UCLA Department of History

Sabrina González (Washington State University): “Schools as Laboratories: Pedagogy and Eugenics in Argentina”
2025-03-03 16:00 - 17:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | 5288 Bunche Hall

Book Celebration: Landscaping Indigenous Mexico by Fernando Pérez Montesinos
2025-04-07 16:00 - 17:00 | 6275 Bunche Hall
Join us for a book celebration and panel discussion in honor of Landscaping Indigenous Mexico: The Liberal State and Capitalism in the Purépecha Highlands (2025) by Fernando Pérez Montesinos, Associate Professor of History. 🍽 Refreshments provided.
Zoom: https://ucla.zoom.us/j/91757589490

“Landscaping Indigenous Mexico is a moving tribute to the resilience and adaptability of the agrarian landscapes that Mexico’s Indigenous peoples built over centuries.” – Germán Vergara
Co-sponsored by the History of Science Colloquium and the UCLA Latin America Institute.

Natasha Wheatley: The Life and Death of States: Central Europe and the Transformation of Modern Sovereignty
2025-04-07 16:00 - 18:00 | Bunche 5288 & Zoom
💻 Virtual Option: [https://ucla.zoom.us/j/91210000676?pwd=[REDACTED]

Daniel P. Gamez, "Imperial Urbanism: Environmental violence and Nahua autonomy in the Anahuac-Mexico City"
2025-04-17 14:00 - 16:00 | 6275 Bunche Hall

Suzy Kim, Rutgers University, "Among Women Across Worlds: North Korea in Global Cold War"
2025-04-22 16:00 - 18:00 | Bunche 10383

Why History Matters: L.A. Wildfires Past, Present and Future
2025-04-30 18:00 - 19:00

2025 UCLA History Graduate Student Conference: "Resistance and Change"
2025-05-03 08:30 - 22:30 | 6275 Bunche Hall
Interested in attending? Click here to RSVP(Or click the flyer above to access the RSVP form.)

Jonah Walters: "The Capsicum Cure: Slavery, medicine, and the (pre)histories of pepper spray"
2025-05-05 16:00 - 18:00 | Bunche 5288 & Zoom
“The Capsicum Cure: Slavery, medicine, and the (pre)histories of pepper spray” a talk by Jonah Walters, a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies and the UCLA Institute for Society and Genetics. Join via Zoom here.

State of Dispossession: Politics of Land and Memory on the Sino-Kazakh Borderland
2025-05-06 15:00 - 17:00

Susan Juster (W.M. Keck Foundation Director of Research at the Huntington Library), “A Common Grave: Being Catholic in English America.”
2025-05-08 12:30 - 14:00 | Bunche 6275 & Zoom

9th Annual Undergraduate History Research Conference
2025-05-14 10:00 - 16:00 | 6275 Bunche Hall
Now available: Conference Agenda
The History Undergraduate Advisory Board cordially invites you to our 9th Annual Undergraduate Research Conference on May 14th from 10am to 4pm. Tune in and support UCLA undergraduates as they present their research in front of various faculty and graduate students from the department. This event will be hosted in 6275 Bunche Hall (in the History Conference Room) and will be available via Zoom as well (Please RSVP below).
Our theme for UCLA’s 9th Annual Undergraduate History Conference is Lost or Forgotten Histories. The conference follows this themed tradition by encouraging participants to approach the theme creatively.
Please register for the event here!: https://forms.gle/djgqyzB1avBTPnGB6.

Dana Simmons: "On Hunger: Violence and Craving in America, from Starvation to Ozempic"
2025-05-19 16:00 - 18:00 | Bunche 5288 & Zoom
Join via Zoom here.

CANCELLED: Recognizing Citizens Without Territory: The Mechanisms of Exiled Polish Statehood During World War II
2025-05-19 16:00 - 18:00 | Bunche 6275 & Zoom
Please note: This event has been cancelled.

💻 Zoom Link: https://ucla.zoom.us/j/97217520919?pwd=[REDACTED]

(Rhiannon Koehler) Comics and Conquest: Political Cartoons and a Radical Retelling of the Navajo-Hopi Land Dispute
2025-05-28 16:00 - 17:00 | 6275 Bunche Hall

Marcel Boumans: "The History of the Mathematization of Economics"
2025-06-02 16:00 - 18:00 | Bunche 5288 & Zoom

UCLA History Department Open House
2025-09-24 14:30 - 16:30 | 6275 Bunche Hall
Incoming and returning students are invited to the History Department’s Undergraduate Open House! Make the most out of your UCLA experience and learn about:

Academic Counseling
HistoryCorps Internships & Public History Initiative
Luskin Center for History and Policy
Study Abroad
Phi Alpha Theta History Honor Society
History Graduate Student Association (HGSA)
History Undergraduate Advisory Board (HUAB)
and much more!

RSVP is encouraged, but walk-ins are always welcome! Please RSVP via https://forms.gle/9bfx3zZjgwxfmiFQ6.
Refreshments will be served!

How to Build a History of Science Course from the Ground Up
2025-10-06 16:00 - 17:30 | 5288 Bunche Hall
Everyone is welcome to the first installment of the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology Colloquium Series. UCLA’s own Jamie Kreiner will be presenting “How to Build a History of Science Course from the Ground Up.”
Creating a course from scratch takes a lot of work — but it doesn’t have to be a mystery or a slog, either. Jamie Kreiner will talk about how she developed a new lower-division survey of the history of science in the Middle Ages: this example will introduce grad students to the process of designing and building their own courses and engage the whole group in a conversation about pedagogical approaches to the history of science.
See you in the History of Science Room or join our listserv by emailing jkaptanian@ucla.edu for the option to listen via Zoom.

A Dialogue on Pan-Africanism
2025-10-16 12:00 - 14:00 | 6275 Bunche Hall
Please RSVP here, lunch will be provided.
To attend remotely via Zoom, RSVP here.

Speakers:
Félix Jean Louis III,
Assistant Professor, Department of History, University of California, Irvine
Paper: “Haiti, Haitians, and the Caribbean Roots of Pan-Africanism”

Bright Gyamfi
Assistant Professor, Department of History, Rutgers University
Paper: “Pan-Africanism and African and Diasporic unity”

Nana Osei-Opare (Discussant)
Assistant Professor, Department of History and Center for African & African American Studies, Rice University

"Wasteland to Date Garden": Eugenics and Agriculture in the California Desert; Between Radicalism and Technocracy: The Council for Science and Society and the Politics of Risk and Expertise, 1973-1990
2025-10-20 16:00 - 17:30 | 5288 Bunche Hall
Everyone is welcome to the next installment of the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology Colloquium Series. UCLA’s own Margaret Spaulding and Claire Votava will be presenting.
Meg’s talk is titled “Wasteland to Date Garden”: Eugenics and Agriculture in the California Desert. Previous historians have shown how the conservation movement inspired eugenicists, who anthropomorphized trees and forests in order to make eugenic arguments about racial preservation. This presentation will reveal how a different environment the desert- and different circumstances- agricultural expansion- nonetheless led to a similar result, wherein eugenic discourses of reproduction, control, and purity became entangled with the emergence and growth of the commercial date industry.
Claire will be presenting Between Radicalism and Technocracy: The Council for Science and Society and the Politics of Risk and Expertise, 1973-1990. This paper recovers the overlooked Council for Science and Society (1973-1990) to reconsider the history of technoscientific critique in late 20th-century Britain. Positioned alongside but distinct from the more activist British Society for Social Responsibility in Science, the CSS advanced a cautious, deliberative mode of critique through elite working parties and policy reports on risk, expertise, and technological governance. Its ambivalent stance- neither fully technocratic nor overtly radical- illuminates alternative models of scientific responsibility and the contested politics of expertise.
See you in the History of Science Room or join us over Zoom:
https://ucla.zoom.us/meeting/register/rDDLSdqDQN2Qy6G7dBdcsQ

Female Religiosity in Central Asia: Sufi Leaders in the Persianate World
2025-10-22 15:30 - 17:00 | 6275 Bunche Hall

Academic Freedom and the Crisis of the Democratic University
2025-10-29 10:00 - 17:00 | UCLA Royce Hall – Room 314, 10745 Dickson Ct, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, United States

Future of History Conference
2025-11-03 15:00 - 18:00 | UCLA Meyer and Renee Luskin Conference Center, 425 Westwood Plaza, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, United States
Recording of Panel 1: https://youtu.be/nUYVNwF6A9Q
Recording of Panel 2: https://youtu.be/tRwWu0TSOf8

Why History Matters: Story Telling on Screen
2025-11-04 18:00 - 19:00 | UCLA California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI) – Auditorium, 570 Westwood Plaza, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, United States

Territoriality and Freedom in the Bush: A Community-Focused Archaeology of Marronage in Colonial Dominica
2025-11-05 12:00 - 14:00 | 6275 Bunche Hall
Please note: Contrary to the usual schedule, this talk is on a Wednesday!
RSVP for attending the talk remotely (Zoom): https://ucla.in/3WvjYFm

Speaker:
Jonathan Rodriguez
McKnight Doctoral Fellow
Dept. of Anthropology, University of South Florida

Paper:
Justin Dunnavant (Discussant)
Assistant Professor, Dept. of Anthropology, UCLA

Jacko Steps, Jacko Flats Trail, Dominica. The stone steps were built by Chief Jacko, an 18th-century leader of escaped slaves, to access their Maroon settlement and protect it against colonial forces. Photo by Jonathan Rodriguez.
In British colonial Dominica from 1763 to 1834, Maroons resisted enslavement by establishing fugitive geographies of resistance in the mountainous hinterlands of the island. The physical landscape of the island afforded Maroons a space to create communities, survive in the rainforests, and resist European colonialism and enslavement. This geospatial analysis of refuge settlements illustrates how Maroon geographies and Black ecologies within the untamed interior of Dominica disrupted cartographical concepts of European settler colonialism based on order, hierarchy, and exploitation. Most importantly, this legacy of fugitive spatial methods and ecological practices was later employed by Rastafarians during the oppressive era of the Dread Act. After discussing the regional study, I shift to the site-based survey highlighting the results of the community-based archaeological and digital heritage project at Jacko Flats. Jacko Flats is located near the rural village of Belles in the Central Forest Reserve, and its place name signifies the location of a Maroon settlement occupied by self-emancipated formerly enslaved Africans under the leadership of Chief Jacko from 1764 to 1814. The archaeological project at Jacko Flats embraced this idea of creating community by collaborating with the Create Caribbean Research Institute at Dominica State College, self-identified Dominican Maroon descendants, local scholars and interested site visitors, and Rastafarians. The results of the community-based archaeological project demonstrate how prioritizing collaboration facilitated the inclusion of interpretations of the site that are often neglected. I also reflect on the challenges and solutions for developing a community-focused archaeology project in the isolated hinterlands of Dominica.

Biography: Jonathan Rodriguez is a McKnight Doctoral Fellow in the department of Anthropology at the University of South Florida. In 2023, he received a Fulbright U.S. Student Research grant to teach digital heritage methodologies to interns at Create Caribbean Research Institute and to conduct the first archaeological investigation of a Maroon settlement on the Caribbean island of Dominica. His research interests include historical archaeology, Caribbean archaeology, Geographic Information Science and digital heritage research, and Maroon studies.

"Engineering the Engineer at the Medici Court in the Age of Galileo"
2025-11-17 16:00 - 17:30 | 5288 Bunche Hall
Everyone is welcome to the next installment of the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology Colloquium Series. Cristiano Zanetti will be joining us- he is a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow at Caltech and a long-term Research Fellow at the Huntington Library. Cristiano will be presenting “Engineering the Engineer at the Medici Court in the Age of Galileo.”
This talk explores how two late Renaissance Florentine academies, connected to the Medici court system, influenced early modern European scientific and technological development. By analyzing six unpublished manuscripts located in different countries, and considering the broader Tuscan context, Zanetti will focus on how Medici-sponsored educational practices shaped not only the professional development of late Renaissance European architect-engineers—particularly in practical mathematics and technological innovation—but also the analytical outlook of influential figures such as Galileo Galilei.
See you in the History of Science Room or via Zoom https://ucla.zoom.us/meeting/register/63ji1NIGSxqm_FoP_fCSNg

Boring into the "Mountain Sickness" Miners' Cancers, Occupational Health, and the Discovery of Radiation Risk in Central Europe
2025-12-01 16:00 - 17:30 | 5288 Bunche Hall
Everyone is welcome to the next installment of the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology Colloquium Series. California State University, Long Beach’s Professor of History Dr. Caitlin Murdock will be presenting Boring into the “Mountain Sickness” Miners’ Cancers, Occupational Health, and the Discovery of Radiation Risk in Central Europe.
In the early twentieth century, physicians, public health officials, and miners in the mountainous Erzgebirge region between German Saxony and northern Bohemia began investigating a lung cancer that had been associated with the region’s miners since the sixteenth century. This paper explores how the discovery of nuclear radiation, the advent of “radium” spas, and the rise of modern social welfare protections transformed an apparently local health problem into a key to expanding occupational health protections and understanding radiation health risk in Germany, Czechoslovakia, and globally.

See you in the History of Science Room or join us over Zoom:
https://ucla.zoom.us/j/97404626072?pwd=[REDACTED]
