UCLA Department of History

UCLA History Department Senior Honors Thesis Workshop
2025-01-28 13:00 - 14:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Zoom RSVP
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 28th at 1pm via Zoom. Please RSVP via https://forms.gle/6cz8C7hDvn8gATiL6.

Oliver Cussen (UC Berkeley): "Colonial Enlightenment and Capitalism's Ecological Repressed"
2025-01-29 16:00 - 18:00 | 6275 Bunche Hall

Joan Flores-Villalobos (University of Southern California), "The Silver Women: How Black Women's Labor Made the Panama Canal"
2025-01-30 15:00 - 16:30 | 6275 Bunche Hall

Ana Struillou (University of London Institute of Historical Research): "Across the Material Sea: Travellers and Their Things in the Early Modern Mediterranean"
2025-02-05 16:00 - 18:00 | 6275 Bunche Hall

Cassia Roth (University of California, Riverside): "Beyond the Chart: From Individual Stories to Epidemiological Insights in Clinical Records"
2025-02-10 16:00 - 17:30 | 5288 Bunche Hall

Spencer Weinreich (Harvard University): "'If his keeper look well unto him': Solitary Confinement in Early Modern Europe"
2025-02-11 16:00 - 18:00 | 6275 Bunche Hall

Jennifer Kosmin (Auburn University): “When the Fetus Becomes a Child: Historicizing Fetal Viability in the early 19th Century”
2025-02-24 16:00 - 17:30 | 5288 Bunche Hall

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