Department of History, UC Santa Barbara

Gender + Sexualities Paper Workshop | Mika Thornburg | "Selling Self-Discovery: Constructing a Desire for Female Travel in Postwar Japan, 1960-1985"
2023-01-19 14:00 - 16:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | HSSB 4041, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
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.

Cold War Working Group Workshop | Nick Cohen "Forging an International Backstop: Commercial Banking, Foreign Policy, and the Empowerment of the IMF, 1973-1981" | Mar 4, 11 AM
2023-03-04 11:00 - 12:30 | West Campus Point Faculty Housing Community’s outdoor plaza, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
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 Backstop: Commercial Banking, Foreign Policy, and the Empowerment of the IMF, 1973-1981,” by Nick Cohen, a doctoral candidate in the UCSB history department.
Abstract: How were the practice and image of commercial banking reinvented alongside the expansion and empowerment of the International Monetary Fund in the decade preceding the global debt crisis of the 1980s? Historians of both business and foreign relations in the 1970s have rightly emphasized the instrumental role played by the Oil Shocks in facilitating the resurgence of global finance and remaking the global balance of power in an era of interdependence. Examining the history of US commercial banking alongside the rise of the IMF, this paper argues that global financialization was also contingent upon a sort of Polanyian double-movement, in which the explosion in the size and power of private international capital markets relied on the concurrent empowerment of the international institution meant to backstop such lending. In the wake of the first oil shock, commercial banks doubled down on the lucrative new business of lending to developing nations in the global south and eastern bloc eager for funds to cope with ballooning balance-of-payments deficits. In response to this same balance-of-payments problem, the IMF began to increase in size and capability through the introduction and gradual expansion of the so-called “Witteveen Facility.” By examining political debates in the United States concerning the regulation of international finance this paper demonstrates that for US policymakers questions over US contributions to the IMF and the role of private American banks overseas were often one in the same. By the end of the 1970s, moreover, commercial bankers had become some of the most vocal advocates for expanding IMF resources. By examining archival material from the Carter administration and the IMF, the papers of notorious Citibank chief Walter Wriston, and congressional records, this paper straddles the line between political economy and diplomatic history.

The CWWG is a collaborative, graduate student-led group designed to provide a supportive, welcoming environment for graduate students working on or around the Cold War and international history. CWWG workshops provide an occasion for graduate students, faculty, and others to join together as peers to read and provide feedback on scholarly work in progress (dissertation chapters, journal articles, conference papers, etc.) by members of our community. We strongly encourage other UCSB graduate students and faculty members to consider submitting their own work for discussion in future workshops.

UCSB History Department’s Annual Senior Honors Colloquium
2023-05-26 09:00 - 16:00 | HSSB 4020, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Please join the History Department in celebrating the undergraduates at the Department’s Annual Senior Honors Colloquium 2023. The program can be downloaded here.

9:00 AM – Welcoming Remarks

Stephan Miescher, Chair, History Department
Debra Blumenthal, Director of 2022-23 Senior Honors Seminar

9:10-10:40 – Panel I – Women and Politics Across Time and Space

Cole Grissom, “Severing the Old Order: The Involvement of Women in the Politics of Ancient Rome’s Severan Dynasty.” (Mentor: Beth Digeser, History)

Comment: Misa Nguyen, History

Madeline Josa, “Ladies’ Magazines: Women’s Fashion as Politics in Georgian England” (Mentor: Erika Rappaport, History)

Comment: Lisa Jacobson, History

Raana Naghieh, “Dudes, Prudes, and Statute Moralists Had Better Not Read This: PR, Feminism, and Nineteenth Century ‘Sex Radicalism’ (Mentor: Steve Zipperstein, History)

Comment: Pat Cohen, Professor Emerita, History

10:45 – 12:15 – Panel II – The Global Early Modern

Nichole Poblete, “Treating the Body Politic: Epidemics and Spanish Colonial Rule in the Early Modern Philippines” (Mentor: Juan Cobo, History)

Comment: Brad Bouley, History

Samuel Ricci, “Mirror in the Maghrib. Gender, Sexuality, and Identity in Early Modern European Captivity Narratives” (Mentor: Brad Bouley, History)

Comment: Adam Sabra, History

Wei Cui, “Agents and Agency in Japanese Daimyo Foreign Trade: Kyushu in the First Half of the Seventeenth Century” (Mentor: Luke Roberts, History)

Comment: Ya Zuo, History

12:15 – 1:30 PM – LUNCH

1:30-2:30 – Panel III: The Immigrant Experience

Keren Zou, “Obliterated People, Chinese Gold: Chinese Immigrants, Resistance and Resilience in Pacific Coast Fishery, 1882-1930” (Mentor: Xiaojian Zhao, Asian-American Studies)

Comment: Donna Anderson, History

Gina Kim, ““Twisted Tongues’ Take the Stand: Legal Advocacy and Education Reform for National Origin Minorities in California, 1931-1997” (Mentor: Miroslava Chavez, History)

Comment: Randy Bergstrom, History

2:30-4:00 Panel IV: Building Community in the 20th Century US

Logan Cimino, “Del Webb, Corporate Development and the Building of the Landscape of Mass Consumption in the Postwar American Southwest” (Mentor: Erika Rappaport)

Comment: Alice O’Connor, History

Emma Barrera, “The Forgotten Crusader: Dr. Dorothy Ferebee and her career as a public health activist” (Mentor: Holly Roose, History)

Comment: Sarah Case, History

Marisol Cruz, “En La Vida: A Glimpse into the Life of Queer Latine Folks in Chicago during the 1990s” (Mentor: Jarett Henderson, History)

Comment: Viviana Valle Gomez, Feminist Studies

Annual Gender + Sexualities Graduate Student Colloquium
2023-06-15 | HSSB 4020, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
9:00 – 10:00 – SESSION A (Presenter will Zoom)
Giulia Giamboni, History, UC Santa Barbara
“Pelegrina de Saladino: Mother, Sister, Patroness, and Business Woman”
This is chapter 2 of my dissertation “Gender, Charity, and Empire in the Late Medieval Eastern Mediterranean.” By investigating the life of fourteenth-century Pelegrina de Saladinis, the chapter explores the complex intersections between gender, politics, and empire in the cross-cultural context of late medieval Zadar (Croatia). A widow with a husband killed in a local uprising and a brother exiled, living in a city ravaged by two centuries of colonial dominion and by the Black death, Pelegrina managed to construct a powerful network turning into a key figure in the social fabric of Zadar. She became a trusted testamentary executor for local powerful families, she endowed and renovated a monastery for poor girls with lands and money, she built a hospital for the poor, and helped persecuted friars from Bosnia find a refuge in her city. Her foundations received the support of other Zaratin women revealing that these women identified with Pelegrina’s image. Pelegrina knew how to gain the trust of her fellow citizens and to navigate oppressive political regimes to provide concrete help to the need of her city. Pelegrina’s story of civic and political engagements in a colonized city challenges traditional narrative of women’s charitable giving. Her life demonstrates that women retooled pious practices of charitable giving to challenge the power of an outside political entity. Weaving close relationships with the local oligarchy, granting lands and resources to religious institutions, and caring for the poor and marginalized offered new and empowering opportunities to women to intervene in the daily life of the city and express their political standing. Pious practices did not constrain women’s individual and collective agency. Instead, women’s charitable activities opened up spaces for performance of agency and emancipatory ends.

10:00 – 11:00 – SESSION B
Makoto Hunter, History, UC Santa Barbara
“‘I Am Not a Criminal’: Mormon Women and the Federal Policing of Polygamous Wives in the Early Progressive Era”
By passing the 1882 Edmunds Antipolygamy Act and criminalizing the “unlawful cohabitation” of men and women not legally married, the United States embarked on an unprecedented campaign of federal sexual reform targeting the nation’s most notorious “deviants”: the polygamous Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or Mormons. On paper, the Edmunds Act specifically targeted men as criminal polygamists, implying women were victims. However, as federal agents sought convictions, their attention turned from polygamist men as defendants to plural wives as potential witnesses. Antipolygamy prosecutors considered the bodily presence of a plural wife—or, better yet, the visible evidence of her pregnancy—an ideal smoking gun to prove unlawful cohabitation. Federal marshals went out of their way to subpoena plural wives to testify against their husbands. Using diaries, letters, and other autobiographical material from plural wives, this paper examines the state’s assertion of power over women’s bodies in the history of late-nineteenth-century antipolygamy. The paper also charts how these women responded, whether by claiming a right to bodily privacy from the witness stand, theorizing the disciplinary purpose of incarceration from prison, or recognizing federal authorities’ surveillance of them in the professed privacy of their communities and homes. Looking back to antipolygamy reveals an unexpected predecessor to early-twentieth-century anti-prostitution legislation, which followed a similar arc of ostensibly prosecuting men’s sexuality by policing women’s bodies—as well as to the contemporary crisis over a woman’s legal right to make choices about her own body and have sexual and reproductive autonomy.

11:00 – 11:15 – NUTRITION BREAK

11:15 – 12:15 – SESSION C
Alice Fulmer, English, UC Santa Barbara
“The T4T Gift Economy and Antagonisms in the Middle English Romance of Sir Launfal”
Current discourse and parlance around “t4t” (trans for trans relationships), involves speculation what such relationships mean in terms of compulsory heterosexuality, conceptions of queerness, ideas about passing, and trans tenderness, but also perceiving an unassuming pair of two things or people and tongue-in-cheek claiming they’re “t4t”. While contemporary queer theory and concepts like “t4t” are anachronistic to such canons such as the Middle English romance tradition, a “t4t” framework may be helpful in uncovering instances of gender non-conformity relative to the 13th and 14th centuries. Romances such as Thomas Chestre’s translative Sir Launfal (a translation of 12thc. Marie de France) exhibit romantic and platonic relationships as central loci in their texts from which a certain ‘t4t’ affect is derived. Without trans language as one knows in the 21st century, ‘t4t’ can be impressed onto the relationship and parasocial objects. While taking inspiration from the work of Sara Ahmed and her generation of affect theorists, this paper carves a path between more traditional (re: heterosexual) medieval literary studies, queer theory/terminology, and the other aforementioned theories. Looking at central characters and their relationships’ dynamics from the Middle English romance tradition provides a means, not a history, from which ‘t4t’ can be understood as a framework to measure affect between individuals who exhibit gender non conformity and how this is impressed and interned into objects they interact or transfer personal affect into. In brief, these gender affirmations and antagonisms propel the narrative’s resolution to demonstrate how they embody the genre of Middle English romance in the late medieval period. Consider this an inquiry into the bandwidth that a romance like Sir Launfal has exploring t4t discourse as present in contemporary transgender studies, along with key excerpts from the fields of etymology, literary history, and whatever is left of philology.

12: 15 – 1:00 – LUNCH

1:00 – 2:00 – SESSION D
Kristina Kelehan, History, UC Santa Barbara
“Spying Homosexuals: An Analysis of the Vassall Affair and Representations, Ideas, and the Politics of Gay Men in Britain during the Cold War
While it is well known that some of the most famous British spies working for the Soviet Union during the Cold War were gay men, much work on this history is written by journalists for popular audiences. My work focuses on a less sensational story but one that is no less important for what it reveals about the politics of queer history in twentieth-century Britain. I am studying the life of John Vassall, a gay man who worked for the British Civil Service and was blackmailed by the Soviet Union starting in 1955. He passed key information to the Soviets until his arrest in 1962. A public scandal at the time, my research examines how the British public reacted to the scandal but also how and why his story disappeared from the public eye and has not received historical attention.

2:00 – 3:00 – SESSION E
Kristen Thomas-McGill, History, UC Santa Barbara
“A Case Study of Celebrity, Scottishness, and Masculinity in the Victorian Empire”
This is Chapter 1 of a five-chapter dissertation, “‘Now I am Going to Tell You about Sir Hector Macdonald’: A Cultural Biography of Memorialization and Child Sexual Abuse in the British Empire.” It traces Hector Macdonald’s extraordinary rise through the ranks from private to major-general, attending to the events of Macdonald’s life and media depictions of him. I show how the late 19th-century print media fashioned Macdonald into a celebrity symbol of Scottish martial masculinity, a particularly salient figure at a time when Britons worried about the fitness of their men in the face of imperial challenges. This chapter is both a biography and a critical analysis of biography as a historical source. Victorian media depictions of Macdonald’s life story are replete with inaccuracies, offering opportunities to consider the tensions and concordances among biography, mythmaking, journalistic errors, and plain lies.

3:00 – 3:15 – NUTRITION BREAK

3:15 – 4:15 – SESSION F (Presenter will Zoom)
Kelsey Wight, History, UC Santa Barbara
Violets & Roses, Betony, & Borage: Italian Women as Apothecaries
In this paper, I will argue that gender played a crucial and oftentimes restricting role in women’s apothecarial practice in early modern Italy, but that it also produced “zones of sociability” and new opportunities for women such as becoming a public figurehead, an author of natural science, or even a saint. The history of science has often marginalized the contributions of women to early modern science and excluded them from discourse concerning natural philosophy. I seek to center the contributions of early modern women and place them, as active participants, within early modern natural philosophy. My central research questions include: How widespread was apothecarial practice within cloistered Italian convents and in the lay public marketplace? How does the Inquisition/Counter-Reformation in Italy factor into how women practiced the apothecarial arts? And how do the apothecary practices of nuns differ from lay women in early modern Italy? I will use the concepts investigated in this research paper to develop my MA thesis and eventual dissertation.

4:15 – 6:00 – KEYNOTE & HAPPY HOUR
Dr. Candice Lyons, 2022-2023 Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow
Department of Black Studies, UC Santa Barbara
“Queering Slavery: Staging Queer Re-Examinations of the Archive”

UCSB History Department’s Annual Senior Honors Colloquium
2024-05-17 08:45 - 16:00 | HSSB 4020, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Please join the History Department in celebrating the undergraduates at the Department’s Annual Senior Honors Colloquium 2024.
The program can be downloaded here.

Department of History Senior Honors Colloquium
Friday, 17 May 2024
HSSB 4020

Coffee: 8:45 am
First Panel, 9-10:30 a.m.: To Get Us Started…
Roselind Zeng, “Chinese Protein PR: Selling Soymilk to Build a Nation, 2010-Present” (Jacobson)
Comment: Professor Xiaowei Zheng
Daira Chavez, “Coal Oil Point: Ranching, Restoration, and their Effects” (Alagona)
Comment: Dr. Sarah Case
Harry Pardoe, “The Ever-Changing Dynamics of Control, Power, and Black Agency in Georgetown County, South Carolina from 1860 to 1900” (Majewski)
Comment: Professor Giuliana Perrone

Second Panel, 10:45 a.m.-12:15 p.m.: Gender, Memory, and Cultural Construction
Madison Dunkle, “‘Learn How to Mend Your Lives:’ Repentance and Restraint in Early Modern English Broadside Ballads, 1570-1630” (Bouley)
Comment: Dr. Jessica Zisa, Writing Program
Emilio Perez Williams, “A Blood Stained Brush: Societal Reaction to Female Military Command in Medieval Europe” (Lansing)
Comment: Professor Debra Blumenthal
Stephanie Gerson, “Triumphing Comprehensive Content Over Moral Messaging: Exhibiting the Holocaust at the Reagan Library” (Marcuse)
Comment: Professor Erika Rappaport

Third Panel, 1:15-2:15 p.m.: Contesting Boundaries in Early America
Nicole Knox, “Frontiers of Reciprocity: The Dynamics of Exchange, Diplomacy, and Power in the Dawnland” (K. Moore)
Comment: Professor Juan Cobo
Hanna Kawamoto, “‘Spiritually Unsexed’: Believers, Critics, and Early Histories of the Publick Universal Friend, 1776-1835” (Henderson)
Comment: Professor Katie Moore

Fourth Panel, 2:30-4 p.m.: Labor, Policy, and Power
Nikita Srinivas, “American Psychopharmacology and its Discontents: Tracing the Historical Underpinnings of the 2004 Regulatory Intervention in Antidepressant Use, 1950s-2004” (O’Connor)
Comment: Professor Lisa Jacobson
Jake Taylor, “‘Telesis: Progress Intelligently Planned’ for Whom? Deciding Who Counts in the Telecommunications Industry” (Stein)
Comment: Professor Nelson Lichtenstein
Matthew Mucha, “Singapore’s Labor Relations Reveal that People’s Action Party Pragmatism is Political (1958-1985)” (McDonald)
Comment: Professor Alice O’Connor

CMES Grad Fellows Panel III | Statecraft, Memory, Belonging: From Abkhazia to Palestine
2026-01-26 09:00 - 10:30 | CA
On Monday January 26 at 9 am CMES Spotlight Series is hosting its third iteration of the 2025-2026 academic year.
This will feature a graduate student panel on the topic “Statecraft, Memory, Belonging: From Abkhazia to Palestine” and features the work of Graduate Fellows Gehad Abaza (Anthropology), Farah Hammouda (Sociology), and Amin Mahini (History). Professor Mona Damluji (Film and Media) will be the discussant.
To register please visit this link.

Van Gelderen Lecture by Alexandra Noi | “The Other Side of Eugenics: Socialist Experiments with Nurture over Nature”
2026-05-06 17:00 - 18:00 | HSSB 6020 (McCune Room), University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Our Graduate Student, Alexandra Noi will present this year’s Van Gelderen Lecture.
Her talk is titled : “The Other Side of Eugenics: Socialist Experiments with Nurture over Nature”
On Wednesday, May 6, 2026 at 5:00pm.
In the McCune Room, HSSB 6020.
