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.
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
Pandemics have exposed the interconnections between environmental degradation, disease, and social inequalities calling for a broader conception and understanding of trauma and healing. The "Healing Communities" conference features scholars from diverse backgrounds who will explore the complex and varied ways in which communities across the world have been and are actively engaged in processes of […]