Undergraduate Honors Thesis Workshop
2026-04-22 12:00 - 13:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | 6275 Bunche Hall
This workshop is designed for students embarking on their honors theses to meet fellow researchers, hear from students who recently finished their theses successfully, and learn how to kick off their project successfully. Lunch provided.

UCLA European History Colloquium Presents: The Jet Age in Eight Passengers
2026-04-22 17:00 - 18:00 | 10383 Bunche Hall & Zoom
We are pleased to announce that the next UCLA European History Colloquium will be held on Wednesday, April 22, at 5pm in Bunche 10383 and on Zoom. Please note the new location!
Lauren Stokes, Associate Professor of History at Northwestern University, will be joining us to speak on “The Jet Age in Eight Passengers.”

The History of Gender and Sexuality Working Group Presents: The-Graduate Student Conference 2026
2026-04-24 09:00 - 16:00 | 6275 Bunche Hall

History of Science, Medicine, and Technology Colloquium Series: "Tīrs, the Moroccan chernozem: soils, epistemologies and empires (1900-1930)"
2026-04-27 16:00 - 17:30 | Bunche 5288 & Zoom
Everyone is welcome to the next installment of the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology Colloquium Series. UCLA’s Ethan Mefford, will be presenting “Tīrs, the Moroccan chernozem: soils, epistemologies and empires (1900-1930)”
In 1900, as European empires eyed Morocco, a dark soil known locally as tīrs created a sensation among European observers, sparking commentaries on its great fertility and theories as to its genesis. As an object of local experience and thought and of fast-cohering colonial knowledge, tīrs traces contrasts and convergences between two epistemologies each oriented to its own conceptions of climate and agriculture. In 1908, the geologist Louis Gentil (1868-1925) applied the factorial model of soil genesis developed by the Russian soil scientist V.V. Dokuchaev (1846-1903) and declared tīrs to be akin to the famed chernozem or “black earth” of southern Russia and Ukraine. Gentil’s theory, though mistaken, prevailed and became part of an authoritative discourse that supported French agricultural and political goals. This talk explores the relationship between science and empire, and how the salient “fact” that tīrs was another chernozem reverberated through cohering French and Spanish conceptions of Morocco’s physical and human geography.
See you in the History of Science Room or via Zoom https://ucla.zoom.us/meeting/register/7eHDPkZiQlCkoT-U3x9BiQ.

Weber Book Prize Talk
2026-04-30 16:00 - 17:30 | 6275 Bunche Hall
Join us for a talk of the 2026 Weber Book Prize awardee Catherine Tatiana Dunlop about her winning book The Mistral: A Windswept History of Modern France (University of Chicago Press, 2024).
A recording of the lecture can be watched here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNsnuPMydIk.

A Paper World: Urbano Monte’s Global Renaissance
2026-05-06 17:00 | Bunche 6275 & Zoom
Paula Findlen, Professor of History at Stanford University, will be joining us to speak on “A Paper World: Urbano Monte’s Global Renaissance.”
More information, including the abstract, can be found on the attached flyer and below.
Event Details:
Title: A Paper World: Urbano Monte’s Global Renaissance
Date: Wednesday, May 6th
Time: 5:00PM (PDT)
Location: Bunche 6275
Zoom Link: https://ucla.zoom.us/j/91410387993
Meeting ID: 914 1038 7993

Screening: The Cry of Jazz with Guest Speaker Dr. Masayoshi Yamada
2026-05-07 15:00 - 16:30 | 193 Kaplan Hall, 415 Portola Plaza, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, United States

History of Science, Medicine, and Technology Colloquium Series: "Curatorial Life and the Lives of Objects: Early Science and Medicine at The Huntington Library"
2026-05-11 16:00 - 17:30 | Bunche 5288 & Zoom
Everyone is welcome to the next installment of the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology Colloquium Series. Huntington Library’s Molina Curator for the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, Joel Klein, will be presenting “Curatorial Life and the Lives of Objects: Early Science and Medicine at The Huntington Library.”

This talk explores the range of work that defines curatorial life in a special collections library and how it shapes the “lives” of objects. Curating is not a single task but a set of activities—acquisitions, exhibitions, teaching, research, donor engagement, etc.—that determine how materials are preserved, described, interpreted, and used. Focusing on early science and medicine collections at The Huntington Library, I illustrate how my responsibilities intersect in practice. After briefly tracing my path from getting a PhD and moving into curatorial work, I present several case studies: securing and reuniting a first edition of Andreas Vesalius’s De humani corporis fabrica with a historic Los Angeles collection; working with technical services in the Library to describe ethically complex materials; yearly engagement with medical students through object-based teaching and narrative medicine exercises; and an NEH-funded project on Isaac Newton’s watermarks. These examples show how curatorial work actively shapes the meaning and use of historical materials.

See you in the History of Science Room or via Zoom
https://ucla.zoom.us/meeting/register/bYObH7HJRpSdIUK3JY_91w

10th Annual Undergraduate History Research Conference
2026-05-13 10:00 - 16:00 | 6275 Bunche Hall
Now available: Conference Agenda
The History Undergraduate Advisory Board cordially invites you to our 10th Annual Undergraduate History Research Conference on Wednesday, May 13th from 10am to 4pm. 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 (History Conference Room) and will be available via Zoom as well (Please RSVP for link below).
Please register for the event here!: https://forms.gle/V4y8bukVTgLvWhyh7.

The UCLA History Atlantic Colloquium presents: Martinique in the Time of Yellow Fever: Colonial Public Health during the 1908 Yellow Fever Outbreak.
2026-05-14 12:30 - 14:00 | 6275 Bunche Hall
Thursday, May 14th at 12:30 pm
Erin Budrow, Graduate Student, Department of History, UCLA
Presentation: “Martinique in the Time of Yellow Fever: Colonial Public Health during the 1908 Yellow Fever Outbreak.”
Discussant: Soraya de Chadarevian, Distinguished Professor, Department of History and the Institute for Society and Genetics, UCLA
Register in advance for this meeting:
https://ucla.zoom.us/meeting/register/R4Npg_oaTWiTlHI48-6KXw
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

Decoding Deschenes: New Insights into the Canadian Governments Troubled War Crimes Investigation
2026-05-18 12:00 - 13:00 | 6275 Bunche Hall

Imagining the Tropics: Women, Romance, and the Making of Modern Tourism
2026-05-20 14:30 - 15:30 | 6275 Bunche Hall

2025-26 LCHP Grantee Reports
2026-05-20 16:00 - 17:00 | 6275 Bunche Hall

HGSA Spring Colloquium Series: Letters in Transit: Utilizing Family Letters for Migration Histories
2026-05-26 14:30 - 16:00 | Bunche 6275 & Zoom

TEACHING TALK: The Professional Payoffs of Historical Thinking, and why and how to think about this in our classes
2026-05-27 12:00 - 13:00 | 6275 Bunche Hall
TEACHING TALK: The Professional Payoffs of Historical Thinking, and why and how to think about this in our classes
Featuring Tawny Paul, Kevin Kim, Bill Marotti, Jared McBride, and Glenn Penny
Wednesday 27 May 2026
12:00 pm, 6275 Bunche
Lunch courtesy of the Public History Initiative

Atlantic Colloquium Presents: Governing through Objects: Material Culture in the Atlantic Slave Trade in West Africa
2026-05-27 16:00 - 17:00 | 6275 Bunche Hall
RSVP Link

Why History Matters - U.S. Immigration Policy: Where do we go from here?
2026-05-27 18:00 - 20:00 | UCLA California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI) – Auditorium, 570 Westwood Plaza, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, United States
See here for a recording of this event: https://history.ucla.edu/2026/06/10/why-history-matters-u-s-immigration-policy-where-do-we-go-from-here/

Atlantic Colloquium Presents: Cudjoe's (Dis)Ability and Maroon (De)Formation
2026-05-28 12:30 - 14:00 | 6265 Bunche Hall
Alex Moulton, Assistant Professor, Department of Geography & Environmental Science, Hunter College CUNY
Presentation: “Cudjoe’s (Dis)Ability and Maroon (De)Formation”
In this talk, Prof. Moulton presents a draft chapter that is part of his book project The Black Grounds: Marronage, Black Placemaking, and the Exercise of Freedom. The chapter focuses on Captain Cudjoe considering what else we might be able to apprehend about marronage, the social life of fugitivity, and the relations of disability in early colonial Jamaica. Captain Cudjoe of the Leeward Maroons is perhaps the most frequently invoked figure in discourses about marronage that following the hero-traitor narrational trajectories. The dichotomized reading of marronage gives us an iconography of Cudjoe as either an exemplifying Black liberatory impulse and placemaking vision, or Black sycophantism and selfishness. The hero-traitor framework demands that we choose which Cudjoe is authentic, a false dilemma fallacy based on a reductive narrative of Black sociality. Against the dilemma, I read Cudjoe as evincing the contingent nature of social coalitions. Rather than one or the other kind of Black leader figure, Cudjoe is a migrator figure. His shifts through character roles on relation to Black community and freedom show the varying relationship between resistance, integration, and recognition to racial formation and racial projects. I read a depiction of Cudjoe as having a sever spinal curvature as a metaphor for the disabling and deforming outcomes of efforts at Black placemaking and freedom in an antiblack world. I consider how the fact of Cudjoe’s ascent to the leadership of his community invites celebration of Black communal practices of care that refuse hierarchies of worthiness.

Session recording: https://youtu.be/mQrG74PXwN8

Atlantic Colloquium Presents: Visualizing Place: Constructing the Caribbean through Postcards, 1900-1930s
2026-06-04 12:30 - 14:00 | 6275 Bunche Hall
This event has been rescheduled!
Mandie Nuanes, Graduate Student, Department of History, UCLA
Presentation: “Visualizing Place: Constructing the Caribbean through Postcards, 1900-1930s”
Discussant: José Luis Passos, Professor, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, UCLA.

Register in advance for this meeting:
https://ucla.zoom.us/meeting/register/FDD95llSRtyFJv849F1gIg
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

HGSA Spring Colloquium Series: Nepal and the Asian Information Order
2026-06-10 15:00 - 16:30 | Bunche 5288 & Zoom

The Rise and Demise of Paper Money in Imperial China
2026-10-09 09:00 - 17:00 | 6275 Bunche Hall
Click the poster for the symposium’s program.

The State of Lebanon: Popular Politics and Institution Building in the Wake of Independence
2026-10-28 13:00 - 14:30 | 10383 Bunche Hall
A book talk by History alumni Ziad Abu-Rish. Organized by the UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies and co-sponsored by the UCLA Department of History.
Please see the following link for more details and event registration: https://www.international.ucla.edu/cnes/event/17744
About the Book
Lebanon gained its formal political independence in 1943. During the dozen years that followed, women and men across class, sectarian, geographic, and ideological divides built, challenged, and reformed the institutional arrangements that would shape the country. With this book, Ziad Abu-Rish traces shifting patterns of alliances and conflict that shaped the material and representational production of the Lebanese nation-state. Exploring labor regimes, women’s suffrage, the provision of electricity in Beirut, public education, and the armed forces—and the meetings, lectures, pamphlets, delegations, and protests they produced—Abu-Rish demonstrates how elite and popular groups mobilized normative ideas about independence and state power.
The State of Lebanon offers a new social and institutional history of post-colonial Lebanon. Abu-Rish challenges common narratives of an absent, weak, or failed state. Instead, state institutional arrangements emerge as objects and subjects of political mobilization by politicians, bureaucrats, party activists, students, and workers. Rather than read history backward from the present, he approaches the past on its own terms. In so doing, Abu-Rish offers significant insights into politics, social life, and the state in Lebanon—grounded in the early post-independence period yet critical to how we understand Lebanon today.
About the Speaker
Ziad Abu-Rish is a scholar of the modern Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. His research centers around state formation, economic development, and popular mobilizations, particularly in Lebanon and Jordan. His teaching experience includes undergraduate and graduate courses in human rights; comparative state formation; various themes in Middle East studies; and research methodologies. Abu-Rish is the author of The State of Lebanon: Popular Politics and Institution Building in the Wake of Independence (Stanford University Press, 2026). He co-created (with artist Tania El Khoury) The Search for Power, a touring lecture performance and sound installation exploring the history of electricity in Beirut. Abu-Rish is also coeditor of The Dawn of the Arab Uprisings: End of an Old Order? (2012) and Critical Voices: A Collection of Interviews from and on the Middle East (2015). Abu-Rish has also authored several articles appearing in Middle East Report and Review of Middle East Studies and chapters in edited volumes on the political economy of the Middle East, the Arab uprisings, and teaching Middle East history. Abu-Rish also serves as coeditor of Arab Studies Journal and Jadaliyya e-zine, and codirector of the Lebanese Dissertation Summer Institute.
