Axel Jansen, History of Medicine, "An Unlikely Partnership? The Vatican Endorses Stem Cell Research, 2000-2015"
2023-04-03 16:00 - 18:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Bunche 5288 & Zoom
RSVP for in person attendance here.
RSVP for Zoom link here.

Peasants, Perpetrators, and Violence in Nazi-Occupied Ukraine
2023-04-04 16:00 - 18:00 | 6275 Bunche Hall

Dr. Ashley Sanders and Dr. David Sebastiani, DH^2: Digital Humanities x Digital History
2023-04-05 14:30 - 16:00 | 6275 Bunche Hall

Patrícia Martins Marcos, UC Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow Rising to the Challenge "The Empire of White Patriarchs: Population, Race-Making, and the Sciences of Human Improvement in the Afro-Luso-Brazilian Atlantic (1730-1800)"
2023-04-06 12:00 - 13:30 | 6275 Bunche Hall
In 1750, when the Brazilian border expanded by several orders of magnitude, Portuguese Crown officials, administrators, and men of science received the news with hope and apprehension. While the growth of frontiers of Portugal’s possession in the Americas was celebrated, it also presented formidable challenges for settlement. How could a diminutive metropole whose empire stretched across the four corners of the globe, secure its new territorial gains? Drawing on Newtonian physics, novel anthropological thinking about the human as a species, and the accounting technology of “Political Arithmetic,” Portuguese imperial administrators launched a policy known as the “political mechanism.” Recognizing how “population is everything,” this talk historicizes the emergence of racial whitening (branqueamento) as a project of human improvement and “population multiplication.” Arguing that producing bigger and better population futures became the chief scientific project of eighteenth-century Portuguese imperialism, I demonstrate how reform was undergirded by the forging of a new ideal of subjecthood: the salaried laborer. The salaried laborer became, I argue, the embodiment of a new ideal of whiteness (or white subjecthood). The end-goal of a new imperial science of human improvement was premised on the remolding of “rustics” into workers. In the Amazon, the key site where I will focus on in this talk, a new Crown policy promised to assimilate Amerindians and Roma people into whiteness through productive and reproducible labor. This talk excavates the racialized and gendered conditions of possibility for whitening through pronatalism, human speciation, and patriarchal rule.
Patrícia Martins Marcos (Ph.D History and Science Studies) is a UC Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow Rising to the Challenge at UCLA’s History Department of History and the Bunche Center for African American Studies. Her book manuscript, Imperial Whiteness, historicizes genealogies of racial improvement through whitening in the 18th Century Afro-Luso-Brazilian Atlantic by linking histories of the life sciences, to medicine, gender and sexuality, and race. She is currently Associate Editor with the History of Anthropology Review and elected Early Career Representative for the History of Science Society—where she is also co-chair of the Early Sciences Forum. Her work has been supported by the Huntington Library, the American Philosophical Society, the Center for Black, Brown, and Queer Studies, and the John Carter Brown Library. She is currently a fellow with the Folger Shakespeare Library and next Fall she will be a visiting fellow at the Department of History of the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG–Brazil) . Her most recent “Blackness out of Place,” was published with the Radical History Review and focuses on the epistemology of Black visual resistance in Portugal and its former imperial spaces.
Zoom Registration Here

Mika Lior, Assistant Professor of Performing Arts at the University of Malta, "Circling With/In: Choreographies of Gendered & Regendered Agency in Bahian Candomblé"
2023-04-20 12:00 - 13:30 | Zoom
Mika Lior, Assistant Professor of Performing Arts at the University of Malta
“Circling With/In: Choreographies of Gendered & Regendered Agency in Bahian Candomblé”
Based on history, dance studies methodologies and critical ethnography, this paper addresses choreographies of invocation and incorporation in the Afro-Brazilian ritual practice of Candomblé through the lens of indigenous feminisms and choreographic analysis. Looking closely at practitioners’ use of circular and cyclical movements and spatial pathways at a range of ceremonial sites in Salvador, the capital of Bahia in Northeastern Brazil, I show how Candomblé’s aesthetic principles and matri-focal social structures are similarly informed by what I call a feminist poiesis, evidenced in ceremonial performance histories that privilege women’s bodies for mediumship. Intervening in the dominant representation of Candomblé’s spirit embodiments as acts of “possession,” I attend to practitioners’ idioms of incorporation, including circling with and in the saint –“rodar com o santo” and “rodar no santo,” – to illustrate how ritual processes are actively constructed around intersubjective, movement oriented ontologies as well as cycles of women’s reproductivity and Yoruba-Atlantic understandings of gendered agency. At the same time, processes of incorporation instantiate a non-binary ontology of ritual gender fluidity through which male mediums take on structurally feminized roles.
This presentation concludes by considering how performance studies approaches such as choreographic analysis and dance practice under the tutelage of ritual experts can contribute to processes of intercultural knowledge production. I share my ethnographic dance film, Ogum’s Story, co-created with Candomblé elder Dona Cici, as a model for thinking through circling with/in not only as an ontology of spirit embodiment but also a collaborative, mutually reciprocal research method.
Zoom RSVP Here

Edward Halley Barnet, History of Medicine, "Music and the Mind. Vibratory Mental Mechanics in the 18th Century"
2023-04-24 16:00 | 5288 Bunche Hall

Dean Alexandra Stern, "Queer Oppression and Resistance to Eugenics in 20th Century California"
2023-04-26 12:00 - 14:00 | 6275 Bunche Hall
The RSVP link is here.

Melissa Lo, History of Science, "How We Find Our Topics, How Our Topics Find Us: A Discussion"
2023-05-01 16:00 | 5288 Bunche Hall

Alden-Berg Lecture ft. Stephen Aron
2023-05-03 18:00 | Kerckhoff Grand Salon
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Kevin Dawson, Associate Professor of History, University of California, Merced “Surfing, Surf-Canoeing, and the Atlantic Slave Trade”
2023-05-04 00:00 - 13:30 | 6275 Bunche Hall
Atlantic Africa—the region extending from Senegal to Angola—has few natural harbors, compelling Africans to cross through surf to reach fisheries and coastal shipping lanes. Sources suggest that one thousand years ago Africans independently developed surfing to understand how to design and surf waves ashore in surf-canoes loaded with fish cargo. Today, Atlantic Africans remain the only people to harness wave energy as part of their daily labor practices. Even as Europeans crossed oceans, their rowboats were too slow to navigate African surf-zones, and routinely capsized. Hence, surf-canoemen transported most of the goods imported into and exported out of Africa between ship-and-shore, including the majority of the twelve million captives shipped into Atlantic slavery. This talk considers how African maritime wisdom and expertise informed the cultural and economic development of the Atlantic world.
Zoom: RSVP

Dr. Kate McDonald, History of Science, "The Rickshaw Everyman: Transport and Memory in Postwar Japan"
2023-05-08 16:00 | 5288 Bunche Hall

The History of Gender & Sexuality Group Graduate Student Workshop
2023-05-11 09:00 - 17:00 | 6275 Bunche Hall

Sakhia's Gift: Intimate Economies in Transition in Twentieth-Century Zanzibar
2023-05-11 12:30 - 13:50 | 6275 Bunche Hall

History Undergraduate Conference
2023-05-17 09:00 - 17:00 | 6275 Bunche Hall

Clark Library Conference "From Bodies to Things: The Commodification of Human Life in the Early Modern Atlantic" organized by Tawny Paul and Andrew Apter (UCLA)
2023-05-19 09:00 - 17:00 | William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 2520 Cimarron Street, Los Angeles, CA 90018, United States
https://www.1718.ucla.edu/events/bodies-to-things-1/

Jane Moon, M.D., History of Science, "Pushing the Borders of Consciousness: A History of Ketamine and Dissociative Anesthesia"
2023-05-22 16:00 | 5288 Bunche Hall

Waterfront Film Screening by Professor Milos Jovanovic
2023-05-25 17:00 - 18:30 | Kaplan A65

Michael Miller, "A French History of Rivers"
2023-05-31 16:00 - 17:30 | 6275 Bunche Hall

Mélanie Cournil, Senior Lecturer in British History at the Sorbonne University "Transatlantic Circulation of Botanical Knowledge : The Glasgow Years of William Jackson Hooker (1820-1841)"
2023-06-01 12:00 - 13:30 | 6275 Bunche Hall
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Zev Yaroslavsky Reception
2023-06-06 16:00 - 19:00 | 306 Royce Hall
Join us to celebrate the release of a new memoir by a long-time member of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors and member of the Luskin Center of History and Policy Board of Advisors, Zev Yaroslavsky.
Space is limited for this event. Please RSVP before May 15 to: luskincenter@history.ucla.edu.

History Department Open House for Undergraduate Students
2023-09-27 14:30 - 16:30 | 6275 Bunche Hall

Patricia M. Marcos, “‘True Sex’: Adjudicating Gender and the Sciences of Racial Improvement in the Portuguese Atlantic (1740-1790)”
2023-10-09 16:00 - 17:30 | 5288 Bunche Hall

Tanya Bride (UCLA History) - Trails of Hoof and Pawprints
2023-10-19 12:00 | Zoom
Please join us for our first lecture series of the 23-24 academic year featuring Tanya Bride who will speak on “Trails of Hoof and Pawprints: Tracing human-animal relations in colonial Mexico through the religious courts and Relaciones Geográficas”.
Please note: This event will only be held via Zoom. It will not be in person.
This event is part of the UCLA History Department Atlantic History lecture series.

Michael McGovern, “Quantifying Injustice: Law, Science, and History”
2023-10-23 16:00 - 17:30 | 5288 Bunche Hall
Zoom link here

Andrew Denning, "Automotive Empire: How Cars and Roads Fueled European Colonialism in Africa"
2023-10-26 16:00

Isabela Dornelas, “From Pelvic to Abdominal: The Development of Cesarean Section in Brazil, Mid-XIX Century.”
2023-10-30 16:00 - 17:30 | 5288 Bunche Hall

America on Strike: Labor Takes Center Stage
2023-11-06 18:00 - 20:00 | Founders Room, UCLA James West Alumni Center
—– RSVP: In-Person and Virtual —–

Thomas Barton (Univ. of San Diego) “Forbidden Love in the Archives: Exploring the Possibilities of Medieval Municipal Sources”
2023-11-08 16:00 - 18:00 | 6275 Bunche Hall

Mike Jarvis (Rochester) - Castle Cormantine and Early English Africa, 1632-1672
2023-11-09 12:00 - 13:30 | Bunche 6275 & Zoom
The Atlantic History Colloquium generates innovative scholarship on the relations linking Africa, Europe and the Americas by investigating the expansion of markets during the slave trade; the production of literary texts and forms of historical memory; the politics of religious dissent and conversion; the growth of colonial science and cartography; Native American ethnogenesis; the rise of abolitionist and Pan-African ideologies; and the dynamics of race, gender and creolization throughout the Atlantic world.
Please visit UCLA Atlantic History for more information and a complete schedule of events in 2023.

Stefan Rinke, "Doing Latin American History From a European Perspective During the Boom Times of the Global"
2023-11-09 16:00 - 17:00 | 5288 Bunche Hall
