UCLA Department of History

Territoriality and Freedom in the Bush: A Community-Focused Archaeology of Marronage in Colonial Dominica
2025-11-05 12:00 - 14:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | 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

Teaching Talk #1: Trade Secrets of Hit History Lectures
2025-11-19 12:00 - 13:00 | 6275 Bunche Hall
TEACHING TALKS — a new series dedicated to the craft of teaching history
Teaching Talk #1: TRADE SECRETS OF HIT HISTORY LECTURERS
Featuring Mary Corey, Anthony Vivian, and Chien-Ling Zeleny
BYO Lunch

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]

The Environmental History of D-Day and the Battle of the Hedgerows
2025-12-03 17:00 - 18:30 | 10383 Bunche Hall

The Road Not Taken: Big Sur and the Unimaginability of Retreat
2026-01-12 16:00 - 17:30 | 5288 Bunche Hall
Everyone is welcome to the next installment of the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology Colloquium Series. Dr. Tamara Venit-Shelton, Professor of History at Claremont McKenna College, will be joining us. She is a will be presenting “The Road Not Taken: Big Sur and the Unimaginability of Retreat.”
California Highway 1 at Big Sur is an ideal case with which to think about how rural, coastal communities are and are not adapting to the changing climate. Since the 1980s, global climate change has made the landscape slide more freely and dramatically into the ocean, and road closures – which have always been a seasonal reality – have grown increasingly frequent and disruptive. Caltrans is investing to protect Highway 1 from crumbling into the sea with cable nets, rebar, and electrochemical treatments that fortify cliff faces as well as roads and bridges, but those efforts have not silenced debate over giving up on Highway 1 altogether. Permanently closing Highway 1 at Big Sur, if it ever happened, would be an example of an adaptation strategy that planners call “managed retreat,” the coordinated relocation of people and infrastructure in the face of changing environmental conditions. This paper is an environmental history of road closures that asks how Big Sur residents found ways to thrive, both personally and economically, in the absence of Highway 1 and probes the possibilities for life after it falls into the ocean.
See you in the History of Science Room or via Zoom:
https://ucla.zoom.us/meeting/register/QgidfJXpSFqtBq8b9tfU9A

Tea with Transfers
2026-01-22 17:00 - 18:00 | Bunche 6275 (History Conference Room)
You are warmly invited to the History Department’s Tea with Transfers, hosted by the History Undergraduate Advisor Board (HUAB). Join us for a relaxed and welcoming space to connect with fellow transfer students, reflect on your first quarter at UCLA, and learn how HUAB can support you moving forward.
This event will also include an open discussion where we want to hear your thoughts—what’s been working well, what challenges you’ve faced, and what you’d like to see from the History Department in the future.
Come chat with peers about topics such as:

Navigating your first year as a transfer
Academic and departmental resources
Ways HUAB can better support transfer students

Thursday, January 22 @ 5:00 PM (Week 3) in Bunche 6275 (History Conference Room)
Light refreshments will be provided.

UCLA History Department Senior Honors Thesis Workshop
2026-01-27 13:00 - 14:00 | Zoom
Interested in carrying out a year-long independent research project that will culminate in an honors thesis? Our department will be hosting a workshop for interested students on Tuesday, January 27th at 1pm via Zoom. Please RSVP via https://forms.gle/tEWuck56HYvbWidx7.

Vulnerable Bodies: Roman Medical Research and the Enslaved
2026-02-09 16:00 - 17:30 | 5288 Bunche Hall
Everyone is welcome to the next installment of the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology Colloquium Series. Dr. Claire Bubb, Visiting Associate Professor of Classics at USC, will be joining us. She is a will be presenting “Vulnerable Bodies: Roman Medical Research and the Enslaved.”
Roman doctors periodically required bodies, both living and dead, for medical demonstration and research. There were many vulnerable bodies in Roman society–animals, the enslaved, the impoverished, the outcast, and the conquered–and this talk will explore which bodies doctors seem to have favored for which purposes. As it turns out, their use of the enslaved appears to have been surprisingly curtailed. The talk will therefore also address Galen’s perspectives on slavery and the enslaved and explore the potential boundaries to the exploitation of this particularly vulnerable population.
See you in the History of Science Room or via Zoom:
https://ucla.zoom.us/meeting/register/QIkvfaYBTei-hPhAKDF0Pg

From Face Blindness to Superrecocognition: The Discovery of a Spectrum
2026-02-23 16:00 - 17:30 | 5288 Bunche Hall
Everyone is welcome to the first installment of the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology Colloquium Series. Professor Sharrona Pearl of Texas Christian University will be presenting “From Face Blindness to Superrecognition: The Discovery of a Spectrum.”
Super recognition was clinically identified in 2009. That’s yesterday in scientific terms. In this talk, Sharrona Pearl discusses how the face recognition spectrum was developed, emphasizing the urgent need for the health humanities in clinical practice. (There will also be some games.)
See you in the History of Science Room or via Zoom:
https://ucla.zoom.us/meeting/register/Ynw3Fc2GSdqcAfBEnXi_5g
