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 (America/Los_Angeles) | 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.

Mapping the Criminal Brain: Murder, Morphology, and the Rise of the Psychiatric Expert Witness
2026-01-26 16:00 - 17:30 | Bunche 5288 & Zoom
Everyone is welcome to the next installment of the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology Colloquium Series. Dr. Wendy Kline Purdue University’s Dema G. Seelye Chair in the History of Medicine and Director of the Medical Humanities Program, will be joining us. She is a will be presenting “Mapping the Criminal Brain: Murder, Morphology, and the Rise of the Psychiatric Expert Witness.”
In 1901, medical student Edward Anthony Spitzka autopsied Leon Colgosz’s brain just after he was executed for assassinating President McKinley. It was a transformative moment not just for his career, but also for the psychiatric profession. Mapping the brain – its size and structure, its electrical impulses, its composition, and its injuries – enabled psychiatric knowledge to enter the criminal courtroom. Forensic psychiatrists presented judges, lawyers, and jurors with a new way of understanding the mind of the murderer, and, more generally, the secrets of the human brain.
See you in the History of Science Room (Bunche 5288) or via Zoom
https://ucla.zoom.us/meeting/register/x_2_DIHoTwGOu8rZFNIBIw.

UCLA History Department Senior Honors Thesis Workshop
2026-01-27 13:00 - 14:00 | Zoom
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 27th at 1pm via Zoom. Please RSVP via https://forms.gle/tEWuck56HYvbWidx7.

History Travel Study Info Session: Paris
2026-01-29 17:00
Dear History Students,
Interested in studying abroad in Paris during the summer? An info session on Paris will be offered Thursday, January 29th via zoom.
Upcoming Zoom Information Sessions:
Thursday, January 29 at 5PM: https://clemson.zoom.us/j/95419669352
Wednesday, February 4 at 5pm: https://clemson.zoom.us/j/94475034235
Please see the attached flyer for more information.

The Law and Politics of the Federal Assault on Higher Education: A Conversation with Prof. Joseph Fishkin
2026-02-03 12:00 - 13:30 | Bunche 6339

History Travel Study Info Session: Paris
2026-02-04 17:00
Dear History Students,
Interested in studying abroad in Paris during the summer? An info session on Paris will be offered Wednesday, February 4 via zoom.
Upcoming Zoom Information Sessions:
Wednesday, February 4 at 5pm: https://clemson.zoom.us/j/94475034235
Please see the attached flyer for more information.

Vulnerable Bodies: Roman Medical Research and the Enslaved
2026-02-09 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. Claire Bubb, Visiting Associate Professor of Classics at USC, will be joining us. She is a will be presenting “Vulnerable Bodies: Roman Medical Research and the Enslaved.”
Roman doctors periodically required bodies, both living and dead, for medical demonstration and research. There were many vulnerable bodies in Roman society–animals, the enslaved, the impoverished, the outcast, and the conquered–and this talk will explore which bodies doctors seem to have favored for which purposes. As it turns out, their use of the enslaved appears to have been surprisingly curtailed. The talk will therefore also address Galen’s perspectives on slavery and the enslaved and explore the potential boundaries to the exploitation of this particularly vulnerable population.
See you in the History of Science Room or via Zoom:
https://ucla.zoom.us/meeting/register/QIkvfaYBTei-hPhAKDF0Pg

From Face Blindness to Superrecocognition: The Discovery of a Spectrum
2026-02-23 16:00 - 17:30 | 5288 Bunche Hall
Everyone is welcome to the first installment of the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology Colloquium Series. Professor Sharrona Pearl of Texas Christian University will be presenting “From Face Blindness to Superrecognition: The Discovery of a Spectrum.”
Super recognition was clinically identified in 2009. That’s yesterday in scientific terms. In this talk, Sharrona Pearl discusses how the face recognition spectrum was developed, emphasizing the urgent need for the health humanities in clinical practice. (There will also be some games.)
See you in the History of Science Room or via Zoom:
https://ucla.zoom.us/meeting/register/Ynw3Fc2GSdqcAfBEnXi_5g

Book Talk: Covered with Night: A Story of Murder and Indigenous Justice in Early America
2026-02-24 16:00 - 17:00 | 6275 Bunche Hall

Teaching Talk #2: TEACHING WITH AI
2026-02-25 12:00 - 13:30 | Bunche 6275
teaching talk 2

TEACHING TALKS — a new series dedicated to the craft of teaching history
Teaching Talk #2: TEACHING WITH AI
Featuring Chris Johanson, Jamie Kreiner, Elizabeth Landers, Zrinka Stahuljak, and Stefania Tutino
Wednesday 25 February, 12:00 pm, 6275 Bunche
Lunch provided by DataX;

RSVP here

The UCLA History Atlantic Colloquium presents: Coachmen and Abakuá in Nineteenth-Century Cuba: Subjects and Agents of Surveillance
2026-02-26 12:30 - 14:00 | 6275 Bunche Hall
José Ortega, Associate Professor, Department of History, Whittier College
Presentation: “Coachmen and Abakuá in Nineteenth-Century Cuba: Subjects and Agents of Surveillance.”

The UCLA History Atlantic Colloquium presents: Mapping Seafarers and Black Women’s Networks in Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Cartagena
2026-03-05 12:30 - 14:00 | 6275 Bunche Hall
Viviana Quintero-Marquez, UC President’s and Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow, Departments of History, and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, UC Merced.
Presentation: “Mapping Seafarers and Black Women’s Networks in Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Cartagena.”
Discussant: Nohora Arrieta Fernández, Assistant Professor, Dept. of Spanish and Portuguese, UCLA
Also on Zoom: https://ucla.zoom.us/j/98793935555

Eugenic Spectrums: Social Science, Genetic Data, and Disabling in the U.S. West, 1900-1940
2026-03-09 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 Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow, Isidro Gonzalez Granados, will be presenting “Eugenic Spectrums: Social Science, Genetic Data, and Disabling in the U.S. West, 1900-1940.”
González Granados’s fundamental historical question is: how were disabled people made? His book project, Eugenic Foot Soldiers: Gendered Science, Racial Defects, and Disabling in the U.S. West, 1900-1940, interrogates how eugenics was from its inception a thoroughly interdisciplinary endeavor that reached the heights of national policy and social engineering, as well as the intimate, domestic, bodily, and molecular of American life. The foot-soldiers of American eugenics, known as eugenic field workers, extracted eugenic knowledge from bodies, neighborhoods, and the social worlds of institutionalized people by using such interdisciplinary methods. González Granados focuses on how these field workers, sought out and revered for their “maternalist” observational prowess within the sciences, created what he calls dysgenic data: the sociomedical, aesthetic, and moral information they assembled to identify individuals and families of Mexican, Black, Mormon, and/or Catholic background, as biosocially unfit. What eugenic field workers learned in the process was foundational to the expansion and durability of eugenic ideas across disciplines and institutions throughout the 20th century.
See you in the History of Science Room or via Zoom:
https://ucla.zoom.us/meeting/register/e-YWC8wDSRilg1rILEbTdw#/registration.

Book Launch: Lauren Derby - Bêtes Noires
2026-04-10 14:00 - 16:00 | 6275 Bunche Hall
Professor Derby will launch her new book: Bêtes Noires
Further information and eBook: https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/3601/Betes-NoiresSorcery-as-History-in-the-Haitian
Please RSVP here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1I48dLzOKSnJIBwXWCIXZ3vI7FbrqmkGfIFLxqEojPdo/edit

Mountains of Capital: Private Power Production in the Sierra Nevada
2026-04-13 16:00 - 17:30 | Bunche 5288 & Zoom
Everyone is welcome to the next installment of the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology Colloquium Series.
Moorpark College Professor, Joshua McGuffie, will be presenting “Mountains of Capital: Private Power Production in the Sierra Nevada.”

Over the course of 1905, the Nevada Power, Mining and Milling Company
constructed a hydroelectric power system on Bishop Creek in the Sierra Nevada.
Transmission lines crossed Owens Valley, traversed the White Mountains, and then
meandered eastwards to the silver fields around Tonopah, Nevada. By 1920, the
Company’s hydroelectric power flowed southward to the burgeoning cities of San
Bernadino, Riverside, and Redlands.

This talk analyzes the role of private power production in the environmental and
scientific histories of the Sierra Nevada. The Company, in its many iterations, built
infrastructure to transform flowing Sierra creeks into profit. Flowing water became
kilowatt hours. Trees became power poles. Glacial till and granodiorite boulders became
fill for dams. As the company transformed the mountains to produce power, its leaders
and workers developed the notion that they, as private, corporate actors, served as the
range’s natural caretakers. The Company fought the Los Angeles Bureau of Water and
Power and its Los Angeles Aqueduct. The Company worked to produce a privately-
owned paradise for employees who vacationed at creek side cabins. In company hands,
the Sierra acted as a bulwark against creeping socialism. Accounting for private power
production in the eastern Sierra enriches regional histories that traditionally emphasize
state actors and public lands.

See you in the History of Science Room or via Zoom
https://ucla.zoom.us/meeting/register/vLI7S0I3TsioQQj7GYDNZQ.

AI-Proof Assessments
2026-04-15 12:00 - 13:00 | 6275 Bunche Hall

UCLA European History Colloquium Presents: Scales of Slavdom: Race and Geography in Yugoslav Communism, 1941-48
2026-04-15 17:00 - 18:00 | 6275 Bunche Hall

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Workshop
2026-04-22 12:00 - 13:30 | 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
