Natasha Wheatley: The Life and Death of States: Central Europe and the Transformation of Modern Sovereignty
2025-04-07 16:00 - 18:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | 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

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

The UCLA History of Gender & Sexuality Colloquium presents a book talk: Offshore Attachments: Oil and Intimacy in the Caribbean by Chelsea Schields
2026-01-21 15:00 - 16:30 | Bunche 6275
This event is co-sponsored by UCLA’s Center for the Study of Women, Latin American Studies, the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, and the International Institute.

Light refreshments provided.

History Travel Study Info Session: Paris
2026-01-22 15:00 - 16:00 | Zoom
Dear History Students,
Interested in studying abroad in Paris during the summer? An info session on Paris will be offered Thursday, January 22nd via zoom.
Upcoming Zoom Information Sessions:
Thursday, January 22 at 3PM: https://clemson.zoom.us/j/92561117855
Please see the flyer below for more information:

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.
