UCLA Department of History

Dr. Tara Suri, History of Medicine, "Modeling 'The Human' Over the End of Empire"
2023-02-13 16:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | 6275 Bunche Hall

Erin Rowe, Professor of History, Johns Hopkins University "The Black Saints of the Carmelite Order: Ancient Ethiopia in the Early Modern European Imagination”
2023-02-15 14:00 - 15:30 | 6275 Bunche Hall
Beginning in the seventeenth-century, members of the Carmelite order adopted two ancient Ethiopian saints, Efigenia and Elesban. While their interest in ancient saints was tied to the order’s longstanding efforts to prove the antiquity of their order dating back to the Prophet Elijah, the inclusion of Ancient Ethiopia in these efforts tell a more complex story about how early modern Spaniards thought with and about Ancient Ethiopia. The inclusion of Ethiopia in early modern ideas about the Biblical Near East clashed with the treatment of enslaved people from West and Central Africa being brought to the peninsula in vast numbers, while devotion to Ethiopian saints by White and Black Spaniards transformed the spiritual and historical landscape.
*Co-sponsored by Department of History, CMRS-CEGS, The Atlantic History Colloquium, Peter H. Reill Chair in European Studies, and The Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies.

Madina Thiam, Assistant Professor of History, NYU "Absolutely and Utterly Free: An Atlantic-Saharan Journey through Slavery and Race-Making, 1834-1836"
2023-02-16 12:00 - 13:30 | Bunche 6275 & Zoom
This talk follows Abu Bakr al-Siddiq Watara, a Timbuktu-born teenager who was enslaved in Jamaica from 1805 to 1834. Upon securing his manumission, Watara undertook a trans-Atlantic and trans-Saharan journey, in a bid to return home. A close examination of Watara’s words and writings about him, and a reconstruction of his trajectory, provides insight into the social and political forces that ushered in deep changes in the worlds of the British Atlantic and Muslim Sahel and Sahara, in the first half of the nineteenth century. As Watara sought to secure freedom while journeying across the Atlantic and Sahara, which strategies did he leverage? How did larger political changes in 1820s-1830s Sahel, Sahara, and Atlantic render his aspirations to freedom possible, and how did they restrict them? Scholars have previously written about Watara’s journey and writings by situating his autobiography within the broader genre of transatlantic slave narratives, and analyzing his trajectory as evidence of the retention of African cultural expressions among enslaved Black Muslims in the Americas.
This talk offers a new interpretation of Watara’s articulation and praxis of freedom, framing them in the broader contexts of the end of chattel slavery in the British Atlantic, booming trans-Saharan slave trade, and changing notions of race and enslaveability in the West African Sahel in the era of Islamic revolutions and state-building.
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Dr. Elizabeth O’Brien, History of Medicine, "Surgical Salvation: Mexico and the History of Reproductive Medicine, from Enlightenment to Eugenics"
2023-02-23 16:00 | 6275 Bunche Hall

Outrageous Comparisons in Modern History and Contemporary Politics
2023-03-06 16:00 - 17:30 | 6275 Bunche Hall

Flying Home? Palmares and the Afterlife
2023-03-09 12:00 - 13:30 | Bunche 6275 & Zoom
Marc Hertzman, Associate Professor, University of Illinois at Urbana – Champaign
Flying Home? Palmares and the Afterlife
Most histories of Palmares, the sprawling collection of settlements in Brazil that became perhaps history’s largest fugitive slave society, end in 1695, when colonial forces assassinated the famous rebel leader Zumbi. My book project plays the story forward into the eighteenth century to propose a new way to think about maroon communities across the Americas. Palmares and other such settlements have rightfully been understood as spaces of diasporic refuge and resistance; but unless descendants can trace their lineage directly back to them, through land possession or genealogy, scholars implicitly define them as endpoints: formerly enslaved people either lived out their days there or were recaptured or killed. I advance a new framework that treats maroon communities as points of origin, capable of generating their own unique diasporas. Along with Palmares’s previously overlooked human diaspora—members who were captured in or fled Palmares—I examine the pathways along which inheritances and memories of Zumbi and Palmares survived after 1695: canonical historical texts; the lives and travels of soldiers who fought against Palmares; soldiers’ claims (most embellished) to killing Zumbi, which they turned into heritable wealth; previously ignored place names that made elements of the natural landscape memorials to Palmares and Zumbi; and spiritual traditions, which remain an important locus of history and memory.

Marc Hertzman, Associate Professor, University of Illinois at Urbana - Champaign "Flying Home? Palmares and the Afterlife"
2023-03-09 12:00 - 13:30 | Bunche 6275 & Zoom
Marc Hertzman, Associate Professor, University of Illinois at Urbana – Champaign
Flying Home? Palmares and the Afterlife
Most histories of Palmares, the sprawling collection of settlements in Brazil that became perhaps history’s largest fugitive slave society, end in 1695, when colonial forces assassinated the famous rebel leader Zumbi. My book project plays the story forward into the eighteenth century to propose a new way to think about maroon communities across the Americas. Palmares and other such settlements have rightfully been understood as spaces of diasporic refuge and resistance; but unless descendants can trace their lineage directly back to them, through land possession or genealogy, scholars implicitly define them as endpoints: formerly enslaved people either lived out their days there or were recaptured or killed. I advance a new framework that treats maroon communities as points of origin, capable of generating their own unique diasporas. Along with Palmares’s previously overlooked human diaspora—members who were captured in or fled Palmares—I examine the pathways along which inheritances and memories of Zumbi and Palmares survived after 1695: canonical historical texts; the lives and travels of soldiers who fought against Palmares; soldiers’ claims (most embellished) to killing Zumbi, which they turned into heritable wealth; previously ignored place names that made elements of the natural landscape memorials to Palmares and Zumbi; and spiritual traditions, which remain an important locus of history and memory.
Zoom RSVP Here

Axel Jansen, History of Medicine, "An Unlikely Partnership? The Vatican Endorses Stem Cell Research, 2000-2015"
2023-04-03 16:00 - 18:00 | Bunche 5288 & Zoom
RSVP for in person attendance here.
RSVP for Zoom link here.

Peasants, Perpetrators, and Violence in Nazi-Occupied Ukraine
2023-04-04 16:00 - 18:00 | 6275 Bunche Hall

Dr. Ashley Sanders and Dr. David Sebastiani, DH^2: Digital Humanities x Digital History
2023-04-05 14:30 - 16:00 | 6275 Bunche Hall

Patrícia Martins Marcos, UC Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow Rising to the Challenge "The Empire of White Patriarchs: Population, Race-Making, and the Sciences of Human Improvement in the Afro-Luso-Brazilian Atlantic (1730-1800)"
2023-04-06 12:00 - 13:30 | 6275 Bunche Hall
In 1750, when the Brazilian border expanded by several orders of magnitude, Portuguese Crown officials, administrators, and men of science received the news with hope and apprehension. While the growth of frontiers of Portugal’s possession in the Americas was celebrated, it also presented formidable challenges for settlement. How could a diminutive metropole whose empire stretched across the four corners of the globe, secure its new territorial gains? Drawing on Newtonian physics, novel anthropological thinking about the human as a species, and the accounting technology of “Political Arithmetic,” Portuguese imperial administrators launched a policy known as the “political mechanism.” Recognizing how “population is everything,” this talk historicizes the emergence of racial whitening (branqueamento) as a project of human improvement and “population multiplication.” Arguing that producing bigger and better population futures became the chief scientific project of eighteenth-century Portuguese imperialism, I demonstrate how reform was undergirded by the forging of a new ideal of subjecthood: the salaried laborer. The salaried laborer became, I argue, the embodiment of a new ideal of whiteness (or white subjecthood). The end-goal of a new imperial science of human improvement was premised on the remolding of “rustics” into workers. In the Amazon, the key site where I will focus on in this talk, a new Crown policy promised to assimilate Amerindians and Roma people into whiteness through productive and reproducible labor. This talk excavates the racialized and gendered conditions of possibility for whitening through pronatalism, human speciation, and patriarchal rule.
Patrícia Martins Marcos (Ph.D History and Science Studies) is a UC Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow Rising to the Challenge at UCLA’s History Department of History and the Bunche Center for African American Studies. Her book manuscript, Imperial Whiteness, historicizes genealogies of racial improvement through whitening in the 18th Century Afro-Luso-Brazilian Atlantic by linking histories of the life sciences, to medicine, gender and sexuality, and race. She is currently Associate Editor with the History of Anthropology Review and elected Early Career Representative for the History of Science Society—where she is also co-chair of the Early Sciences Forum. Her work has been supported by the Huntington Library, the American Philosophical Society, the Center for Black, Brown, and Queer Studies, and the John Carter Brown Library. She is currently a fellow with the Folger Shakespeare Library and next Fall she will be a visiting fellow at the Department of History of the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG–Brazil) . Her most recent “Blackness out of Place,” was published with the Radical History Review and focuses on the epistemology of Black visual resistance in Portugal and its former imperial spaces.
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Mika Lior, Assistant Professor of Performing Arts at the University of Malta, "Circling With/In: Choreographies of Gendered & Regendered Agency in Bahian Candomblé"
2023-04-20 12:00 - 13:30 | Zoom
Mika Lior, Assistant Professor of Performing Arts at the University of Malta
“Circling With/In: Choreographies of Gendered & Regendered Agency in Bahian Candomblé”
Based on history, dance studies methodologies and critical ethnography, this paper addresses choreographies of invocation and incorporation in the Afro-Brazilian ritual practice of Candomblé through the lens of indigenous feminisms and choreographic analysis. Looking closely at practitioners’ use of circular and cyclical movements and spatial pathways at a range of ceremonial sites in Salvador, the capital of Bahia in Northeastern Brazil, I show how Candomblé’s aesthetic principles and matri-focal social structures are similarly informed by what I call a feminist poiesis, evidenced in ceremonial performance histories that privilege women’s bodies for mediumship. Intervening in the dominant representation of Candomblé’s spirit embodiments as acts of “possession,” I attend to practitioners’ idioms of incorporation, including circling with and in the saint –“rodar com o santo” and “rodar no santo,” – to illustrate how ritual processes are actively constructed around intersubjective, movement oriented ontologies as well as cycles of women’s reproductivity and Yoruba-Atlantic understandings of gendered agency. At the same time, processes of incorporation instantiate a non-binary ontology of ritual gender fluidity through which male mediums take on structurally feminized roles.
This presentation concludes by considering how performance studies approaches such as choreographic analysis and dance practice under the tutelage of ritual experts can contribute to processes of intercultural knowledge production. I share my ethnographic dance film, Ogum’s Story, co-created with Candomblé elder Dona Cici, as a model for thinking through circling with/in not only as an ontology of spirit embodiment but also a collaborative, mutually reciprocal research method.
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Edward Halley Barnet, History of Medicine, "Music and the Mind. Vibratory Mental Mechanics in the 18th Century"
2023-04-24 16:00 | 5288 Bunche Hall

Dean Alexandra Stern, "Queer Oppression and Resistance to Eugenics in 20th Century California"
2023-04-26 12:00 - 14:00 | 6275 Bunche Hall
The RSVP link is here.

Melissa Lo, History of Science, "How We Find Our Topics, How Our Topics Find Us: A Discussion"
2023-05-01 16:00 | 5288 Bunche Hall

Alden-Berg Lecture ft. Stephen Aron
2023-05-03 18:00 | Kerckhoff Grand Salon
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Kevin Dawson, Associate Professor of History, University of California, Merced “Surfing, Surf-Canoeing, and the Atlantic Slave Trade”
2023-05-04 00:00 - 13:30 | 6275 Bunche Hall
Atlantic Africa—the region extending from Senegal to Angola—has few natural harbors, compelling Africans to cross through surf to reach fisheries and coastal shipping lanes. Sources suggest that one thousand years ago Africans independently developed surfing to understand how to design and surf waves ashore in surf-canoes loaded with fish cargo. Today, Atlantic Africans remain the only people to harness wave energy as part of their daily labor practices. Even as Europeans crossed oceans, their rowboats were too slow to navigate African surf-zones, and routinely capsized. Hence, surf-canoemen transported most of the goods imported into and exported out of Africa between ship-and-shore, including the majority of the twelve million captives shipped into Atlantic slavery. This talk considers how African maritime wisdom and expertise informed the cultural and economic development of the Atlantic world.
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Dr. Kate McDonald, History of Science, "The Rickshaw Everyman: Transport and Memory in Postwar Japan"
2023-05-08 16:00 | 5288 Bunche Hall

The History of Gender & Sexuality Group Graduate Student Workshop
2023-05-11 09:00 - 17:00 | 6275 Bunche Hall

Sakhia's Gift: Intimate Economies in Transition in Twentieth-Century Zanzibar
2023-05-11 12:30 - 13:50 | 6275 Bunche Hall

History Undergraduate Conference
2023-05-17 09:00 - 17:00 | 6275 Bunche Hall

Clark Library Conference "From Bodies to Things: The Commodification of Human Life in the Early Modern Atlantic" organized by Tawny Paul and Andrew Apter (UCLA)
2023-05-19 09:00 - 17:00 | William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 2520 Cimarron Street, Los Angeles, CA 90018, United States
https://www.1718.ucla.edu/events/bodies-to-things-1/

Jane Moon, M.D., History of Science, "Pushing the Borders of Consciousness: A History of Ketamine and Dissociative Anesthesia"
2023-05-22 16:00 | 5288 Bunche Hall

Waterfront Film Screening by Professor Milos Jovanovic
2023-05-25 17:00 - 18:30 | Kaplan A65

Michael Miller, "A French History of Rivers"
2023-05-31 16:00 - 17:30 | 6275 Bunche Hall

Mélanie Cournil, Senior Lecturer in British History at the Sorbonne University "Transatlantic Circulation of Botanical Knowledge : The Glasgow Years of William Jackson Hooker (1820-1841)"
2023-06-01 12:00 - 13:30 | 6275 Bunche Hall
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Zev Yaroslavsky Reception
2023-06-06 16:00 - 19:00 | 306 Royce Hall
Join us to celebrate the release of a new memoir by a long-time member of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors and member of the Luskin Center of History and Policy Board of Advisors, Zev Yaroslavsky.
Space is limited for this event. Please RSVP before May 15 to: luskincenter@history.ucla.edu.

History Department Open House for Undergraduate Students
2023-09-27 14:30 - 16:30 | 6275 Bunche Hall

Patricia M. Marcos, “‘True Sex’: Adjudicating Gender and the Sciences of Racial Improvement in the Portuguese Atlantic (1740-1790)”
2023-10-09 16:00 - 17:30 | 5288 Bunche Hall

Tanya Bride (UCLA History) - Trails of Hoof and Pawprints
2023-10-19 12:00 | Zoom
Please join us for our first lecture series of the 23-24 academic year featuring Tanya Bride who will speak on “Trails of Hoof and Pawprints: Tracing human-animal relations in colonial Mexico through the religious courts and Relaciones Geográficas”.
Please note: This event will only be held via Zoom. It will not be in person.
This event is part of the UCLA History Department Atlantic History lecture series.
