October 2016
“The Specter of Social Engineering: Scientism and its Critics in the Long 1950s” a talk by Andrew Jewett, Harvard University
Andrew Jewett’s talk traces fears about science’s cultural impact among intellectual and political leaders and ordinary citizens in postwar America. Jewett is the author of Science, Democracy, and the American University: From the Civil War to the Cold War (2012). A copy of his paper can be found here.
Find out more »April 2017
Marriage and Ritual Performance among the Servants of the Babylonian Gods
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…
Find out more »Amelia Brown (University of Queensland), Maritime Religion in Ancient Greek Culture
Amelia Brown on Greek Maritime Religion
Find out more »May 2017
Caitlin Rathe, History, UCSB, “Food Assistance Policies and the Transformation of the Public/Private Welfare State in the U.S. and Britain, 1972-1988”
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.
Find out more »Dana Frank, History, UC Santa Cruz, leads an all day Op-Ed writing workshop
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…
Find out more »Leilah Danielson, History, Northern Arizona University, “Workers’ Education in the 1930s and Beyond”
Danielson is the author of American Gandhi: A.J. Muste and the History of Radicalism in the 20th Century (2014). Visit https://www.history.ucsb.edu/labor/home for more details on her talk.
Find out more »February 2018
Seth Rockman, History, Brown University, “Plantation Labor Outsourced: Rethinking New England Outwork and the National Economy of Slavery in Antebellum America”
Rockman is the author of Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore (2008) and co-editor, with Sven Beckert, of Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development (2016). Scraping By won the OAH’s Merle Curti Prize, the Philip Taft Labor History Book Award, and the H.L. Mitchell Prize from the Southern Historical Association. Rockman spent the 2016-17 year at re:work, a research institute on global labor history at the Humboldt University in Berlin.
Find out more »March 2018
Marcia Chatelain, History, Georgetown University, “Burgers in the Age of Black Capitalism: Fast Food and the Remaking of Civil Rights after 1968”
Chatelain is currently writing a book about race and fast food, From Sit-In to Drive-Thru: Black America in the Age of Fast Food (under contract, Liveright, an imprint of W.W. Norton). Her first book South Side Girls: Growing up in the Great Migration was published by Duke University Press in 2015. Chatelain co-edited, with Britta Waldschmidt-Nelson, Staging a Dream: Untold Stories and Transatlantic Legacies of the March on Washington (2015). Chatelain is a regular commenter on current events and social issues across a variety of media platforms.…
Find out more »April 2018
Rosie Bermudez, Chican@ Studies, UC Santa Barbara. “Economic Justice is a Women’s Issue: The Chicana Welfare Rights Organization’s Challenge to Welfare Reform in the 1970s.”
Rosie Cano Bermudez is a doctoral candidate in the department of Chicana and Chicano studies at UC Santa Barbara. Her dissertation “Doing Dignity Work: Alicia Escalante and the East Los Angeles Welfare Rights Organization, 1967-1974,” focuses on the human dignity struggles waged by single Chicana welfare mothers in East Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s at the confluence of multiple social movements. Her research interests are centered on the histories of Chicana and Mexican American women’s activism, identity, and…
Find out more »Nate Citino, History, Rice University, “Envisioning the Arab Future: Modernization in U.S.-Arab Relations, 1945-1967.”
Citino discusses his most recent book, Envisioning the Arab Future: Modernization in U.S. – Arab Relations, 1945-1967 (2017). He is also the author of From Arab Nationalism to OPEC: Eisenhower, King Sa’ud, and the making of U.S. – Saudi Relations (2002). Co-Sponsored with the Blum Center for Global Poverty Allevation and Sustainable Development. A chapter from his recent book can be found here. A light lunch will be served.
Find out more »May 2018
Jin Hee Kim, American Studies, Kyung Hee Cyber University. “The Republic of Samsung: Labor, Governance, and the Crisis of Korean Democracy.”
Currently a visiting fellow at the Center for the Study of the Work, Labor, and Democracy, Kim is the author of Labor Law and Labor Policy in New York State, 1920s-1930s (2006) and translator into Korean of John Dewey’s Liberalism and Social Action (2011). The editor and author of numerous books and articles on U.S. and Korean labor, Kim serves on the steering committee of the Seoul Labor Center. Her paper will be available here two weeks before her talk. A light lunch will…
Find out more »June 2018
Serge Ferrari, History, UC Santa Barbara. “General Electric versus the Market: the Road from Industrial to Financial Capitalism.”
Serge Ferrari is completing his dissertation on GE, tracing how the corporation remade itself into a large-scale financial enterprise at the end of the twentieth century. His paper will be available here two weeks before his talk. A light lunch will be served.
Find out more »May 2019
Atheism and Unbelief in the Protestant Atlantic World, c. 1558 – c. 1776, Patrick Seamus McGhee, University of Cambridge. LUNCH PROVIDED
Click to download flyer with details
Find out more »October 2019
Bernhard Rieger, “Making Society Work Again: Workfare in Transnational Context since the 1960s””
As part of the The Center for the Study of Work, Labor, and Democracy‘s “The Political Economy of Racial Inequality” Fall Quarter speaker series, Bernhard Rieger (History, University of Leiden) will present “Making Society Work Again: Workfare in Transnational Context since the 1960s”.” Rieger’s research examines European history within a comparative and transnational framework. His publications include Technology and the Culture of Modernity in Britain and Germany, 1890-1945 (2009) and The People’s Car: A Global History of the Volkswagen Beetle (2013).
Find out more »November 2019
Eric Rauchway, “A New Deal Voting Rights Case: A Strategy of the Roosevelt Justice Department, 1939-1941”
As part of the The Center for the Study of Work, Labor, and Democracy‘s “The Political Economy of Racial Inequality” Fall Quarter speaker series, Eric Rauchway (History, University of California Davis) will present “A New Deal Voting Rights Case: A Strategy of the Roosevelt Justice Department, 1939-1941.” Rauchway is the author of Murdering McKinley: The Making of Theodore Roosevelt’s America (2003), The Money Makers: How Roosevelt and Keynes Ended the Depression, Defeated Fascism, and Secured a Prosperous Peace (2015), and Winter War: Hoover, Roosevelt, and…
Find out more »David Stein, “Containing Keynesianism in an Age of Civil Rights: Jim Crow Monetary Policy and the Struggle for Guaranteed Jobs, 1956-1979”
As part of the The Center for the Study of Work, Labor, and Democracy‘s “The Political Economy of Racial Inequality” Fall Quarter speaker series, David Stein (African American Studies, University of California Los Angeles) will present “Containing Keynesianism in an Age of Civil Rights: Jim Crow Monetary Policy and the Struggle for Guaranteed Jobs, 1956-1979.” A UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow, Stein is the author of the forthcoming book Fearing Inflation, Inflating Fears: The Civil Rights Struggle for Full Employment and the…
Find out more »January 2020
Andrew Hartman, “Rethinking Karl Marx: American Liberalism from the New Deal to the Cold War”
As part of the The Center for the Study of Work, Labor, and Democracy‘s Winter Quarter speaker series, Andrew Hartman (History, Illinois State University) will present “Rethinking Karl Marx: American Liberalism from the New Deal to the Cold War.” Hartman is the author of Education and the Cold War: The Battle for the American School (2008) and the widely reviewed A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars (2015). Professor Hartman is currently at work on…
Find out more »February 2020
Jennifer Burns, “The Last Conservative: The Life of Milton Friedman”
As part of the The Center for the Study of Work, Labor, and Democracy‘s Winter Quarter speaker series, Jennifer Burns (History, Stanford University) will present “The Last Conservative: The Life of Milton Friedman.” Professor Burns is the author of Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (2009), and is now at work on a biography of economist Milton Friedman. She publishes articles and interventions on conservatism, libertarianism, and liberalism in academic journals as well as The New York…
Find out more »Ronny Regev, “‘We Want No More Economic Islands’: The Mobilization of the Black Consumer Market in the Postwar US”
On February 14 Ronny Regev (History, Hebrew University of Jerusalem) presents, “‘We Want No More Economic Islands’: The Mobilization of the Black Consumer Market in the Postwar US.” WWII ushered in an era of economic growth in the United States, which enshrined consumption as an integral part of liberal citizenship. African Americans were often excluded from the benefits of this “affluent society,” due to the prevalence of segregation and discrimination in the name of white supremacy. Still, throughout the 1940s…
Find out more »Grace Peña Delgado, “Mexico’s New Slavery: A Critique of Neo-Abolitionism to Combat Human Trafficking”
As part of the The Center for the Study of Work, Labor, and Democracy‘s Winter Quarter speaker series, Grace Peña Delgado (History, UC Santa Cruz) will present “Mexico’s New Slavery: A Critique of Neo-Abolitionism to Combat Human Trafficking.” Delgado is the author of Making the Chinese American: Global Migration, Localism, and Exclusion in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (2012) and co-author of Latino Immigrants in the United States (2011). Delgado participates in the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Project on Trafficking, Smuggling, and Illicit…
Find out more »Page last modified: February 17, 2020