Department of History, UC Santa Barbara

Salim Yaqub, History, "Imperfect strangers: Americans, Arabs, and U.S.-Middle East Relations in the 1970s"
2017-01-25 17:00 - 19:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | McCune Conference Room (HSSB 6020), Humanities and Social Sciences Bldg, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Salim Yaqub will be giving a talk on his new book, Imperfect Strangers: Americans, Arabs, and U.S.-Middle East Relations in the 1970s, which was published by Cornell University Press in September 2016. In this book Yaqub argues that the 1970s were a pivotal decade in U.S.-Arab relations—a time when Americans and Arabs became an inescapable presence in each other’s lives and perceptions, and when each society came to feel profoundly vulnerable to the political, economic, cultural, and even physical encroachments of the other. Throughout the seventies, these impressions aroused striking antagonism between the United States and the Arab world. Over the same period, however, elements of the U.S. intelligentsia grew more respectful of Arab perspectives, and a newly assertive Arab American community emerged into political life. These patterns left a contradictory legacy of estrangement and accommodation that continued in later decades and remains with us today.
Yaqub is Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Director of UCSB’s Center for Cold War Studies and International History. He is the author of Containing Arab Nationalism: The Eisenhower Doctrine and the Middle East (University of North Carolina, 2004) and of several articles and book chapters on the history of U.S. foreign relations, the international politics of the Middle East, and Arab American political activism.

Marshall Steinbaum, Economics, The Roosevelt Institute, "Student Debt and the Labor Market: Challenges to Theory and Policy"
2017-01-27 13:00 - 15:00 | CA
Marshall Steinbaum, who holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Chicago, is Senior Economist and Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. He has authored numerous papers on job mobility, economic inequality, student debt, entrepreneurship and the corporate economy.

Jeff Sklansky, History, University of Illinois at Chicago, "The Fund of Trust: Monetary Reform and the Ethic of Investment in the Gilded Age"
2017-02-03 13:00 - 15:00 | CA
Sklansky is the author of The Soul’s Economy: Market Society and Selfhood in American Thought, 1820-1920 (2002) and the forthcoming Sovereign of the Market: The Money Question in Early America. A copy of his paper, “”The Fund of Trust: Monetary Reform and the Ethic of Investment in the Gilded Age” can be found here: Sklansky

Panel Discussion: Historical Perspectives on President Trump's Jan. 27 Executive Order on Immigration
2017-02-08 17:00 - 18:30 | HSSB 6020 (McCune Room), University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Three faculty of the UCSB History Department will provide historical perspectives on immigration in the U.S.:
Giuliana Perrone, “The History of Exclusion in American Law”
Nelson Lichtenstein, “Immigrants Built the American Left and They Will Do It Again”
Paul Spickard, “Immigration in a Time of Hate”
Feb. 8 Poster

Ann Little (Colorado State University) - Blogging, Tweeting, and Instagramming the Borderlands of Public and Academic History: Social Media as a Tool for Public Engagement
2017-02-09 12:00 - 13:30 | HSSB 3208, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
College and university History departments (once again?) say they’re in crisis: nationwide, our numbers of majors have shrunk dramatically over the past decade, not to mention the “job crisis” of the past 45 years that has outlived the expansion of the profession from 1945-1970 nearly twice over. What’s an academic historian to do about this? Social media like Facebook, blogs, Twitter, and Instagram can be tools for building interest and support for our work as historians, and can help build careers to boot.
This talk by Ann M. Little (from Colorado State University’s Department of History) will examine the promise (mostly) and perils of being a historian in public online.

In keeping with the theme, if you want to check out Ann on Twitter, she’s at @historiann or read her blog.

Professor Ann Little (Colorado State University) - The Many Captivities of Esther Wheelwright: Communities of Women in the Northeast Borderlands.
2017-02-09 15:00 - 16:30 | HSSB 4080, 4080 Humanities and Social Sciences Building, UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Join us for a talk by Prof. Ann Little who will be speaking about her new book, The Many Captivities of Esther Wheelwright: Communities of Women in the Northeast Borderlands.

Esther Wheelwright (1696-1780) embodies the imperial conquest of North America like no other eighteenth-century figure, yet she has been largely written out of the story of American history. Born and raised to age seven in a New England garrison town, she was taken in wartime by the Wabanaki in 1703 and taught to pray as a Catholic and to live like a Native girl. At age twelve, she was enrolled in the Ursuline convent school as a student, where she would remain for the rest of her life as a choir nun, eventually becoming the first and only foreign-born Mother Superior of the order. Learn why she has been forgotten, and what remembering her can teach us.

This talk is sponsored by the Slavery, Captivity, and Meaning of Freedom Research Focus Group

Nicole De Silva, History UCSB, "Fashioning Chinese America Cultural Citizenship and the Transpacific Boycott of Japanese Silk Stockings, 1937-1940”
2017-02-15 15:30 - 17:00 | HSSB 3001E, 3001E Humanities and Social Sciences Building, UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
The Commerce, Commodities and Material Culture Research Cluster will be hosting its first paper workshop this year to discuss Nicole De Silva’s paper “Fashioning Chinese America Cultural Citizenship and the Transpacific Boycott of Japanese Silk Stockings, 1937-1940.”

The paper positions the Japanese silk stocking boycott of 1937-1941 as a staging ground that fostered the development of a Chinese American cultural and political identity in the midst of the Exclusion Era. It tells a story unbound by US national borders to demonstrate how contact and collaboration between US/ Chinese residents enabled boycott participants to articulate their biculturalism, perform their image of modernity, and find their political voices. By fitting this movement into larger historical disputes around trade, diplomatic policy, labor politics, and US anti-fascism, the project suggests that the debate over the buying and selling of Japanese silk hosiery was more than it might have “seamed.”

Please read the paper before coming to the workshop. It is available here: NDS Silk Stockings Fall 2017 Revisions

Hail the Maintainers! or - How to Give Up the Innovation Fetish (Prof. Lee Vinsel)
2017-02-16 16:00 - 17:30 | HSSB 4080, 4080 Humanities and Social Sciences Building, UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Hail the Maintainers! or – How to Give Up the Innovation Fetish
Join us for a talk by Prof. Lee Vinsel, Stevens Institute of Technology – 16 February 2017 in HSSB 4080 at 4PM
Our culture is obsessed with innovation. Innovation is thought to be the goal of business, policy-making, philanthropy, education, even play. Yet, the vast majority of human activity aims not at creating or adopting innovative things but in maintaining old ones. While our society celebrates Innovators, the simple truth is that most of us are Maintainers. This talk first traces the rise of innovation-speak in the USA. The Cult of Invention that developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries laid the foundation, but rise of the word “innovation” itself was a distinctly post-World War II phenomenon. Ironically, the term was used more and more after 1970—and particularly after 1990—when the United States experienced low economic growth and fewer meaningful innovations than in the previous hundred years.
Innovation-speak was a reaction to and antidote for economic malaise, and all institutions, including universities, were to be reformed in its name. After laying out this history, I will put forward an alternative view of human life with technology, drawing on a tradition of thought, including historians like Ruth Schwartz Cowan and David Edgerton. I will conclude by exploring the consequences of this more grounded view of technology and society for both the future of historical and social scientific technology studies and for policy-making.
This talk is co-sponsored with the Machines, People, and Politics RFG
A flyer for Lee’s talk is here.

David Moss, Harvard Business School, “E Pluribus Unum: Thoughts on the Perils (and Promise) of an Aging Democracy”
2017-02-17 13:00 - 15:00 | CA
David Moss is the Paul Whiton Cherington Professor at Harvard Business School, where he teaches in the Business, Government, and the International Economy (BGIE) unit. He earned his B.A. from Cornell University and his Ph.D. from Yale. A founder of the Tobin Project, Professor Moss is the author of Socializing Security: Progressive-Era Economists and the Origins of American Social Policy (1996); When All Else Fails: Government as the Ultimate Risk Manager (2002); and editor of Preventing Regulatory Capture: Special Interest Influence and How to Limit It (2014). A copy of his paper, “E Pluribus Unum: Thoughts on the Perils (and Promise) of an Aging Democracy,” will be available soon.

Cheryl Jimenez Frei, UCSB, "Shaping and Contesting the Past: Monuments, Memory and Identity in Buenos Aires"
2017-02-26 12:30 - 15:00 | Alumni Hall, Mosher Alumni Center, UCSB, Santa Barbara , CA, 93106, United States
UCSB History Associates invites you to attend the Fourth Annual Van Gelderen Graduate Student Lecture
Cheryl Jimemez Frei, a PhD Student in Latin American History, will be giving a lecture related to her work on memory and the built environment in Argentina. A luncheon will follow. To attend the luncheon, please fill out the form here: 2017-Frei flyer-3
In 2013, then-President of Argentina Cristina Fernández de Kirchner sparked both protest and praise after announcing the removal of a nearly century-old monument of Christopher Columbus in Buenos Aires. It had been a gift from Argentina’s prominent Italian immigrant community, to celebrate the nation’s centen-nial of independence. After two years of contentious public debates, Kirchner celebrated the inaugural of the massive monument that replaced it—a sculpture of Jua-na Azurduy de Padilla, a nineteenth-century female rev-olutionary fighter of indigenous heritage, and a histori-cal figure previously unknown to most.
The controversy over these statues provides a flashpoint to examine the history and iconography of monuments in Buenos Aires’s commemorative core, to question how history, identity, and memory are pro-duced and internalized through public spaces. How did monuments perform specific didactic functions in the past, and do they continue to do so in the present? If so, who has authority in representation? What should be-come of monuments to now-questionable heroes and narratives of the past?
Cheryl Jimenez Frei is completing her PhD dissertation in Latin American History. Her research specialties include Argentina, memory, and the built environment, visual culture, and public history. Her article, “Contesting Columbus: Monuments, Memory and Identity in Buenos Aires,” was recently accepted by the Journal of Latin American Studies.

Film—"Nasser's Republic: The Making of Modern Egypt"
2017-02-28 19:30 - 21:20 | HSSB 6020 (McCune Room), University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
The Center for Cold War Studies and International History will show Icarus Film’s new documentary, “Nasser’s Republic: The Making of Modern Egypt,” a stirring but unflinching portrayal of Gamal Abdel Nasser and his impact on Egyptian, pan-Arab, and international politics. After the screening of the film, which runs about 80 minutes, Sherene Seikaly, Associate Professor of History at UCSB, will offer commentary and lead a discussion of the film.
The event is free an open to the public. Delicious refreshments will be served!
Nasser’s Republic Flyer

"The Beach Boys: Classified Research with a Southern California Vibe" - Bill Leslie; The Johns Hopkins University
2017-03-02 16:00 - 17:30 | HSSB 4080, 4080 Humanities and Social Sciences Building, UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Long before companies such as Apple and Google learned how to attract and indulge their high tech workforces with espresso bars, climbing walls, flextime, and other perks, laboratories likeRAND in Santa Monica, Hughes Research Laboratories in Malibu, and Nortronics in Palos Verdes perfected the art of concierge science. These were venues designed to recruit, retain, and inspire researchers with bold architecture, scenic views, challenging problems, brilliant colleagues and a lifestyle best described as “cold war avant-garde”. Whether through curated contemporary art collections, guest lecture series by recent Nobel prize winners, or simply the opportunity to live and play in some of the area’s best beachfront resorts, these companies reimagined the scientific life as a aesthetic choice for members of an emerging ‘creative class,’ with a distinctly regional flair. Southern California promised a new style of doing science where researchers themselves called the shots, where the bottom line did not constrain blue sky thinking, and where youthful exuberance had the chance to prove itself.

About the Speaker: Bill Leslie has taught the history of science and technology at Johns Hopkins University since 1981. He has written on industrial research, Cold War science, corporate architecture, and most recently the architecture of science. Much of his recent work looks at science and technology in the developing world—Iran, India, and Pakistan—and at the aerospace industry in Southern California. He is currently writing a history of Johns Hopkins University.
A flyer for the talk is here.

Post-Holocaust Film: Bogdan's Journey (1946 Kielce pogrom)
2017-03-07 19:30 - 21:30 | Girvetz 1004, Girvetz Hall, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
In 1946 forty Jewish survivors of the Holocaust were murdered by townspeople in Kielce, Poland, after a non-Jewish boy reported having been kidnapped by Jews. Catholic psychologist Bogdan Bialek moved to Kielce in the late 1970s, and was shocked by the toxic atmosphere in the town. He made it his life’s rork to persuade residents to embrace their past and to reconnect the town with Jewish groups around the world.
After the 90-min. film Bogdan Bialek will discuss his work with the audience.
Official trailer.

Mary Furner, History, “The Jacobs Era in US Labor Standards Law and Regulation, 1885-1899”
2017-03-10 13:00 - 17:00 | HSSB 6020 (McCune Room), University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Professor Furner is the author of Advocacy and Objectivity: A Crisis in the Professionalization of American Social Science (with a new Introduction, 2010); “Ideas, Independencies, Governance Structures, and National Political Cultures: Norbert Elias’s Work as a Window on U.S. History,” in Christa Buschendorf, et al, eds, Civilizing and Decivilizing Processes: Figurational Approaches to American Culture (2011); and “From ‘State Interference’ to the ‘Return of the Market’: The Rhetoric of Economic Regulation From the Old Gilded Age to the New,” in Edward Balleisen & David Moss, eds., Government and Markets (2009).
Her presentation will be followed by a symposium honoring Professor Furner’s contributions to the field.

Drawing Twentieth-Century History: The World in Flames, a talk by Fernando Bryce Copy
2017-04-07 15:00 - 17:45 | HSSB 4020, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Fernando Bryce’s upcoming public lecture, “Drawing Twentieth-Century History: The World in Flames” to take place Friday, April 7th in HSSB 4020 starting at 3 pm, is part of the yearlong new interdisciplinary graduate workshop “Theoretical Perspectives on War, Political Violence, Nationalism and the State” (History 291) in the History Department. After the formal talk (3:00-4:30) and a coffee break, Bryce will stay for one more hour further to discuss his work with students registered in the workshop and any other interested students and faculty. The following paper is available for discussion: Natalia Majluf, “Seeing History” (Fernando Bryce. Lima: Museo de Arte de Lima, 2011). For further reading see Rodrigo Quijano, “Present Allusion”. Fernando Bryce. Barcelona: Fundació Antoni Tàpies, 2005, or Jiménez Fernando Bryce, The Untimely Copyist, Jiménez in Artnexus 2010
Since the goal of History 291 is to tackle the problems of war and political violence, including colonialism and empire from a multiplicity of disciplinary angles, I have taken the somehow experimental step of inviting an internationally renowned artist whose remarkable visual work addresses precisely those concerns. Historians, as Michel-Trouillout pointed out, are not the only ones to provide historical narratives. Or, as Natalia Mafluf, Director of the Museum of Art of Lima, eloquently wrote:
“Bryce focuses on the grand narratives, on the century’s historical events and decisive processes: the conquests of European imperialism, the great wars, the revolutions and ideological debates of the Cold War –that is, the development of the international ideologies of communism and capitalism shaping the political struggles of the twentieth century. Bryce’s project is thus aligned with certain recurrent themes of critical studies related to culture, images, politics, politics and the formation of subjectivities in the public sphere. At the same time, his series distance themselves from the practice of academics and professional historians, who usually focus on particular problematics or on the study of complex social processes by way of narrative argumentation. His drawings nevertheless provide a different approach to historical facts; one might say that what the academic discipline of history basically focuses on explaining, is what Bryce proposes instead to show. In other words, what he discovered, very simply, was a method that allows us to see history”.
This event is co-sponsored by the History Department, the Departments of Film and Media Studies, Spanish and Portuguese, History of Art and Architecture, the Program in Latin American and Iberian Studies, and the Office of the Associate Vice-chancellor on Diversity, Equity and Academic Policy.
For more information about Fernando Bryce, please scroll down. For inquiries please write Prof. Cecilia Méndez at mendez@history.ucsb.edu

FERNANDO BRYCE (b. 1965 Lima) attended university in both Lima and Paris and lived for many years in Berlin. Currently, he lives and works in Lima and New York. His ink on paper drawings systematically re-examine the ways historical events are represented in printed media. The process, which Bryce describes as ‘mimetic analysis’ involves culling archives for print materials like advertisements, newspaper articles, and propaganda pamphlets in order to faithfully reproduce a selection of these materials, creating his own ink-on-paper “reconstructions.”
In May 2011, Bryce had his first one-person exhibition in North America at Alexander and Bonin, El Mundo en Llamas [The World in Flames] in which the expansive sets of drawings El Mundo en Llamas and Das Reich / Aufbau were shown. Drawing Modern History, a survey exhibition of his work, was on view in 2011 at the Museo de Arte de Lima (MALI) and traveled to Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporaneo (MUAC), Mexico City and Malba-Colección Costantini, Buenos Aires. His work was included in “Manifesta 4,”Frankfurt (2002); “8th International Istanbul Biennial,” (2003); “26th Biennial of SãoPaulo” (2004); “54th Carnegie International,” Pittsburgh (2005); “T1 – The Pantagruel Syndrome,” Castello di Rivoli, Turin (2006); “The 11th Biennale de Lyon,” (2011) ; “The 1st International Biennial of Contemporary Art”, Cartagena de Indias (2014).
* * *
FERNANDO BRYCE: “DRAWING MODERN HISTORY”
Over the past decade Fernando Bryce (Lima, 1965) has produced a vast corpus of drawings that forge new forms of representation of historical memory. His method, which he early defined with a dose of humor as “mimetic analysis”, is based on the careful copy of official documents, press images, political propaganda and advertisements so as to form large series of ink drawings that focus on power relations and their mediatization in twentieth-century history. Through the basic play of re-presentation (in the most literal sense of showing again), by copying or the simple mise en scène of documents and objects, Bryce uses appropriation, parody and irony as weapons to expose the prejudices underlying commonly accepted official discourses.
This exhibition, jointly presented by Fundación Telefónica, the Museo de Arte de Lima and the City of Lima, brings together for the first time the greater part of the artist’s most ambitious series. A significant group of Bryce’s early work is shown at Fundación Telefónica. In these drawings and paintings made between Berlin and Lima in the second half of the 1990s, the artist explores diverse approaches to the representation of the local context and its history through images drawn from the mass media. The large series of drawings presented at the Museo de Arte de Lima reveal the way in which Bryce’s project gradually acquires a programmatic character and assumes an almost encyclopedic ambition. At the turn of the millennium, his work opens up, as in concentric circles, to encompass other regions and other chapters in twentieth-century history. He centers on the printed matter of ideology to cover war and revolution, colonial exploits, imperial domination and art programs, as officially portrayed in their own graphic language. Through his drawings, Bryce literally recovers the figuration of ideology. His project engages the images of the modern world, fixed selectively to forge a genealogy of the present.
Tatiana Cuevas and Natalia Majluf, curators (2011)
* * *
FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES
The wars and conflicts of the 20th century yielded entities like Unesco, a United Nations agency dedicated to encouraging international peace and, according to its website, “universal respect for human rights.” In his current show, the Peruvian-born artist Fernando Bryce reproduces images and text printed in Unesco’s Courier magazine between 1948 and 1954, as well as other publications devoted to promoting new aesthetic or cultural ideas.
The largest work includes 81 ink-on-paper drawings — what Mr. Bryce calls “reconstructions” — made from the Unesco Courier. Among the selections here, writers argue against racism, call for better access to education and ask how art and technology might aid peace and unity. On the opposite wall are 31 ink-on-paper reconstructions of advertisements for gallery exhibitions published from 1944 to 1947 in ARTnews, the reigning English-language contemporary art magazine of that period. In the rear gallery are 28 silk-screen prints with reproductions of images from Parisian and Latin American art magazines.
Culled from museum and library archives, Mr. Bryce’s project hints at the complications between originals and the copies. After all, art during the midcentury was often experienced — particularly by people outside urban centers — through black-and-white reproductions in magazines. The rise of abstraction as an international language in art is another concern raised by this show, since it was seen as having the ability to erase cultural differences. The gallery’s walls are filled with grand and wonderful ideas: foundations for a new and better world. The sobering fact is how familiar these problems of yesterday feel today.
Source:
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/18/arts/design/fernando-bryce-explores-midcentury-cultural-ideas.html?_r=0
For more on Fernando Bryce:

http://db-artmag.com/en/78/feature/the-artist-and-the-propaganda-machine-how-fernando-bryce-retells/
http://www.alexanderandbonin.com/sites/default/files/jimenez_artnexus_2010.pdf

"'A Toda Madre (ATM)': Migrant Dreams and Nightmares in El Norte"
2017-04-13 16:00 - 17:30 | UCSB Library Instruction & Training Room 1312 (First Floor, Mountain Side), Davidson Library, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106
A talk by Miroslava Chávez-García, Professor, Department of History, UCSB
Relying on dozens of personal letters exchanged among Mexican male migrants across the U.S.-Mexico borderlands in the 1960s, this talk by Miroslava Chávez-García (UCSB Department of History) probes migrants’ longing for economic opportunity, masculine affirmation, and emotional fulfillment. As the migrants’ correspondence illustrates, they relied on each other and the broader social networks to achieve lawful migration, employment, housing and transportation, and familiar forms of entertainment and companionship, easing their transition to the new environment and allowing them to bridge the best of both worlds. Offered as part of UCSB Reads 2017.

Honoring a Chicana Activist Dignity Warrior: The Life and Work of Alicia Escalante
2017-04-14 13:00 - 15:00 | UCSB Main Library, Pacific View Room, 8th Floor, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
A reception honoring Alicia Escalante, life-long community activist.

Please join us in recognizing the life-long activism of Alicia Escalante, the founder of the East Los Angeles Welfare Rights Organization (ELAWRO), who recently donated her papers to the California Ethnic and Multicultural Archives at the UCSB Library. Escalante organized the ELAWRO in 1967 after tiring of the indignities poor, single mothers of color like her secured at the hands of local authorities. Focused on economic justice and human dignity, Escalante’s social and political activism sheds new light on the multiple insurgencies and inter-organizational dynamics across a wide berth of movements, including welfare rights, women of color and white women’s feminist struggles, and Chicano battles for self-determination. Today, Escalante and the ELAWRO carry tremendous historical insight for the current struggles for human dignity, as they teach us the critical role of individual as well as collective, grassroots activism and leadership in furthering movements for social justice.
Speakers to include: Alicia Escalante; Miroslava Chavez-Garcia, History; & Rosie Bermudez, PhD Candidate, Chicana/o Studies. Reception to follow.

France Winddance Twine, Sociology, UCSB, “Diversity, Sexuality and Inequality in the San Francisco Tech Industry.”
2017-04-14 13:00 - 15:00 | HSSB 4041, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Twine is the author, most recently, of Outsourcing the Womb: Race, Class & Gestational Surrogacy in a Global Market (2015); Girls with Guns: Firearms, Feminism, Militarism (2013); and A White Side of Black Britain: Interracial Intimacy and Racial Literacy (2010). A copy of one of Twine’s recent articles on this topic, “Gender-Fluid Geek Girls: Negotiating Inequality Regimes in the Tech Industry,” can be found here.

Gender and Sexualities Research Cluster Brown Bag
2017-04-17 12:00 - 14:00 | HSSB 4020, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
The Gender and Sexuality Research Cluster will meet periodically throughout the year for brown bag lunches to read and workshop works-in-progress from members of the research cluster.
On April 17, Elizabeth Schmidt will discuss, “Culinary Commonplacing: The Literary Value of Food Manuscripts in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Britain.”
Draft papers will be distributed before the event, and all participants will be invited to offer feedback to the author. Contact history-gender-cluster@history.ucsb.edu for more information or to join the Gender and Sexuality Research Cluster.

Hannah Arendt, On Truth and Lying in Politics
2017-04-17 16:00 - 18:00 | Phelps 6206, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Lecture and discussion with Prof. Susanne Lüdemann (Munich/Rutgers Univ.)
Hannah Arendt (1906 –1975) was a German-born American political theorist. She escaped Europe during the Holocaust, becoming an American citizen. Her works offer provocative reflections on the conditions of possibility for political experience, an experience that defines the human condition. Her work is deeply concerned with the questions of nationhood, totalitarianism, the status of refugees and stateless persons, and the political sphere as an autonomous domain of human practice.
Susannne Lüdemann is the Charlotte M. Craig Distinguished Visiting Professor of German at Rutgers University and is professor of German and Comparative Literature at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich, Germany. After having received her Ph.D. from the University of Freiburg (Germany), she held research and teaching positions at Aarhus University (Denmark), at the Freie Universität Berlin, at the University of Konstanz, and at the University of Chicago. Her books include: Politics of Deconstruction. A New Introduction to Jacques Derrida (2014); Exemplarity and Singularity: Thinking Through Particulars in Literature, Philosophy, and Law (2015), co-edited with Michèle Lowrie; Der fiktive Staat. Konstruktionen des politischen Körpers in der Geschichte Europas (co-authored with A. Koschorke, T. Frank, E. Matala, 2007); Metaphern der Gesellschaft. Studien zum soziologischen und politischen Imaginären (2004); Mythos und Selbstdarstellung. Zur Poetik der Psychoanalyse (1994). Susanne Lüdemann works at the intersection of modern literature, continental philosophy, political theory, and psychoanalysis. Her current research project is a critical edition of Hannah Arendts’s unpublished lectures on Immanuel Kant. She is also preparing a monograph on Hannah Arendt and the Problem of Judgment in Modernity. The seminar will begin with a short presentation by Dr. Lüdemann, after which we will discuss the following texts by Hannah Arendt:

“Lying in Politics: Reflections on the Pentagon Papers,” in: Crises of the Republic (1972), pp. 1-47 https://monoskop.org/images/7/70/Arendt_Hannah_Crises_of_the_Republic.pdf
“Truth and Politics”, The New Yorker, Feb. 25, 1967, https://idanlandau.files.wordpress.com/2014/12/arendt-truth-and-politics.pdf

Marriage and Ritual Performance among the Servants of the Babylonian Gods
2017-04-18 12:00 - 13:30 | HSSB 4041, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Talk by Bastian Still, Leiden University
With more than 50,000 legal-administrative cuneiform tablets, the so-called Neo-
Babylonian Period (c. 625-484 BCE) is one of the best-documented periods in the
history of Mesopotamia, the region between Tigris and Euphrates. Unfortunately,
this invaluable and very rich material rarely finds use in wider social-historical
discourses, as cuneiform specialists still engage predominantly in conventional
investigations of philological, juridical and economic nature. Attempts to further the
field of Assyriology by providing much needed social perspectives are still strikingly
missing with the result that the complex fabric of this ancient society as a whole
remains a poorly understood subject of research – this is particularly obvious in the
study of Babylonian marriage.
This talk presents a novel approach to marriage in Babylonian society of the
mid-first millennium BCE, based on a combination of social network analysis,
sociological theory and anthropological studies. Focusing on priests in the city of Borsippa,
the talk reveals how marriage practices helped shape not only the social order of the community but also the daily cult activities of the temple of Borsippa.

Let us go upon the Acropolis: John Wesley Gilbert in Greece, September 1890-April 1891
2017-04-19 16:00 - 17:30 | UCSB Library Instruction & Training Room 1312 (First Floor, Mountain Side), Davidson Library, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106
Talk by John W.I. Lee, UCSB History Department

John Wesley Gilbert (ca. 1863-1923) was born in Hephzibah, Georgia. He attended Paine College (Augusta, Georgia), then received his BA from Brown University in 1888. He was the third African American to graduate from Brown. As a Brown MA student in 1890-1891, Gilbert became the first African American to attend the fledgling American School of Classical Studies at Athens (ASCSA). The ASCSA was founded in 1881 by a group of scholars from Brown, Columbia, Harvard, Yale, and other American colleges as a research and teaching center for Greek archaeology, literature, and history.
Drawing on Gilbert’s own writings and other contemporary documents, this talk examines the historical significance of Gilbert’s time in Greece. During his year as a student at the American School, Gilbert traveled throughout Greece, wrote a thesis on the demes (political subdivisions) of ancient Athens, and took part in the ASCSA’s excavations at the ancient city of Eretria.
After studying in Greece, Gilbert returned to the U.S. to teach at Paine College in Augusta, Georgia. He was a leader in the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church (now Christian Methodist Episcopal Church) and was an important voice for African American education and for racial equality and harmony in the U.S.
This talk is part of the ‘Black Classicism’ lecture series presented in conjunction with the “14 Black Classicists” exhibition hosted by the AD&A Museum and the UCSB Library. The lecture is co-sponsored by the Argyropoulos Endowment in Hellenic Studies, and the departments of Classics and Black Studies.

A talk by Sarah Bridger (Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo) on "STEM Feminists, Social Constructivists, and Well-Meaning War Criminals: Redefining American Science in the 1970s”
2017-04-20 17:00 - 18:30 | HSSB 4020, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Bridger flyer-fin

Amelia Brown (University of Queensland), Maritime Religion in Ancient Greek Culture
2017-04-24 16:00 - 17:30 | HSSB 4041, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Amelia Brown on Greek Maritime Religion

"Thinking Palestine Panel: 1967 and Beyond", Panel and Poster Exhibit
2017-04-28 16:00 - 18:30 | Unnamed Venue, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Please join us on April 28 from 4-6:30 pm for a panel, poster exhibit, and reception for the event “Thinking Palestine: 1967 and Beyond.” The event will be at Wireframe Studio in the Music Library, Music Building 1st floor.
June 2017 will mark fifty years of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and East Jerusalem. The anniversary makes all too evident what activists and scholars have long noted: the Israeli military occupation is not temporary. It is a defining structure of the Israeli and Palestinian political landscape.
Along with UCLA and UC Berkeley, UCSB is hosting a day of commemoration that will include a panel, a poster exhibit, and a reception. The panel, including Felice Blake, Richard Falk, Lisa Hajjar, and Sherene Seikaly, seeks to build on decades of critical thinking and political organizing around Palestine and justice more broadly. It will engage how legality, legitimacy, and history have intersected over the last half a century. The discussant for the panel is Jennifer Tyburczy.

Caitlin Rathe, History, UCSB, “Food Assistance Policies and the Transformation of the Public/Private Welfare State in the U.S. and Britain, 1972-1988”
2017-05-05 13:00 - 15:00 | HSSB 4041, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
While completing her dissertation in history at UCSB, Rathe is affiliated with the Blum Center for Global Poverty Alleviation and Sustainable Development. She studies welfare and social policy in the twentieth century.

Dana Frank, History, UC Santa Cruz, leads an all day Op-Ed writing workshop
2017-05-06 09:00 - 15:00 | HSSB 4041, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Professor Dana Frank of UC Santa Cruz will be leading an all day op-ed writing workshop on Saturday, May 6th. This workshop, offered on an annual basis by the UCSB Center for Work, Labor, and Democracy, provides faculty and students with an opportunity to hone their op-ed writing skills, translating their historical expertise into opinion pieces that speak to the present.
In addition to writing frequently for The Nation, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and The Huffington Post, Frank is the author of Local Girl Makes History: Exploring Northern California’s Kitsch Monuments (2007); Bananeras: Women Transforming the Banana Unions of Latin America (2005); and Buy American: The Untold Story of Economic Nationalism (1999).
If you wish to participate in this workshop, please contact Caitlin Rathe at: crathe(at)umail.ucsb.edu. There is space for 12 participants; coffee and a light lunch will be provided.

Echoes from El Pueblo Viejo
2017-05-07 14:00 - 16:00 | Alhecama Theatre, 914 Santa Barbara Street, Santa Barbara, CA, 93101, United States
2017-EPV-flyer-pdf

Gender and Sexualities Brown Bag: Sasha Coles
2017-05-08 12:00 - 14:00 | HSSB 4020, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
The Gender and Sexuality Research Cluster will meet periodically throughout the year for brown bag lunches to read and workshop works-in-progress from members of the research cluster.
On May 8, Sasha Coles will discuss “A Nation’s Wealth Surrounds a Worm”: Mormonism, Consumer Politics, and Utah’s Silk Industry, 1860s-1906.”
Draft papers will be distributed before the event, and all participants will be invited to offer feedback to the author. Contact history-gender-cluster(at)history.ucsb.edu for more information or to join the Gender and Sexualities Research Cluster.

Lawrence Badash Memorial Lecture - Erika Milam on "Creatures of Cain"
2017-05-10 16:00 - 17:30 | McCune Conference Room (HSSB 6020), Humanities and Social Sciences Bldg, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, United States
Please join us on May 10, 4PM, in the McCune Conference Room for the Lawrence Badash Memorial Lecture. Our guest speaker will be Erika Lorraine Milam (Princeton University) who will be giving a lecture titled Creatures of Cain: Human Nature and the Politics of Violence During the Cold War.
Human nature contains the seeds of humanity’s destruction. Or so it seemed to popular consumers of evolutionary theory in the late 1960s who maintained that the essential quality distinguishing the human animal from its simian kin lay in our capacity for murder. This startlingly pessimistic view enjoyed particular currency in the United States between 1966 and 1975. Even ten years earlier, this vision of humanity would have struck many scientists as odd. After the Second World War, liberal American biologists and anthropologists had crafted an account of humanity’s past that emphasized a common evolutionary heritage bonded through continued inter-breeding into a universal family of man. Her talk tells the story of how definitions of human nature came to grip public science with such force and why purported insights shifted, so dramatically and in such a short time, from seeing humanity as characterized by our unique capacity for reasoned cooperation to emphasizing, even lauding, our proficiency with violence.

Erika Milam is an Associate Professor of History at Princeton University where she specializes in the history of evolutionary theory. Her research explores how scientists have used animals as models for understanding human behavior, from sex to aggression. She is author of Looking for a Few Good Males: Female Choice in Evolutionary Biology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010) and coeditor, with Robert Nye, of Scientific Masculinities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).
The Badash Lecture honors the late Prof. Lawrence Badash, a long-time professor in the history of science at UCSB. The lecture is made possible with generous donations from Larry’s partner Nancy Hofbauer, his former student Peter Neushel, and numerous other donors who have contributed their support to the series.
A flyer for this event is here.
