UCLA Department of History

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 (America/Los_Angeles)
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.

José I. Fusté - “Historicizing Entangled Afro-Latinidades: Looking Beyond the Diasporic and/or National Subject”
2016-04-28 12:00 - 14:00
This presentation invites us to imagine afrodescended Latin@s—who live, think, and feel colonial modernity between different nations, regions, and subaltern positionalities—as subjects with inherently fragmented and “entangled” ontologies. Drawing from the writings of the Martinican poet-philosopher Edouard Glissant about the protean condition of the Caribbean (post)colonial subject, we will analyze various Cuban and Puerto Rican activist intellectuals from the early 20th century that self-identified as Black political subjects, but also as Latin Caribbean national subjects. Specifically, we will analyze traces left behind by those that sought to reconcile anti-racist and anti-imperialist/nationalist discourses and practices that were inherently contradictory due to the notion that in Latin America, the nation and Latin@ pan-ethnicity made racial alterity insignificant. A close reading of the identitarian aporias apparent in the letters, essays, and the journalism of those who sought to unravel these contradictions affords us a window for reconceptualizing the instabilities but also the possibilities of afro-latinidades as a spectrum of heterodox onto-political strategies that are inherently transnational and relational.

Kathleen Murphy - “Botany and Biopiracy along the Routes of the Asiento Trade”
2016-04-25 16:00 - 18:00 | 5288 Bunche Hall
Kathleen Murphy (Cal Poly San Luis Obispo) “Botany and Biopiracy along the Routes of the Asiento Trade”

Ted Porter and Norton Wise - “Positivism and Revolutions: First-Generation Historiographies of Science”
2016-04-18 16:00 - 18:00 | 5288 Bunche Hall
Please note: This meeting is designed especially for graduate students, and will be organized as a discussion of short essays about Kuhn and Gillispie. Essays will be circulated to history of science grad students; anyone else who would like to participate can get the papers from Iris (irisclever@ucla.edu)

Presentation on Juana Inés
2016-04-18 11:00 - 13:00 | 6275 Bunche Hall
Students and faculty are cordially invited to a presentation on the critically critically acclaimed TV Series JUANA INES. Juana Inés centers on the personal life of the renowned writer and poet of the Colonial times in Mexico: Sor Juana. She is considered an outstanding early feminist of the Americas. The academic literature on Sor Juana is broad and spans across the world. Her life and works continue to be sites of criticism, debate and contemporary artistic activity.

Christopher L. Brown - "The British in Africa in the Era of the Slave Trade"
2016-04-13 16:00 - 18:30 | 6275 Bunche Hall

Eric Hounshell - “A Feel for the Data: Paul F. Lazarsfeld and the Columbia Bureau of Applied Social Research”
2016-04-11 16:00 - 18:00 | 5288 Bunche Hall

John Laslett - "My Brother Peter, E.P. Thompson and Me: A Personal Memoir"
2016-04-05 16:00 - 18:00 | 6275 Bunche Hall
John Laslett is an Emeritus Research Professor in the History Department at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research focuses on United States History: American labor and social movements; U.S., Asian, Black and Mexican immigration; and comparative Euro-American history.

Dan Stone - "Rethinking Liberation"
2016-03-31 16:00 - 18:00 | UCLA Faculty Center
Seventy years after the end of the war, the liberation of the camps is still relatively understudied by historians. In this lecture, Dan Stone will give an overview of the different sorts of liberation experienced by the victims of Nazism and explain the importance of the liberation and what followed for understanding the history of the Holocaust.
About the Speaker: Dan Stone is a historian of ideas who works primarily on twentieth-century European history. His research interests include: the history and interpretation of the Holocaust, comparative genocide, history of anthropology, and the cultural history of the British Right. His most recent publications include Goodbye to All That? The Story of Europe since 1945 (Oxford University Press, 2014) and The Liberation of the Camps: The End of the Holocaust and its Aftermath (Yale University Press, 2015).
Sponsored by the
UCLA Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies
1939 Society
Cosponsored by the
UCLA Department of Germanic Languages
UCLA Department of History
Please RSVP at http://www.cjs.ucla.edu/rsvp-to-event/.

Nancy O. Gallman - “American Constitutions: Life, Liberty and Property in Colonial East Florida"
2016-03-31 12:00 - 14:00 | 6275 Bunche Hall
Nancy O. Gallman is a Ph.D. candidate in Early American History at the University of California, Davis. Her dissertation, “American Constitutions: Life, Liberty, and Property in Colonial East Florida,” is a comparative legal history of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Spanish–Native East Florida. It examines the interactions between Spanish colonial law and the customary law of the Lower Creeks and Seminoles to show how a broadly defined, pluralistic system of law shaped the development of East Florida, where neither the Spanish nor Native peoples could dominate but where both had to adapt to the other. She argues that, on the basis of mutual tolerance and restraint, this mixed legal culture reinforced Native sovereignty, promoted multiple conceptions of justice, race, gender, labor, and property, and, as a result, made East Florida a greater target of U.S. aggression in the early years of the new republic. This study of legal pluralism in East Florida refines our understanding of the role of Native law in the constitution of power in colonial North America.

Michael Rothberg - “Inheritance Trouble: Transmitting Holocaust Memory in a Society of Immigration”
2016-03-09 16:00 - 18:00
Michael Rothberg is Professor of English and Head of the Department of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he is also Director of the Initiative in Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies. His latest book is Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (2009), published by Stanford University Press in their “Cultural Memory in the Present” series. He is also the author of Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation (2000), and has co-edited The Holocaust: Theoretical Readings (2003) and special issues of the journals Criticism, Interventions, Occasion, and Yale French Studies.

Jean-Marc Dreyfus - “Comprehensive or focused? Which teaching of the Holocaust in the 21st Century?”
2016-03-08 16:00 - 18:00 | 6275 Bunche Hall
Jean-Marc Dreyfus is Reader in History and in Holocaust Studies at the University of Manchester (History Division), United Kingdom. He was a post-doctoral fellow at the Centre for European Studies, Harvard and the Centre Marc-Bloch in Berlin. He is the author of six monographs, including L’impossible réparation. Déportés, biens spoliés, or nazi, comptes bloqués, criminels de guerre [The impossible réparation. Deportees, looted properties, Nazi gold, war criminals] (Paris, 2015). He has recently edited a special issue of the European Review of History, on ‘Traces, memory and the Holocaust in the writings of W.G. Sebald’. He is the co-organizer (with Elisabeth Anstett) of the ERC research programme “Corpses of mass violence and genocide” (www.corpsesofmassviolence.eu).

Mary Terrall - “Michel Adanson’s Imagined Plantations: Secrecy, Botanical Knowledge, and French Colonial Policy after the Seven Years’ War”
2016-03-07 16:00 | 5288 Bunche Hall
Mary Terrall is a History Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Fifth International Conference on Freemasonry at UCLA. "Brothers across the Sea: Freemasonry's Spread to Africa and the Middle East"
2016-03-05 20:45
This is an all day event, scheduled to begin at 8:45 and go until 4:00pm.
You can view information and biographies about the speakers, the event program, and registration at this url.

The Clandestine and Heterodox Underground of Early Modern European Philosophy, 17th–18th Centuries
2016-03-04 09:00 - 2016-03-05 17:00 | UCLA Royce Hall – Room 314, 10745 Dickson Ct, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, United States
A conference organized by Margaret Jacob, University of California, Los Angeles; Gianni Paganini, Università del Piemonte Orientale; and John Christian Laursen, University of California, Riverside.
Co-sponsored by the UCLA Department of History; Università del Piemonte Orientale, Vercelli; and Centro di Ricerca della Accademia dei Lincei, Rome.
This conference explores philosophical writings that circulated clandestinely in the early modern era—a corpus of some 250 texts in some 2,000 manuscript copies. At its most radical, the clandestine philosophical tract remained rigorously anonymous. These tracts offered a rationalist criticism of philosophy and religion, drawing on classical and Renaissance alternative traditions while providing critical readings of mainstream texts to bring out their errors and ideological sleight of hand. Many of the ideas expressed in the manuscripts emerged in print in the works of Voltaire, Hume, d’Holbach, and Diderot. The conference examines how these manuscripts enable a reading of European intellectual history beyond the official professions of faith promoted by the schools and established authors.
RSVP at http://www.1718.ucla.edu/events/heterodox-underground/
Speakers
Jeffrey D. Burson, Georgia Southern University
Sabrina Ebbersmeyer, Københavns Universitet
Karen Hollewand, University of Oxford
Jonathan Israel, Institute for Advanced Study
John Christian Laursen, University of California, Riverside
Inger Leemans, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Whitney Mannies, University of California, Riverside
John Marshall, Johns Hopkins University
Gianni Paganini, Università del Piemonte Orientale
Winfried Schröder, Philipps-Universität Marburg Maria
Susana Seguin, Université Paul-Valery Montpelier III
Rienk Vermij, University of Oklahoma

Alon Confino - “A World With and Without Jews: Some Thoughts on Holocaust History and Memory”
2016-03-03 16:00 - 18:00 | 6275 Bunche Hall
Alon Confino is a professor of history at the University of Virginia and at Ben-Gurion University. At the heart of his work are the imagination, sensibilities, and emotions that make the stories people tell themselves about their past to give meaning to their world. He has published extensively on modern German and European history, on nationhood, memory, and historical method. In the last few years he worked on the Holocaust and the result is Foundational Pasts: The Holocaust As Historical Understanding (Cambridge University Press, New York, 2012) and A World Without Jews: The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide (Yale University Press, 2014), which won a 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship. He is now at work on a book project on 1948 in Palestine, at the center of which is the impact of Holocaust memories.

Vinay Lal - "The Politics of Internet Hinduism"
2016-03-03 12:00 - 13:30 | 6275 Bunche Hall
Hinduism’s adherents, particularly in the United States, have displayed in recent years a marked tendency to turn towards various forms of digital media, and in particular the internet, to forge new forms of Hindu identity, furnish Hinduism with a purportedly more coherent and monotheistic form, engage in debates on American multiculturalism, and partake of the protocols of citizenship in the digital age. The aspiration to create linkages across Hindu groups worldwide, embrace Hindus in remoter diasporic settings who are viewed as having been ‘left behind’, and create something of global Hindu consciousness, has a fundamental relationship to India’s ascendancy as an ‘emerging economy’ and the confidence with which its Hindu elites increasingly view the world and their prospects for prosperity and political gain. In this lecture, I shall focus on some contemporary phenomena, among them the deployment of the internet in battles over the content of history textbooks in California and attempts to secure ‘the dignity of Hinduism’ by groups such as American Hindus Against Defamation (AHAD). As I shall argue, a revolutionary internet Hinduism is being forged which transforms an old faith into a worldwide religion, and brings pliant Hindus, both in India and in the older Indian diasporas of the nineteenth century, to an awareness of the global strengths of a ‘modern’ Hindu community.

Caroline Ford - “Natural Interests: The Contest over Environment in Modern France”
2016-02-29 16:00 | 5288 Bunche Hall
Caroline Ford is a History Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research interests include modern France, environmental history, and urban and architectural history.
This event is co-sponsored by the History Department.

#StandWithJNU: A Forum on Nationalism and Dissent
2016-02-26 13:00 - 15:00 | 11372 Bunche Hall
CISA and the South Asia Graduate Association Present: #StandWithJNU: A Forum on Nationalism and Dissent. Featuring talks by: Sanjay Subrahmanyam (History) , Vinay Lal (History), and Aparna Sharma (World Arts and Cultures). Light refreshments.

Futures of History Conference
2016-02-25 08:00 - 2016-02-26 17:00 | Palisades Room, Carnesale Commons
This is a conference aimed at empowering the next generation of historians.
Futures of History will be held on February 25–26, 2015 in the Palisades room on the third floor of Carnesale Commons. Breakout sessions will take place in Malibu, Venice, and Hermosa rooms on the second floor.
More information about this event…
