Department of History, UC Santa Barbara

History Club Weekly Meetings
2019-02-07 19:00 - 21:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | HSSB 4020
UCSB’s new and improved History Departmental club is for majors, minors, and anyone with a passion for the past! Meetings are held every Thursday at 7:00 PM in HSSB 4020. See flier below for information about upcoming events. Please email histclub.ucsb@gmail.com with any questions.

International Webinar on Global Capitalism, Colonial Politics and Publicity: The Past and Present of Tea in South Asia
2021-06-05 07:00 | YouTube, United States
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 the part of various Tea Associations, companies and committees. Colonial politics, we contend, was always at the center of the South Asian tea industry, its propaganda, publicity, and labor struggles. This webinar brings together scholars from a variety of disciplines and contemporary activists in order to address how tea was and is commodified and how South Asians were constructed as consumers and workers.
Registration Link: https://forms.gle/wqVHkFdk1xzqmKDn7
YouTube Channel Link: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTx895TOvpL_DxjEmPKAc5Q

Public History Colloquium Event–"Telling Diverse Stories: The National Park Service Women's History Initiative and Collaboration in Historic Preservation"
2021-06-04 12:00 - 13:30 | Zoom, CA
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 the Interior in 2011 to foster greater representation in NPS programs.
Johnson will discuss the NPS initiatives, while Profs. Sorkin and Lindsay share their experiences as scholars with a recent NPS collaborative project at Pond Farm Pottery, the home and studio of Bauhaus ceramicist Marguerite Wildenhain. In addition to recognizing a nationally significant site associated with women’s contributions to American arts, the project also provided valuable hands-on experience to undergraduate and graduate students pursuing careers in public history.
Register for this event at https://ucsb.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_QWJsZ22GQtiyk3Lgqn7-pw
Recommended web links:
Heritage and History Initiatives – National Historic Landmarks (U.S. National Park Service) (nps.gov)
Women’s History (U.S. National Park Service) (nps.gov)
crm-v20n3.pdf (npshistory.com)
Explore Suffragist Stories and Connections (arcgis.com)
https://stewardscr.org/pond-farm-pottery/

UCSB Africa Center Inaugural Lecture: Dr. Zoé Samudzi's "Rewriting the Concentration Camp"
2021-06-04 11:00 - 13:00 | Zoom, CA
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 and regimes of property ownership during German colonization and the still shrouded story of post-colonial western institutions’ imperial skull-collecting and refusal to adequately acknowledge the genocide.

For a copy of Dr. Samudzi’s paper, please email Claudia Ankrah (c_ankrah@ucsb.edu) or Dr. Mhoze Chikowero (chikowero@history.ucsb.edu).

Dr. Samudzi is a highly accomplished author and scholar. Her research interests include German colonialism, the Herero and Nama genocide and its afterlife, and the role of colonnial science in the production of indigenous/Black/African identity. She has published for a variety of critical publications, including Africa is Not a Country, New Life Quarterly and a monograph As Black as Resistance: Finding the Conditions for Liberation. She earned her Ph.D. from UC San Francisco.

Zoom URL: https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/84107544681

California Eugenics Legacies Symposium, June 4-5, 2021
2021-06-04 - 2021-06-05 | https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/89876633951
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 Comments

This symposium is part of ongoing national and international conversations on the influence of eugenics beliefs and practices across a multitude of private and public institutions, spaces, and places.* Focusing specifically on the legacies of eugenics in California, this event brings together a diverse group of scholars, educators, students, activists, and community members to engage in dialogue exploring how state institutions of higher learning, health care, and government promoted, sustained, and mainstreamed eugenics via educational, medical, and public contexts.
Extending over two days, the gathering–Final Schedule June 4 2021–will open with a keynote panel focusing generally on history, memory, and reparations: how do we come to terms with the violence of eugenics carried out in and on communities across California? The next session will present new research on the ways in which eugenics shaped the work of researchers, professors, and doctors in various state institutions, including the University of California. Then we will turn our attention to the findings of the Sterilization and Social Justice Lab at the University of Michigan, learning about the massive digitization project and analysis of more than 20,000 sterilization records in California. The following session will explore continuing struggles to excise eugenics-based beliefs, confronting ableism, anti-Blackness, settler colonialism and racism in medicine, science, and child welfare systems. Next, activists working in law, prisons, disability justice, and reproductive justice will update us on their ongoing fights for reparations and against eugenic ideology and practice. Finally, we will hear from activists-researchers-scholars about new modes and discourses of eugenics in developments of reproductive technology and biotechnology, many of them emerging out of California. (Participant biographies below.)
*The panel is part of ‘From Small Beginnings…: Addressing the continuing shadows of eugenics’ series of events across the world leading up to marking 100 years since the Second International Eugenics Congress held at the American Museum of Natural History in New York (September 22nd-28th, 1921). The series offers an opportunity to focus on how eugenics has been used and misused over the past century but still more importantly to critically assess how the intellectual inertia of eugenic habits of mind continue to globally influence political, social and medical ideas, in addition to practices and policies. Visit the website and program of events at https://www.fromsmallbeginnings.org/
For information and other access needs, contact: Isidro González @ isidrogonzalez@ucsb.edu
Image Credit: “Women welfare rights activists holding signs protesting proposed forced sterilization bill outside Tennessee courthouse, 1971,” Southern Conference Educational Fund (SCEF).
Livestream: YouTube – https://youtu.be/9tKLzCzE9Ak
Webinar: Zoom – https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/89876633951
Participant Biographies
Ella Callow, J.D., is the Director for Disability Access & Compliance at UC Berkeley. She has had a long history of advocacy as an attorney for the rights of disabled people before joining UC Berkeley. Ella is open about having disabilities herself and as a member of the Bay Area American Indian/Alaskan Native community, her understanding of disability in the United States is as an identity that is deeply intersectional with race, class, gender, sexuality, and educational privilege.
Cynthia Chandler is Director of the Bay Area Legal Incubator (BALI), in Oakland, California, a social-mission, legal incubator launched by the Alameda County Bar Association to accelerate the launch of affordable, community law practices.
Miroslava Chávez-García is professor of history at UCSB. She holds affiliations in Chicana/o studies and Feminist Studies Departments. Author of three books including States of Delinquency: Race and Science in the Making of California’s Juvenile Justice System (2012). Her current research interests focus on the intersection of the environmental movement, population control, and immigration restriction and the ways in which eugenic thought informed the ideologies as well as the leadership and rank-and-file of these movements.
Marcy Darnovsky is Executive Director at the Center for Genetics and Society (CGS), a Berkeley-based public interest organization focused on the social implications of human genetic and assisted reproductive technologies, including the legacies of eugenics that can distort their development and use. Darnovsky speaks and writes widely about the social justice and human rights challenges of human biotechnologies. She is co-editor, with Osagie K. Obasogie, of Beyond Bioethics: Toward a New Biopolitics (University of California Press, 2018).
Aminah Elster, a formerly incarcerated person, is with the California Coalition for Women Prisoners. A recent UC Berkeley graduate with a B.A. in Legal Studies, Elster is a well-known activist who collaborates with state legislators on policy reform for former and currently incarcerated people. https://news.berkeley.edu/2020/05/19/how-student-aminah-elster-liberated-herself-by-giving-voice-to-others/
Lorena García Zermeño is the Policy and Communications Coordinator for California Latinas for Reproductive Justice and spearheads our Justice for Young Families(J4YF) initiative where she works closely with CLRJ’s amazing young parent leaders. She graduated in 2014 from UC Santa Cruz and double majored in Anthropology and Feminist Studies with a concentration in Law, Politics and Social Change.
Isidro González is currently a third-year graduate student in the Department of History at UCSB studying the intersection of race, disability, and science in U.S. history. Broadly, González explores the rise and continuation of eugenics at the nexus of medicine, social science, and culture in the Mexico-U.S. borderlands. By situating eugenics in a transnational and historical context, his aim is to reveal how eugenic ideology continues in the present-day rhetoric of citizenship, health, and progress.
Juan Gudino, MPH, University of Iowa, College of Public Health.
Marie Kaniecki, MPH, is research analyst and dataset manager at the Sterilization and Social Justice Lab (SSJL) at the University of Michigan. The SSJL is an interdisciplinary group of scholars studying America’s history of eugenics through a reproductive, disability, and racial justice lens.
Han Koehle is a researcher and activist specializing in health inequity and institutional power. Han serves as the UCSB Health Equity Advocate and is a member of the Moral Support Consulting Collective, where they develop equity-centered medical education materials and strategies. Han’s current research addresses trans activist resilience, health inequities among university students, and the legacy of the eugenics movement in routine medical and psychiatric care.
Natalie Lira is Assistant Professor of Latina/o Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. Her research uncovers the largely neglected racial aspects of California’s eugenic sterilization program by providing evidence of the disproportionate institutionalization and sterilization of Mexican-origin women and men in state hospitals for the disabled during the first half of the twentieth century.
Carlos Martínez, MPH, is a PhD candidate in the joint program in Medical Anthropology at UC Berkeley and UC San Francisco. His research focuses on deportee and refugee life/health, the global drug war, policing and abolition, and colonial and decolonial approaches to medicine in the United States and Latin America.
David McIntosh is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at UCSB. He is currently exploring the history of anthropology and archaeology.
Aimee Medeiros is an Associate Professor and Director of the History of Health Sciences Program at UC San Francisco. Her work focuses on the reciprocity between diagnoses, preventive care measures, and societal expectations of the body in medicine. Her research areas include the history of pediatrics, race and medicine, history of pharmaceuticals, and twentieth-century therapeutics in the U.S.
Carly A. Myers is a Staff Attorney at the Disability Rights Education & Defense Fund (DREDF). She first joined DREDF staff in Fall 2017, as a George Barrett Social Justice Fellow, where she worked on a variety of litigation, legislation, and policy initiatives aimed at increasing access to healthcare for low-income people with disabilities.
Nicole Novak is Assistant Research Scientist at Iowa College of Public Health.
Osagie K. Obasogie, J.D., Ph.D., is the Haas Distinguished Chair and Professor of Bioethics at the University of California, Berkeley, in the Joint Medical Program and School of Public Health. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Center for Genetics and Society. Obasogie’s scholarly interests include Constitutional law, bioethics, sociology of law and medicine, and reproductive and genetic technologies. His first book, Blinded By Sight: Seeing Race Through the Eyes of the Blind (Stanford University Press) was awarded the Herbert Jacob Book Prize by the Law and Society Association. His second book, Beyond Bioethics: Toward a New Biopolitics (University of California Press, co-edited with Marcy Darnovsky), is an anthology that examines the past, present, and future of bioethics. His next book is under contract with Stanford University Press and explores the often overlooked limitations of DNA databases when they are used in criminal investigations.
Kate O’Connor, MPH, PhD Candidate, University of Michigan, American Culture.
Tony Platt is is Distinguished Affiliated Scholar, Center for the Study of Law & Society, UC Berkeley and a member of Berkeley’s Truth & Justice Project. He has written previously about the history of eugenics in the United States (Bloodlines, 2006, and Beyond These Walls: Rethinking Crime & Punishment in the United States, 2019). His current research focuses on the racial foundations of UC Berkeley.
Milton Reynolds is an educator and activist in the Bay Area. He formerly served for over a decade as senior program associate with Facing History and Ourselves. Before joining Facing History he spent over ten years as a middle school teacher, a diversity/communications consultant and as a curriculum design specialist and has over 30 years of counseling experience. Dedicated to improving dialogue and implementing innovative solutions to address difficult social issues such as race relations and juvenile justice and delinquency concerns, Milton sustains a high level of engagement in his home community.
Susan Schweik is professor of English at UCB. Her last book, The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public (2009), bore on the history of eugenics, a subject she is taking up directly in the book she is now completing, Unfixed: How the Women of Glenwood Asylum Overturned Ideas about IQ, and Why You Don’t Know About Their Work. She has been involved with the development of disability studies at Berkeley for almost 25 years.
Lucy Sirianni is a doctor–al candidate and Graduate Student Instructor in UC Berkeley’s English department, where she is completing a dissertation on nineteenth-century women’s anti-racism poetry and has taught a variety of courses on social justice and minority literature. She also serves as the Lydia Maria Child Society’s Vice President of Inclusive Excellence and Social Action and is deeply passionate about disability history, rights, and justice.

Paul Spickard is Distinguished Professor of History, Black studies, Asian American studies, and Chicana/o Studies at UC Santa Barbara. He has taught at fifteen universities in the United States and abroad. He is author or editor of twenty books and ninety-some articles on race, mixed race, and related topics. His most recent book is Shape Shifters: Journeys across Terrains of Race and Identity.
Alexandra Minna Stern, University of Michigan, is the Carroll Smith-Rosenberg Collegiate Professor of American Culture, History, and Women’s Studies and Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of Michigan. Her research has focused on the uses and misuses of genetics in the United States and Latin America. She is the author of the award-winning Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America (2015, 2nd ed.), Telling Genes: The Story of Genetic Counseling in America (2012), a Choice 2013 Outstanding Academic Title in Health Sciences, and Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate: How the Alt-Right is Warping the American Imagination (2019). Stern leads the Sterilization and Social Justice Lab, which uses mixed methods to study patterns and experiences of eugenic sterilization in the twentieth-century United States.
Nate Tilton is the Disability Lab Manager at the UC Berkeley Disability Lab, a disabled veteran, and a graduate student in the Department of Anthropology at Cal studying the intersecting points of institutions, disability, and veteran health. Through Nate’s research, he aims to understand how eugenics and eugenic design serves as a framework for ableist institutional policies and structures. He is currently working on “War Machine: American Institutions and Disposable Disabled Brown Bodies.” “War Machine” aims to understand the ways in which Pacific Islander veterans from free associated states and U.S. territories like the Republic of Palau and Guam experience exclusion from veterans’ benefits like medical care.

Jess Whatcott (they/them) is an Assistant Professor of Women’s Studies at San Diego State University. They study, teach, and organize for abolition against carceral state violence. Their current research examines how the philosophy and practice of eugenics was used to develop the carceral system in the state of California, beginning in the early twentieth century. Dr. Whatcott has also written about feminist speculative fiction as political education of eugenics, the carceral industrial complex, and neoliberalism.

Eugenics in California & the World

History Department Awards Ceremony
2021-06-02 16:00 - 17:00 | University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
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

A Conversation on Early Modern Print Culture: Hilary Bernstein and Patricia Fumerton Present Their New Books
2021-05-28 12:00 - 13:30 | Zoom, CA
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 entitled Historical Communities: Cities, Erudition, and National Identity in Early Modern France. Professor Bernstein will be introduced by Professor Erika Rappaport. Patricia Fumerton is Distinguished Professor of English, specializing in popular, multimedia print culture, with a focus on broadside ballads, 1550-1750; she is also Director of the NEH-funded English Broadside Ballad Archive (EBBA), ebba.english.ucsb.edu. Her new book is entitled The Broadside Ballad in Early Modern England: Moving Media, Tactical Publics. Professor Fumerton will be introduced by Professor Andrew Griffin.
Registration Link
A Conversation on EM Print Final Flyer

Senior Honors Thesis Colloquium
2021-05-28 09:00 - 15:30 | Zoom, CA
The participants of the 2020-2021 Senior Honors Thesis Seminar will be holding a Zoom colloquium to showcase their research on Friday, May 28th. We encourage you to attend and show support for your fellow undergraduate history majors. This is also a great opportunity to get a feel for what the colloquium is like if you plan to participate in the honors thesis seminar in the future! The schedule of presentations and zoom link are attached.
program.seniorhonorseminarcolloquium.2021

FOCAL POINT Dialogues in History Keynote Lecture with Prof. Herman Bennett: "Body, Soul & Subject: A History of Difference in the Early-Modern African Atlantic"
2021-05-21 13:00 | Zoom, CA
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 of Latin American history and the African Diaspora, Prof. Bennett’s previous books include Africans in Colonial Mexico: Absolutism, Christianity, and Afro-Creole Consciousness (2003), Colonial Blackness: A History of Afro-Mexico (2009), and the forthcoming The African Diaspora: A Very Short Introduction. His notable essays include “The Subject in the Plot: National Boundaries and the ‘History’ of the Black Atlantic,” in African Studies Review (2000) and “Writing into a Void: Slavery, History, and Representing Blackness in Latin America” in Social Text (2007). He has been the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for Humanities, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University, and the American Council of Learned Societies. The American Historical Association recognized his mentorship of racially and ethnically underrepresented students in the historical discipline through the AHA Equity Award in 2012. Prof. Bennett has served on the editorial boards of the Hispanic American Historical Review, Social Text, The Americas, the Blacks in the Diaspora series at Indiana University Press, and the American Historical Review.
Prof. Bennett’s most recent book, African Kings and Black Slaves: Sovereignty and Dispossession in the Early Modern Atlantic (2018) invites our attention to politics of sovereignty, enslavement, and power in the earliest Iberian and African interactions as a point of inquiry to critically rethink the ways in which liberalism has subsequently shaped analyses of culture, economy, and history.
The inaugural FOCAL POINT Dialogues in History series is inspired by the UCSB 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 it. Following three webinars led by History Department faculty and graduate students on topics like sovereignty, the political, liberation, racial capitalism, liberalism, and empire, from their own scholarly angles of vision, the keynote lecture brings the series to a close and invites more conversations to be continued in the future.
The keynote lecture will use the Zoom webinar format. Prior registration is required.
Date: Friday 21 May, 2021
Time: 1:00 PM Pacific Time (US and Canada)
Keynote Lecture: “Body, Soul & Subject: A History of Difference in the Early-Modern African Atlantic”
Zoom registration: Please register in advance for this webinar using the link below:
https://ucsb.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_RbHCtjyoS8S-l6vbTiFEzw

Conference on "Imperial Foodways: Culinary Economies and Provisioning Politics"
2021-05-21 - 2021-05-23 | Zoom, CA
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 organizer will be in touch with links to the relevant papers.
Please be advised that the format of this conference is workshop-style: because the papers are pre-circulated, authors will not be giving a formal presentation, and attendees are expected to have read papers beforehand to participate in the discussion.
If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact organizers at foodandempireworkshop@gmail.com.

Center for Cold War Studies Talk: Nancy Mitchell, "Andrew Young: Challenging Anglo-Saxon Foreign Policy?"
2021-05-20 11:00 - 12:15 | Zoom, CA
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 is Professor of History at North Carolina State University. She is the author of Jimmy Carter in Africa: Race and the Cold War (2016), which received the Douglas Dillon Award from the American Academy of Diplomacy and the Robert Ferrell Prize from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. Professor Mitchell’s first book was The Danger of Dreams: German and American Imperialism in Latin America, 1895-1914 (1999). She contributed the chapter on “The Cold War and Jimmy Carter” to The Cambridge History of the Cold War (2010), and her articles have appeared in Cold War History, International History Review, Diplomatic History, American Historical Review, Journal of American History, Prologue, H-Diplo, and H-Pol.
Click here to join the Zoom for this event.

Lily Anne Welty Tamai, "Mixed-Race Black Identities in Postwar Japan and Okinawa"
2021-05-19 16:00 - 17:30 | Zoom, CA
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 the Pacific, created a surge of interracial relationships, resulting in a mid-century multiracial baby boom. Easily identifiable by their mixed-race features, they were the children of the enemy: in Japan they symbolized defeat and racial impurity. In the U.S., they represented an extension of America’s democratic intervention abroad and for mixed-race adoptees in particular, they embodied the salvation that the U.S. offered Japan during the postwar occupation. Interracial
communities, families, and mixed-race individuals challenged the default narrative of White normativity in the U.S. military and in the post-war period, while also expanding our understanding of the transnational Black Pacific, or the diaspora of Blacks in the Pacific Rim. While Black soldiers migrated west across the Pacific, some of their mixed-race children migrated east to the U.S. in the
decades following World War II. This presentation with center the voices of mixed-race Black Japanese in post-war Japan and within the militarized borderland of Okinawa to examine the tropes of hybrid degeneracy and hybrid vigor as these individuals navigated their lives between
invisibility and hyper-recognition.

Lily Anne Welty Tamai earned her doctorate in History from UCSB. She conducted research in Japan and in Okinawa as a Fulbright Graduate Research Fellow and was also a Ford
Foundation Fellow. Her forthcoming book, titled Military Industrial Intimacy: Mixed-Race American Japanese, Eugenics and Transnational Identities, documents the history of mixed-race American Japanese and American Okinawans born after World War II and raised during the post-war period. Dr. Tamai was formerly the Curator of History at the Japanese American National Museum and served on the U.S. Census Bureau National Advisory Committee on Racial, Ethnic, and Other
Populations. She is currently a lecturer in Asian American Studies at UCLA.

To join the Zoom meeting, use Zoom ID 925 5728 2471.

Public History Colloquium Event–"The Queerness of Home: Public History and the Domestic Archive"
2021-05-07 12:00 - 13:30 | Zoom, CA
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 of Chicago Press, October 2021) retells LGBT history from the inside out, revealing how LGBT people mobilized home spaces as crucial sites of intimate connection, care, and cultural inclusion. He’ll focus particularly on the challenges and possibilities of uncovering queer domestic life both in The Queerness of Home and in his 2017 exhibition, AIDS at Home: Art and Everyday Activism (Museum of the City of New York)—and how a focus on the domestic archive can reshape methods in public history.
Register for this event at http://bit.ly/queerness-home
Recommended links:
A Place in the City: Three Stories about AIDS at Home, dir. Nate Lavey and Stephen Vider (2017), documentary film which originally appeared in AIDS at Home: Art and Everyday Activism https://vimeo.com/303736782
Stephen Vider, “”Oh Hell, May, Why Don’t You People Have a Cookbook?”: Camp Humor and Gay Domesticity,” American Quarterly 65, no. 4 (2013): 877-904. [Open-access through JSTOR Daily: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43822994?mag=in-the-gay-cookbook-domestic-bliss-was-queer]

Senior Honors Thesis Information Session
2021-05-06 16:00 - 17:00 | University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
This is a reminder that we are currently accepting applications for the 2021-22 History Senior Honors Thesis program. 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! See the attached document for more details.

If you plan to apply, please join us at our virtual information session on Thursday, May 6th from 4-5pm using this Zoom link. Please RSVP to me if you can attend. At this meeting, we plan to give an overview of the honors thesis course and colloquium, and answer any questions you have. If you are unable to attend, let me know so I can send you a briefing of what was discussed. Thanks!

Invitation to Apply (7) (1)

Nicole Archambeau, "War, Plague & Confession: Stories of Survival from Fourteenth-Century Provence"
2021-05-06 16:00 | Zoom, CA
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 a rich evidentiary base of 68 narrative testimonials from the canonization inquest for Countess Delphine de Puimichel, which was held in the market town of Apt in 1363. Each witness in the inquest had lived through outbreaks of plague in 1348 and 1361, as well as violence inflicted by mercenaries unemployed during truces in the Hundred Years’ War. Faced with an unprecedented cascade of crises, the inhabitants of Provence relied on saints and healers, their worldview connecting earthly disease and disaster to the struggle for their eternal souls. Their testimonies unexpectedly reveal the importance of faith and the role of affect in the healing of both body and soul.
Advance registration is required for this event. You can sign up here.
Click here to download the flyer for Dr. Archambeau’s talk.

ISRRAR Event–Dr. Sylvester Ogbechie, “Godbearer: Yoruba Orisa, Black Atlantic Modernisms and Afrofuturist Imaginaries”
2021-05-04 16:00 | Zoom, CA
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 narratives of William Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy that centered the Loa (gods) of the Haitian Vodun pantheon as primary characters. This resurgence corresponds to a return of discourses of spirituality in narratives of modernity and contemporary art practice. What is the meaning of this contemporary focus on African deities and how does it allow us to engage anew or reinterpret Black Atlantic arts that foreground African spiritual and cultural registers?
Join this Zoom event at tinyurl.com/isrrarTalk
This event is part of the ISRRAR Spring Quarter series.

Interdisciplinary Conference on "Fallout: Chernobyl and the Ecology of Disaster"
2021-04-29 - 2021-04-30 | Zoom, CA
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 award-winning documentary “The Babushkas of Chernobyl,” with Director Holly Morris, will take place on Thursday, April 29, 2021 at 4:00pm (Pacific Time, US & Canada), before which registered participants can pre-screen the film. Information on registering for both events and the conference website are below:

Conference Website

Register for the Virtual Conference at 9am-4pm Pacific Time (US & Canada) on Friday, April 30, 2021

Register for the Carsey-Wolf Center Virtual Discussion at 4pm Pacific Time (US & Canada) on Thursday, April, 29, 2021

Thirty-five years after the 1986 nuclear accident at Chernobyl, the interdisciplinary virtual conference Fallout: Chernobyl and the Ecology of Disaster considers its afterlife and reverberations in various disciplines, including culture and the arts. Situated at a watershed moment during the Cold War, Chernobyl has spawned an unprecedented quantity of global responses from scientists, writers, filmmakers, and artists, and it has become a key moment for the global environmental movement. This conference views the accident and its aftermath in the context of broader global ecologies of disaster and considers how catastrophe is coded and understood — or fails to be understood — through the prism of science, art, literature, and film. How do all these disciplines and discourses confront the disaster, and where do they converge to produce the fiction, or the truth, of what we call “Chernobyl”? The conference brings together scholars and experts in Comparative Literature, History, Anthropology, Environmental Studies, Nuclear Engineering, Medicine, Art, Film, and Germanic and Slavic Studies.

Sponsored by the Division of Arts and Letters and the T. A. Barron Environmental Fund. Event partners include the Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies, the, and the Carsey-Wolf Center. Other sponsors include the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, Department of Global Studies, Comparative Literature Program, Environmental Studies, Cold War Studies, College of Creative Studies, and History Department. (Rescheduled from April 2020 when it was postponed due to COVID-19.)

History Associates: Patrick McCray, "Making Art Work: Artists and Engineers in the Age of Apollo"
2021-04-25 16:00 | Zoom, CA
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. Patrick McCray shows how in this era, artists eagerly collaborated with engineers and scientists to explore new technologies and create visually and sonically compelling multimedia works. Today, we are in the midst of a new surge of corporate and academic promotion of projects and programs combining art, technology, and science. Making Art Work reveals how artists and technologists have continually constructed new communities in which they exercise imagination, display creative expertise, and pursue commercial innovation.
Zoom link: ucsb.zoom.us/j/6855143149

History Beyond the Academy: A Conversation
2021-04-24 16:00 | Zoom, CA
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 students Addie Jensen and Mattie Webb. All are welcome!
Join this event on Zoom at https://ucsb.zoom.us/j/6855143149.
Click here to download the event flyer.

CWWG Workshop–Mattie Webb, "Beyond Desegregation: Waging a Battle Against Apartheid in the South African Workplace"
2021-04-24 14:00 - 16:00 | Zoom, CA
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 CCWS initiative, the Cold War Working Group (CWWG), 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. The 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, etc.) by members of our community.
If you wish to participate in the April 24 workshop, please email Addie (who is also serving this year as the CCWS Graduate Fellow) at addisonmjensen@ucsb.edu, and she will provide you with a copy of Mattie’s dissertation chapter, along with a Zoom address.
Please join us for this exciting event!

ISRRAR Event–Dr. Vincent Brown, "Tacky's Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War"
2021-04-20 16:00 | Zoom, CA
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 another continuously. These clashes amounted to a borderless slave war: war to enslave, war to expand slavery, and war against slaves, precipitating wars waged by the enslaved against slaveholders. In this sense, Dr. Vincent Brown argues, Tacky’s revolt was but a war within other wars, which had diverging and overlapping provocations, combat zones, political alliances, and enemy combatants.
Join this Zoom event at tinyurl.com/isrrarTalk
This event is part of the ISRRAR Spring Quarter series.

FOCAL POINT Dialogues in History Webinar III: Racial Capitalism and Liberalism
2021-04-16 13:00 | Zoom, CA
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 it, the series brings together UCSB History faculty and graduate students who have volunteered to lead a dialogue on Black life, race, and antiblackness in history. The final webinar will engage Herman Bennett’s African Kings and Black Slaves, as a focal point to discuss themes like racial capitalism and liberalism from different historical angles of vision.
Our final webinar will transition into a Zoom meeting room format. Registration for the Zoom meeting is required. Please click on the link below to register, after which you will receive a passcode and meeting link. You will need the passcode to enter the meeting.
Date: April 16, 2021
Time: 1:00 PM Pacific Time (US and Canada)
Webinar III: Racial Capitalism and Liberalism
Zoom registration: Please register in advance for this webinar using the link below.
https://ucsb.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZcud-yvrj4iE9O-rnuoC1Vo4oW2d61R6HzW
Featuring presentations by Alice O’Connor, Manuel Covo, Mattie Webb, and Sherene Seikaly
Comment by Mhoze Chikowero

Alice O’Connor is a historian of poverty, capitalism, inequality, social science, and public policy in the U.S. and the author of Poverty Knowledge (2001) and Social Science for What? (2007).
Manuel Covo is a historian of French imperialism, the Atlantic World, and the Haitian Revolution and the author of the forthcoming The Entrepot of Atlantic Revolutions.
Mattie Webb is a historian of U.S. foreign policy, African History, and comparative race and ethnicity. Mattie’s archival and oral-historical research combines social and diplomatic history to study the impact and awareness of the Sullivan Principles in South Africa during the apartheid era.
Sherene Seikaly is a historian of political economy, capitalism, development, race, and dispossession in the modern Middle East and the author of Men of Capital (2016) and co-editor of A Critical Political Economy of the Middle East and North Africa (2021).
Mhoze Chikowero is a historian of music, colonialism, technology, and urban space in Zimbabwe and southern Africa and the author of African Music, Power, and Being in Colonial Zimbabwe (2015).
