The History Department is co-sponsoring the upcoming conference "Gender, Creative Dissidence, and the Discourses of African Diaspora: A Colloquium in Honor of Ama Ata Aidoo," to be held at the UCSB Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, May 24-26, 2012. Ama Ata Aidoo, an eminent Ghanaian playwright and author, will deliver the keynote address (UC Regent's Lecture and […]

The Persians used elephants in their military from the Achaemenid to the Safavid period. The talk discusses the importance of elephants forSasanian royal ideology as a symbol of kingship, and their use against the Romans in Late Antiquity. Touraj Daryaee is Howard C. Baskerville Professor in the History of Iran and the Persianate World at […]

Honors Colloquium to Show Disease, Witchcraft, Murder by Dyne Suh and Nate Gelman, excerpted from Historia, May 2012 From televangelists to venereal disease, dictators to witchs' teats, 15 seminarians tested the full powers of their creativity and skill to compose theses examining a wide array of edgy paper topics stretching from antiquity to the Middle […]