichtenstein), “A ‘New Dealized’ Grand Old Party: Labor and the Emergence of Liberal Republicanism in Minneapolis, 1937-1939” was published in LABOR: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas. (Apr. 2014)
Kit’s article, “The Little People’s Century: Industrial Pluralism, Economic Development, and the Emergence of Liberal Republicanism in California, 1942-1946” will be published in the March 2015 issue of the Journal of American History (full text). - Travis Smith (Ph.D. Spickard) was awarded a Fulbright lectureship to teach at a Chinese university in 2012-13.
- David Torres-Rouff (Ph.D. Spickard, 2006) was awarded tenure and promoted to Associate Professor at UC Merced. (Feb. 2015)
- Rachel Winslow (Ph.D. Jacobson, 2012) has accepted a tenure-track position at Westmont College. She will also be the director of Westmont’s new Center for Social Entrepreneurship. Rachel’s dissertation on international adoption is under contract with University of Pennsylvania Press. (March 2015).