Department of History, UC Santa Barbara

History Club Weekly Meetings
2022-10-06 19:00 - 21:00, 2022-10-13 19:00 - 21:00, 2022-10-20 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.

Eugenic Legacies Across Latin America: Virtual Conference
2022-10-12 - 2022-10-13 | University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
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 attending, register at the following link.

This conference is hosted by UC Santa Barbara, as part of the From Small Beginnings… project.

Please disseminate this on any channels, or to anyone who you feel may be interested.

We look forward to welcoming you then.

Best of wishes,

Benedict Ipgrave and Miroslava Chavez-Garcia

History Associates: "Prioritizing the Preservation of Black Legacies in Santa Barbara"
2022-10-19 17:30 | East Side Library, Montecito Street, East Side Library, 1102 E Montecito Street, Santa Barbara, CA, 93103, United States
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. The historic context statement examines the history of Santa Barbara’s African-American and Black community through historic buildings. It identifies buildings and sites important to the community that can now be designated and protected as historic resources. The lecture will highlight the many contributions of people of African American and Black people in Santa Barbara, beginning in the Spanish and Mexican periods through the postwar fight for civil rights. Co-presented by Sojourner Kincaid Rolle of Healing Justice SB and Nicole Hernandez, Architectural Historian for the City of Santa Barbara.
Speakers: Sojourner Kincaid Rolle and Nicole Hernandez
Please see the enclosed flyer for more information.
Free and open to the public. Space is limited. Please RSVP to: historyassociates@ia.ucsb.edu by Monday Oct 17

History Associates Talk | States of Dis/armament | Mhoze Chikowero
2022-11-09 16:00 - 17:00 | HSSB 6020 (McCune Room), University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
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 of African self-liberation, Mhoze Chikowero centers these questions in his research and teaching on Africa’s recent histories, be it the history of European colonization, African wars to expunge that colonization, the cultures and psychologies that those encounters produced, or the technologies of the same.
In this talk, Chikowero reads the cultural archive—written and oral—to argue that colonialism is a system of cultural disarmament and sonic reengineering that left lasting legacies on African states of being. This theorization lays the groundwork for his expansive, transregional research on African liberation wars.
Mhoze Chikowero is an Associate Professor of African History at the UC Santa Barbara. He got his Honors degree in Economic History at the University of Zimbabwe (2001), and his Masters and Ph.D. at Dalhousie University in Canada (2008) as a Killam Scholar. He is a past American Council of Learned Societies Charles Ryskamp Fellow (2014-17), a past UCSB Interdisciplinary Humanities Center Fellow, Hellman Faculty Fellow, and a current Research Fellow at Leiden University, Netherlands.
UCSB History Associates brings together campus and community around our shared passion for History.
Become a member today! bit.ly/ucsbhistoryassociates

Talk by Rob Boddice: Consensus without Collaboration? The Future of Emotion Research from the Perspective of History
2023-01-11 16:00 - 17:30 | CA
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, social psychologists, transcultural psychiatrists, neurophilosophers, and social scientists. You can find more details about the talk here.
This talk is the inaugural event of a long-term initiative, a Research Focus Group called “Emotions in History” organized by Professors Ya Zuo (History) and Hongbo Yu (Psychological and Brain Sciences). Led by a historian and a psychologist, our group aims to promote interdisciplinary dialogue between psychologists and humanists and to foster genuine collaboration among scholars who study emotions from different traditions of inquiry.

Talk by Professor Emerita, Sharon Farmer | Fowl Play: France and beyond, 1979…
2023-01-12 12:00 - 13:30 | HSSB 4020, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
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. Like M.F. K. Fischer, Farmer describes an era that is now separated from us by historical rupture: in Fischer’s case, the rupture was caused by a world war; in Farmer’s, it was caused by the invention of the internet, which has profoundly altered the experience of living and traveling in another country. Like Marcel Proust, Farmer uses the five senses to convey the intensity of certain memories and the non-linear ways in which those memories unfold for us. The chapter also attempts to answer a simple question: how is it that the 27-year old woman who found herself incapable of purchasing a live chicken (which would have been butchered for her on the spot) in Tours, France, in 1979, became the woman who raised and then slaughtered and ate twelve quail in Holyoke, Massachusetts in 2020? She also calls into question, in light of her own growing interests in migrant rights and post-colonial perspectives, the France that she invented for herself in 1979.

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 | 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.

History and Political Economy Colloquium | "Business of pleasure" | Julie Johnson and Erika Rappaport
2023-01-27 12:00 - 13:50 | HSSB 4080, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
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 contemporary issues. For that purpose, we will center our own research and put our work into conversation across geographical, chronological, and field boundaries.

At our second meeting, participants will engage with the work of Professor Erika Rappaport and Julie Johnson, and discuss the “business of pleasure”.

To obtain copies of the pre-circulated materials, please write to mcovo@history.ucsb.edu.

Erika Rappaport is a European cultural historian, interested in the history of gender and consumer cultures in Modern Britain and its Empire. She studies how the history of consumption and commodities were integral to the construction of identities, politics, and economies in the 19th and 20th centuries. She is the author of Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West End (Princeton, 2000) and the award-winning A Thirst for Empire: How Tea Shaped the Modern World (Princeton, 2017).

Julie Johnson is a doctoral candidate in UCSB’s History program. Her research examines the “social life” of the cervical cap contraceptive as a commodity, tracing its circulation throughout Britain and its empire from 1918-1939. Her work blurs the boundaries of medicine and commerce, complicates conceptions of “female entrepreneurship,” and interrogates nationalistic constructions of reproductive “fitness” in the early twentieth century.

Anthologizing the City of Isfahan: Family Archives and Urban Knowledge, lecture by Professor Kathryn Babayan
2023-02-01 16:00 - 17:30 | HSSB 4080, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, 93106, United States
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 behind the gathering, excerpting, recording, and ordering of texts bound in a manuscript, represent different techniques of interpreting the city: they reveal a place where, among other things, the refined self was crafted on paper and performed in public.Anthologizing the City of Isfahan Family Archives and Urban Knowledge (1)

Graduate Seminar with Professor Kathryn Babayan: Archival Practices Beyond the State: Microhistories of Households in early modern Isfahan
2023-02-02 15:00 - 17:00 | Girvetz 2320
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), literally “gathered together,” was a codex which assembled professional and urban texts. Generated and then collected and assembled in the interior spaces Archival Practices Beyond the State Microhistories of Households in early modern Isfahan (2)of the house, such anthologies were also objects fashioned with the precise purpose of traversing the spaces between households—as letters, paintings, and gifts, bringing the city and its many forms of urbane dialogue into focus.

Multiple practices of collecting, copying, and authoring anthologies are preserved in the thousands of majmu’a produced in seventeenth century Isfahan. We will focus on two family archives, microhistories of two households, one religious (Khwansari) and the other bureaucratic (Urdubadi). Although Safavi “state” archives have not survived the trials of time, these archives provide us important clues as to what knowledge circulated in the city and what would have been included in notarial and imperial archives.

History Associates Talk | "Plant Life and Imperialism" | Utathya Chattopadhyaya
2023-02-08 17:30 - 18:30 | Santa Barbara Eastside Branch Library, 1102 E Montecito St, Santa Barbara, CA, 93103, United States
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 history itself. In British India, across the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, different forms of cannabis substances animated the history of working classes, gender, race, rural communities, and state formation in heterogeneous ways that also echoed the complex biochemistry and psychoactive variability of cannabis intoxicants. To understand the unfolding of modern British imperialism, the ways in which cannabis straddled its statuses as plant, commodity, substance, form, and matter can be crucial as it sheds important light on histories that have so far either remained out of focus or simply segregated from one another because of how colonial administrations produced categories to govern colonized spaces. This talk will introduce such histories and why and how they matter before suggesting what they contribute to the ongoing efforts of scholars to attend to the ways in which the supposed boundaries between humans, other species, and their environments have in fact remained thoroughly porous and vulnerable.
Utathya Chattopadhyaya is Assistant Professor in the UCSB History Department.
Click here for the poster

Lecture: Prof. John W.I. Lee (UCSB History) on "Women in Ancient Persia" at the Goleta Valley Library
2023-02-12 14:00 - 15:00 | Goleta Valley Library, 500 North Fairview Avenue, Goleta, 93117
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 region in the west to the highlands of Iran in the east.
John W.I. Lee is Professor of History at UC Santa Barbara. He grew up in Asia and Hawai’i, studied history at the University of Washington (Seattle), and received his PhD in History from Cornell University. His publications include A Greek Army on the March: Soldiers and Survival in Xenophon’s Anabasis (Cambridge University Press 2007), The Persian Empire (The Great Courses 2012), and The First Black Archaeologist: A Life of John Wesley Gilbert (Oxford University Press 2022). He is a member of the Managing Committee of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens.

Prof. Adrienne Edgar, "Intermarriage and the Friendship of Peoples: Ethnic Mixing in Soviet Central Asia"
2023-02-13 16:00 - 17:30 | HSSB 6020 (McCune Room), University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
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 view of ethnic nationality became increasingly primordial and even racialized in the final Soviet decades. In this context, mixed families and individuals found it impossible to transcend ethnicity, fully embrace their complex identities, and become simply “Soviet.”
This event is sponsored by the Center for Cold War Studies and International History. Delicious refreshments will be served!

Reputation and Habitual Misbehavior on a 'Spicy Little Isle Where Ladies were Few' (Paper Workshop)
2023-02-16 14:00 - 15:30 | HSSB 4041, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
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 advance and be prepared to share your observations and insights with the group. All are welcome.
ABSTRACT: In 1903, the Governor of Ceylon learned that a 16-year-old British boy had accused Hector Macdonald, the colony’s highest-ranking military official, of sexual abuse. As further allegations of Macdonald’s “habitual crime of misbehavior” arose, imperial officials in the metropole and the colonies wrestled with how to address the growing scandal. At stake was not only Macdonald’s reputation but also that of British governance across the globe. In this paper, I consider the ways in which the archive has variously replicated or resisted the reputational politics that guided the government’s response 120 years ago and argue that these archival practices have fostered widespread misunderstanding of the Macdonald scandal among historians and the public.

History and Political Economy Colloquium with Dr. Giuliana Perrone | "Abolition and Capitalism" | Feb 24, 12 PM | HSSB 4080
2023-02-24 12:00 - 14:00 | HSSB 4080, 4080 Humanities and Social Sciences Building, UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
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 world – ranging from rent, inflation, and student debt to deepening, racialized inequality. For that purpose, we will center our own research and put our work into conversation across geographical, chronological, and field boundaries.
At our third meeting, we will discuss “abolition and capitalism” with Professor Giuliana Perrone, Assistant Professor, Department of History, UCSB.
Required Readings: Sinha – The Problem of Abolition in the Age of Capitalism (1) Perrone Chapter

Healing Communities Conference
2023-02-25 09:00 - 18:00 | McCune Conference Room, HSSB 6020, UCSB, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
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 healing from capitalism, colonialism, and environmental degradation.

FULL SCHEDULE HERE.

Keynote Speakers
Dr. ann-elise lewallen
Professor of Pacific and Asian Studies
University of Victoria

Dr. Jane E. Warjri
Lead Research Coordinator for the Khasi Biodiversity Forest Health Project
University of Victoria and University of Arizona

Dr. Jan Nederveen Pieterse
Distinguished Professor and Mellichamp Chair in Globalization
University of California, Santa Barbara

The conference is open to all graduate students, organizations, as well as to the public, with no registration fees. Co sponsored by the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center of UC Santa Barbara, the History Department, Medieval Studies, the Graduate Student Association, the Queer & Trans Graduate Student Union, and the Asian Pacific Islander Graduate Student Association.

History Associates Talk | Patricia Cline Cohen | "What the Dobbs decision got wrong about the history of 19th-century abortion."
2023-02-26 14:00 - 15:30 | Santa Barbara Public Library, Faulkner Gallery, 40 E. Anapamu Street, Santa Barbara., University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States

Lecture: Patrick Hunt (Stanford University) on "Hannibal's Secret Weapon" in HSSB Room 6020
2023-02-27 16:00 - 17:00 | McCune Conference Room (HSSB 6020), Humanities and Social Sciences Bldg, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
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 and pay his allied mercenaries as well as his schooling of Rome to reinvent its military. When Scipio – Hannibal’s best pupil – took New Carthage (Cartago Nova or Cartagena) in 209 BCE, he effectively cut off Hannibal’s access to further Iberian silver and Hannibal’s successes dried up, which is no coincidence. Scipio learned well from Hannibal’s craftiness, as documented in Polybius and Frontinus’ Strategemata, by turning the tables on Hannibal at Zama in 202 BCE. As a result of Hannibal’s genius, every strategist since Hannibal, including Machiavelli and military commanders up to the present, emulates Hannibal’s program for adding nature to his arsenal and his use of military intelligence and topography, which is why Hannibal’s tactics are still taught as relevant spycraft. The irony that Hannibal never aimed to destroy Carthage but only to preserve Carthage is all the more tragic in that Rome sought to and succeeded in destroying Carthage’s empire and impose their own empire and remake the Mediterranean as “Mare Nostrum.”
Patrick Hunt is with the Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies at Stanford University, the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at UCLA, the School of Cultural Diplomacy in London, the Fromm Institute in San Francisco, and the Institute for EthnoMedicine. He holds his Ph.D. from the Institute of Archaeology, University of London, and has also studied at the University of California at Berkeley, and the American School of Classical Studies in Athens. His research interests are Alpine archaeology, archaeological science, archaeometry, geoarchaeology, forensic archaeology, Roman archaeology, Celtic archaeology, and Hannibal studies. His main publications include Alpine Archaeology (2007), and Ten Discoveries That Rewrote History (2007), as well as numerous articles and encyclopedia entries, and his most recent book is Hannibal. Prof. Hunt is one of the AIA’s 2022/2023 Norton Lecturers.
For additional information or for assistance in accommodating a disability, please contact Prof. John Lee in the UC Santa Barbara History Department.

IHC RFG Talk | Lee Vinsel | US Policymaking and the Promises of Technology in the 1990S’ “New Economy”
2023-02-27 16:00 - 17:30 | HSSB 4041
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 the Internet. Microsoft CEO Bill Gates predicted Business @ the Speed of Thought, as one of his book titles put it, and Wired writer Kevin Kelly argued that the Internet would lead to the dematerialization of the economy. This “irrational exuberance” would eventually end in the dot com bust, but not before members of the Clinton administration used projections around “the New Economy” to justify a number of decisions that would have far-reaching ramifications, including policies around telecommunications, labor and trade, education and training, student loans, and economic, racial, and gender inequality.
In this talk, Lee Vinsel will build on recent work on the history of the Clinton White House and political economy, including Margaret O’Mara’s The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America and Nelson Lichtenstein and Judith Stein’s forthcoming, A Fabulous Failure: The Clinton Presidency and the Transformation of American Capitalism. Vinsel will ask what can be gained for this literature by focusing on technology, both the actual material change taking place in the 1990s and, perhaps most importantly, the ideas and fantasies surrounding the concept “technology,” which greatly outpaced reality.
Lee Vinsel is Associate Professor of Science, Technology and Society at Virginia Tech.
Sponsored by the IHC’s Machines, People, and Politics Research Focus Group

History and East Asia Center presents Aaron Skabelund's talk "Inglorious, Illegal Bastards: Japan’s Self-Defense Force During the Cold War" | Mar 1 | 4PM | HSSB 4020
2023-03-01 16:00 - 17:30 | HSSB 4020, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
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 the Sapporo Snow Festival, for greater acceptance during the Cold War.
EAC Inglorious, Illegal Bastards Japan_s Self-Defense Force During the Cold War

“LGBT Direct Action Bibliography, Chronology, and Inventory, 1965-73” (Marc Stein, SFSU)
2023-03-01 16:00 - 18:00 | CITRAL Seminar Room, Library, UCSB Library, 525 UCEN Rd, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
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 political activism; and sexual politics in the discipline of history.
Marc will speak about – “LGBT Direct Action Bibliography, Chronology, and Inventory, 1965-73” – a forthcoming database/inventory/chronology on US LGBT history that he is curating.
Reception to follow.

"Queer Public History: A Conversation with Marc Stein"
2023-03-02 14:30 - 16:00 | HSSB 4041, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
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 political activism; and sexual politics in the discipline of history.
“Queer Public History: A Conversation with Marc Stein” will revolve around his recently published edited collection of the same name that considers queer public history and scholarly activism within the same frame.
All are welcome.

From Table to Text: Borders and Boundaries in Food History
2023-03-03 - 2023-03-04 | CA
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: Erika Rappaport, rappaport@ucsb.edu or Elizabeth Schmidt e_schmidt@ucsb.edu
Please see here for the draft program

Graduate Recruitment Day
2023-03-03 09:00 - 17:00 | HSSB 4020
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

Coffee on Campus (with Marc Stein)
2023-03-03 10:00 - 11:00 | HSSB 3041, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
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; queer political activism; and sexual politics in the discipline of history.
Coffee on Campus with Marc Stein. This causal event is exclusively for our undergrad students and will be co-hosted by the History Club and the Undergraduate Journal. Come learn about Marc’s career and work as a historian of sexuality.
Caffeine and snacks will be served.

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.

Deadly Curves: Dissection and Desire in Japan, 1879-1930 (Paper Workshop)
2023-03-16 14:00 - 15:30 | CA
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 your observations and insights with the group. All are welcome.
ABSTRACT:
Women appear as phantasmagoric figures during great societal change. As scholars have noted, figures such as the Modern Girl and the “Good wife, wise mother” served as cultural constructs to alleviate or contain concerns about shifting gender roles in Meiji and Taishō Japan. At the same time, stories of monstrous women that circulated during this time demonstrate the inability of these figures to contain gendered anxieties. My presentation examines a different cultural construct – namely, the figure of the beautiful woman on the dissection table – that horrified and enchanted journalists, novelists, and anatomists alike.
I follow the figure of the lovely corpse through newspaper articles that detail the “poison woman” Takahashi Oden’s execution and dissection in 1879. She also guides me through the fictional pages of Mishima Sōsen’s 1907 short story “Dissection Room” and Harumi Ryō’s 1930 horror novel Dissection of a Virgin. While the practice of dissection was coded as masculine and rational, I argue that the idea of women cadavers both allured and confused the public. Indeed, women’s corpses served as repositories for apprehensions about shifting scientific frameworks, changing gender roles, and the state’s increasing control over the body. The discourse surrounding women’s corpses on the dissection table – whether depicting them as objects of desire, anxiety, and/or scientific proof – demonstrates that the impact of dissection stretched far beyond the laboratory and into the public imagination.
All are welcome.

Talk by Joshua Conrad Jackson: The History of Our Minds: Evidence for Co-Evolution of Cultural and Psychological Processes
2023-03-16 16:00 - 17:30 | Zoom, CA
Dr. Joshua Conrad Jackson, a DRRC Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Northwestern University and an incoming professor of Behavioral Science at the University of Chicago, is going to deliver a talk titled “The History of Our Minds: Evidence for Co-Evolution of Cultural and Psychological Processes,” on Thursday, March 16, 2023 at 4-5:30PM (PST). Please click this link to attend. Everyone is welcome!
Biologically modern humans are more than 200,000 years old. Many scientists have devoted their lives to understanding how architecture, social structure, and language have changed over this history. Yet we know almost nothing about the history of human minds. Behavioral science research has instead focused nearly exclusively on contemporary people, and psychological theories often draw from taxonomies that assume a culturally and historically stable structure to emotion, personality, morality, and other psychological processes. In this talk, Joshua Conrad Jackson surveys new insights into how psychological processes may have changed over human history in ways that challenge these taxonomical models.
This talk is part of a long-term initiative, a Research Focus Group called “Emotions in History” organized by Professors Ya Zuo (History) and Hongbo Yu (Psychological and Brain Sciences). Led by a historian and a psychologist, our group aims to promote interdisciplinary dialogue between psychologists and humanists and to foster genuine collaboration among scholars who study emotions from different traditions of inquiry.
