UCLA Department of History

Installation celebration of Professor Brenda Stevenson as the Nickoll Family Endowed Chair in History
2016-10-24 18:00 (America/Los_Angeles)

B. Harun Küçük -“The Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Prayer Compass”
2016-10-24 16:00 - 18:00

Dr. Nicholas Al-Jeelo, "Assyrian Continuity Post-Empire: The Relevance of Preserving Assyrian History and Heritage"
2016-10-21 19:00
Nearest Parking: UCLA parking structure P5

Nile Green - "When Hajji Baba Met Frankenstein: The Middle Eastern Encounter with the Scientific Revolution"
2016-10-20 16:00 - 18:00
Nile Green to present on “When Hajji Baba Met Frankenstein: The Middle Eastern Encounter with the Scientific Revolution.”
Sponsored/Co-sponsored by the Center for European and Russian Studies, Center for Near Eastern Studies, Program on Central Asia, Dept. of History, and the Center for the Study of Religion.
For more information, please contact UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies:
Tel: (310) 825- 1181
cnes@international.ucla.edu
http://www.international.ucla.edu/cnes/

History Alumni Career Panel
2016-10-18 16:00 - 18:00

Miriam Posner-“Making Sense of the Digital Humanities for Historians of Medicine & Science”
2016-10-17 16:00 - 18:00

Nancy Toff On History Publishing
2016-10-17 12:00 - 14:00
Nancy Toff, Vice President and Executive Editor (History) of Oxford University Press, will talk with graduate students and faculty about academic and general history publishing. Toff, who oversees the popular “What Everyone Wants to Know” and “A Short History” series as well as academic history, will discuss strategies and tips for publishing with an academic press, moving your manuscript from a dissertation to a book, as well as writing for a broader audience.
Lunch will be served. Please RSVP to Jim Gelvin, gelvin@history.ucla.edu by Friday, October 14.

Historians and Others (Try To) Make Sense of the 2016 Election
2016-10-13 19:00
Parking available for $12 in Structure 2
Inquiries: CollegeEvents@support.ucla.edu or (310) 825-4038

Karl Jacoby - "The Color Line and the Borderline: Locating William Ellis, the Texas Slave who Became a Mexican Millionaire, in the Archives and in Family History"
2016-10-12 16:00 - 18:00
To his contemporaries in Gilded Age Manhattan, Guillermo Eliseo was a fantastically wealthy Mexican banker and broker, with an apartment on Central Park West and an office on Wall Street. He began life, however, as William Ellis, an enslaved African American in south Texas. Columbia University historian Karl Jacoby and members of Ellis’s family from Mexico and the U.S. discuss the meanings of Ellis’s strange career and the complicated path he charted through the archives and through family memories on both sides of the border.

Courtenay Raia-“William in Wonderland: Crookes’s Scientific Spiritualism and the Physics of the Impossible”
2016-10-10 16:00 - 18:00
Courtenay Raia (Colson School of Music)
“William in Wonderland: Crookes’s Scientific Spiritualism and the Physics of the Impossible”

Undergraduate Open House
2016-09-28 11:00 - 13:00

A Conversation with Rev. James Lawson: Nonviolence and Social Movements
2016-06-02 15:30 - 18:00
Rev. James Lawson is a leading theorist and practitioner of nonviolent social action. During the 1960s he advised Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and lead civil rights campaigns in Nashville and Memphis. Since the 1970s, his teaching on nonviolence has shaped the practice of social movements in southern California an across the country.
Vinay Lal is Professor of History at UCLA where he teaches courses on Indian history, postcolonial societies, and the contemporary world history. He writes about the politics of history for academic and popular audiences.

León García Garagarza - "The Aztec Healer, the Puppet King and the Mexican Inquisition: Noble Ailments and Colonial Imposition in Early New Spain"
2016-06-02 12:00 - 14:00
In 1539 the Apostolic Inquisition of Mexico accused Martin Ocelotl of idolatry, blasphemy, and other crimes against the Church. Martin Ocelotl was a traditional ritual specialist from the area of Tetzcoco who actively opposed the imposition of colonialism and called for the restoration of the traditional way of life. The files of his trial register that Ocelotl had clandestinely performed a traditional ritual healing on behalf of Don Pablo Xochiquen, a puppet ruler (cuauhtlahtoani) of Mexico Tenochtitlan during the early colonial era. While the folios of the Inquisitorial trial provide only incidental data about the nature of the therapy that Don Pablo undertook, an examination of other early colonial sources strongly suggests that it was the treatment “for the fatigue that afflicts those who administer the Republic and hold Public Office”, a culturally recognized disease in the traditional Materia Medica of Mesoamerica. The treatment of Don Pablo Xochiquen at the hands of Martin Ocelotl during the first decades of Spanish rule not only illuminates indigenous notions of the Nahua etiology of disease, it also reveals important clues about the clash between Aztec and Spanish medicine, and about the more general political and cultural dynamics of early colonial Mexico.

History Writing Center Workshop
2016-05-25 17:00 - 18:00
Join professor Benjamin Madley for helpful tips and feedback in this History Writing Center workshop.

Bunche Social Sciences Book Fair
2016-05-25 10:00 - 15:00
Free Books for Students! Stop by to browse an interdepartmental book collection, and go home with new reading material!
Books from Chicano/a Studies, Economics, Geography, History, and Political Science departments will be available.

William Deringer - “Calculated Values: Finance, Politics, and the Quantitative Age, 1688-1776"
2016-05-23 16:00 - 18:00
William Deringer (MIT)
“Calculated Values: Finance, Politics, and the Quantitative Age, 1688-1776″

2016 Alden-Berg Lecture
2016-05-18 19:00 | Fowler Museum at UCLA, Lenart Auditorium
Event Video

Stephen Aron
Professor and Robert N. Burr Department Chair
UCLA Department of History
Invites you to attend the annual
Alden-Berg Lecture
“Violence and Justice in Frontier Los Angeles”
Featuring
John Mack Faragher
Howard R. Lamar Prof of History & American Studies and Director Howard R. Lamar Center, Yale University
With responses on the contemporary implications of Faragher’s research in his recent book Eternity Street: Violence and Justice in Frontier Los Angeles (2016, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.) by
Zev Yaroslavsky
Former Los Angeles County Supervisor
&
Jim Newton
Former Editor of Los Angeles Times

Wednesday, May 18, 2016
7:00 p.m.
Reception to follow
Fowler Museum, Lenart Auditorium
UCLA Campus

Self-pay parking available in Structure 4
Inquiries: CollegeEvents@support.ucla.edu or (310) 825-4038
————————————–
About the Speakers
About the Lecture
The Alden-Berg Lecture is named for two distinguished alumnae and friends of the Department, Dr. Geraldine Alden and Barbara Berg. Devoted students of history and mainstays of the Friends of History group, Jeri and Barbara have contributed in manifold ways to the well-being of the Department. Now in its 5th year, the lecture draws on the excellence of the History Department faculty to address important issues of the past and present.

Cuban Environmental History: From Imperial Exploits to Socialist Cows
2016-05-18 14:30 - 16:30
This event presents the work of two prominent environmental historians of Cuba with a comment by Sandro Dutra e Silva, visiting researcher, Department of Geography, UCLA.

Rob Schraff - “Making and Unmaking Madness with LSD: From Psychotomimetic to Psychedelic and Back Again”
2016-05-16 16:00 - 18:00
Rob Schraff (UCLA)
“Making and Unmaking Madness with LSD: From Psychotomimetic to Psychedelic and Back Again”

John T. Sidel - "From Baku to Bandung: Republicanism, Communism, and Islam in the Making of the Indonesian Revolution"
2016-05-16 15:30 - 17:00
John T. Sidel, London School of Economics and Political Science. This lecture shows how Communism and Islam played a crucial, constitutive role in the making of the Indonesian “Revolusi,” suggesting the essentially cosmopolitan nature of its origins and its emancipatory energies. John T. Sidel is the Sir Patrick Gillam Professor of International and Comparative Politics at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). This talk covers a set of chapters in a book he is completing, titled Republicanism, Communism, Islam: Cosmopolitan Origins of Revolution in Southeast Asia, which he hopes to complete this year.

First Annual Undergraduate History Conference - "Power & Politics"
2016-05-13 08:30 - 18:00
— Agenda for the day —

Dena Goodman - “An Active, Intimate, and Regular Correspondence”: Invisible Labor and Scientific Exchange in Revolutionary France
2016-05-12 16:00 - 18:30

Aisha Finch - "Of Time and Sugar: Making and Unmaking Cuban Plantation Temporalities"
2016-05-12 12:00 - 14:00
This presentation explores the relationship between time – as it was regulated and embodied in the Cuban sugar plantation world – and the lived experiences of the people enslaved on these plantations. It juxtaposes the function of time as an ever-evolving technology of the plantation world, and its possibilities as a site of black fugitivity and regeneration. This split sense of “plantation-time” marked one of the most important tensions in the world of sugar production: slaveholders and managers sought to ration and appropriate time as a precious commodity, yet enslaved people consistently reshaped its strictures and repurposed its possibilities. Exploring the ways in which enslaved people were violently circumscribed by this plantation temporality, but also the creative means they found to circumvent it, will offer important ways to understand how they inhabited, negotiated, and resisted their enslavement.

Benjamin Cowan - "Securing Sex: Morality and Repression in the Making of Cold War Brazil" Book Talk
2016-05-11 15:00 - 17:00
In this history of right-wing politics in Brazil during the Cold War, Benjamin Cowan puts the spotlight on the Cold Warriors themselves. Tracking how limits to Cold War authoritarianism finally emerged, Cowan concludes that the record of autocracy and repression in Brazil is part of a larger story of reaction against perceived threats to traditional views of family, gender, moral standards, and sexuality — a story that continues in today’s culture wars.

Edward D. Melillo - "Strangers on Familiar Soil: Rediscovering the Chile-California Connection"
2016-05-10 16:00 - 18:00
Edward D. Melillo is associate professor of history and environmental studies at Amherst College. He teaches courses on global environmental history, the history of the Pacific World, and commodities in world historical perspective. He is the author of Strangers on Familiar Soil: Rediscovering the Chile-California Connection (Yale University Press, 2015), the co-editor Eco-Cultural Networks in the British Empire: New Views on Environmental History (Bloomsbury Press, 2015), and the editor of Migrant Ecologies: Environmental Histories of the Pacific World (University of Hawai’i Press, forthcoming).

Adam Lawrence - “The Territory of Fables: Ecological Productivity in Nazi Germany's Imaginary Empire”
2016-05-09 16:00 - 18:00
Adam Lawrence (UCLA)“The Territory of Fables: Ecological Productivity in Nazi Germany’s Imaginary Empire”

Mario Biogioli - "Beyond Publish or Perish: Metrics and the New Ecologies of Academic Misconduct"
2016-05-03 11:00 - 12:15
Mario Biagioli – School of Law, Science & Technology Studies Program, Department of History, UC Davis.
Academic misconduct has traditionally been tied to the stress generated by the “publish or perish” culture and, more recently, to the new opportunities offered by electronic publishing. I argue, instead, that misconduct is undergoing a radical qualitative transformation, adapting itself to modern metrics-based regimes of academic evaluation and the new incentives and opportunities they provide. We are transitioning, so to speak, from “publish or perish” to “impact or perish.” These changes are affecting the practices as well as the discourse and conceptualization of misconduct. Traditional definitions of misconduct were rooted in oppositions between truth and falsehood, right and wrong, honest mistake and fabrication, but some of the new metrics-based misconduct could be seen as a form of gaming rather than a clear violation of ethical norms or laws. The new metrics-based forms of misconduct are thus challenging us to redefine misconduct, but they are also, at the same time, asking us to rethink what we mean by “publication.”

Adam Mosley & Dibner Fellow - “Cosmographic Instruments, Sundials, and the Decline of Cosmography Revisited”
2016-05-02 16:00 - 18:00
Adam Mosley (Swansea University (Wales) and Dibner Fellow, Huntington Library)“Cosmographic Instruments, Sundials, and the Decline of Cosmography Revisited”

Bruno Cabanes - “Rights, not charity”. Rene Cassin, the Great War and the Rights of War Victims
2016-04-28 16:00 - 18:30

Maureen C. Miller - “Feuding Popes and Emperors: Characterizing the Investiture Conflict”
2016-04-28 16:00 - 18:00
Maureen C. Miller, Professor of History, University of California Berkeley – “Feuding Popes and Emperors: Characterizing the Investiture Conflict.” This lecture will argue for an updating of the conceptualization of the ‘crisis of church and state’ in the context of recent work on violence and conflict in Medieval Europe.
