UCLA Department of History

Professor Andrew Robichaud, “Animal City: The Domestication of America”
2021-03-02 11:00 - 12:15 (America/Los_Angeles) | Zoom
Professor Andrew Robichaud, “Animal City: The Domestication of America”

Tuesday, March 2

11am to 12:15pm

Andrew Robichaud, Assistant Professor of History and Director of Undergraduate Studies, Boston University, will be talking about his book Animal City: The Domestication of America (Harvard University Press, 2019)

American cities were once full of animal life: cattle driven through city streets; pigs feeding in gutters and basements; cows crammed into urban feedlots; horses by the tens of thousands; dogs pulling carts and powering small machines; and wild animals peering out at human spectators from behind bars. In his recent book, Animal City: The Domestication of America, Andrew Robichaud reconstructs this evolving world of nineteenth-century urban animal life—from San Francisco to Boston to New York—and reveals its importance, both then and now.

Hosted by the U.S. History Series, the Joyce Appleby Endowed Chair of America in the World, and History 13B: History of the U.S. and its Colonial Origins: 19th Century

Zoom link: https://ucla.zoom.us/j/95986426972

Preston McBride, "Lethal Education: Native American Boarding Schools, 1879-1934."
2021-03-08 16:00 - 17:00 | Zoom
Winter 2021 Colloquium
March 8 | 4PM – 5PM PST
Speaker Preston McBride (Dartmouth)
“Lethal Education: Native American Boarding Schools, 1879-1934.”

Zoom (RSVP Required): https://ucla.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJErcOmuqD8tE9MFnnblgFrfwqJstbN7N8_v

Jenna Gibbs, "Protesting Slavery, Asserting Freedom, and Defying Racism at the African Grove Theatre in New York in the early 1820s."
2021-03-11 12:30 | Zoom
RSVP here

Indian Ocean Studies: How Did We Get Here and Where Are We Going?
2021-03-26 06:00 - 07:30 | Zoom
Indian Ocean Studies: How Did We Get Here and Where Are We Going?
A Historian’s Perspective
Speaker: Edward A. Alpers
Research Professor (Emeritus)
Department of History University of California, Los Angeles
RSVP via QR code above or here.

Gabriel de Avilez Rocha, "East Atlantic Crossings in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries"
2021-04-01 12:30 - 14:00 | Zoom
Gabriel de Avilez Rocha, Vasco da Gama Assistant Professor of History and Portuguese and Brazilian Studies, Brown University
“East Atlantic Crossings in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries”
Atlantic historians tend to understand transoceanic crossings along an east-west axis, with people and goods seen as traversing the space between Africa and/or Europe, on the one hand, and the Americas, on the other. Yet in the early decades of the sixteenth century, even as the broader contours of Atlantic circumnavigation were becoming more evident to members of various maritime communities, impressions of transoceanic mobility did not yet assume the east-west axis as normative. Frequently traveled thoroughfares linking Seville to the Canaries, São Tomé to the Azores, and Cabo Verde to Rouen were themselves widely seen as transoceanic in scope, even if they hewed to the eastern side of the Atlantic. The weight of tradition lay behind this conventional wisdom. Maritime routes spanning the Gulf of Guinea, the Atlantic islands, and Iberia had since the mid-fifteenth century established patterns of voluntary and coerced movement that continued to be integral to an expanding Atlantic circuit even after 1492. In considering the shifting yet continually vital role of the eastern Atlantic corridor, this talk seeks to recover a largely overlooked geographic and temporal dimension of early Atlantic history. It does so by bringing together individual stories of conflict, negotiation, and struggle waged by a diverse range of individuals who interacted, in different ways, with the breadth and dynamism of the east Atlantic in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
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Megan Rosenbloom, “Anatomized Bodies at Work: The Human Skin Book and its Implications for the Histories of Medicine and the Book.”
2021-04-05 16:00 - 17:00 | Zoom
Spring 2021 Colloquium
April 5 | 4PM – 5PM PST
Speaker Megan Rosenbloom (UCLA)
“Anatomized Bodies at Work: The Human Skin Book and its Implications for the Histories of Medicine and the Book”
Please click here to access an abstract from Megan Rosenbloom’s new book, Dark Archives: A Librarian’s Investigation into the Science and History of Books Bound in Human Skin.
Zoom Register Link

ucLADINO Symposium, "Ottoman Legacies, Émigre Culture, and Linguistic Crossroads" - Day 1
2021-04-07 15:00 - 18:00 | Zoom
The theme of “Ottoman Legacies, Émigre Culture, and Linguistic Crossroads” will lay emphasis on heritage, culture, and communication related to Sephardic Jews. The music-filled program–all organized by graduate students–features panels on Ladino Linguistics, History and Memory, and Networks, a keynote address by Dr. Olga Borovaya (Stanford), as well as two concerts.
Please click here to register: https://bit.ly/ucladino

ucLADINO Symposium, "Ottoman Legacies, Émigre Culture, and Linguistic Crossroads" - Day 2
2021-04-08 10:00 - 15:00 | Zoom

Jiacheng Liu, "The Game of Love and the Performance of Masculinity: Courting Actresses in Republican China”
2021-04-12 19:00 | Zoom RSVP
Jiacheng Liu, Assistant Professor of History at the University of Northern Colorado, will be giving a talk based on her article “The Game of Love and the Performance of Masculinity: Courting Actresses in Republican China.”

Date & Time: April 12, 7:00 pm PST, in conjunction with Andrea S. Goldman’s History 282B seminar, Gender and Sexuality in Late Imperial and Modern China.

Participants are encouraged but not required to read the article in advance. The article and zoom link will be made available to participants who RSVP for the meeting. Deadline for the RSVP is on April 5th. Please send an email to rmartnz165@g.ucla.edu to RSVP.

Barbara Krauthamer, "Liberty’s Diaspora: Black Women in the Age of the American Revolution"
2021-04-15 12:30 - 14:00 | Zoom
Barbara Krauthamer, Professor of History, UMass Amherst
“Liberty’s Diaspora: Black Women in the Age of the American Revolution”
This presentation examines the lives of three Black women who had been enslaved in the British North American colonies at the time of the American Revolution. The presentation reflects on their lives by considering the ways historians have navigated the archival gaps and silences about Black women’s presence. The presentation follows the women’s voluntary and forced migrations, their Diasporic routes, within the Americas and across the Atlantic. This focus on Black women’s routes of resistance, liberation and deportation adds a new dimension to the more familiar and male dominated stories of slavery, Black Loyalists and the American Revolution.
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Black Lives Matter in Belgium: Reckoning with Legacies of Colonialism, Violence, and Contemporary Racism
2021-04-16 10:00 - 11:45 | Zoom
From the UCLA International Institute: Black Lives Matter in Belgium: Reckoning with Legacies of Colonialism, Violence, and Contemporary Racism
Debora Silverman, Professor of History and Art History at UCLA, will be on the panel of speakers.
Download the flyer for Zoom registration details.

Gideon Manning, “False Images Do Not Lie: Medicine, Editors’ Decisions, and the Case of René Descartes’s Treatise on Man.”
2021-04-19 16:00 - 17:00 | Zoom
Spring 2021 Colloquium
April 19 | 4PM – 5PM PST
Gideon Manning (Cedars-Sinai)
“False Images Do Not Lie: Medicine, Editors’ Decisions, and the Case of René Descartes’s Treatise on Man”
How to discuss the role of illustrations in the early modern period in a way that is responsive to the concepts and vocabulary of the time remains elusive. In this talk, which builds from the medical tradition outward, I will suggest that the technical language of historia-actio-usus (history-action-use), which originates in Aristotle and Galen and is then standardized among anatomists in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, provides us what has been missing. I will specifically consider the case of René Descartes’s posthumously published Treatise on Man, which appeared in Latin translation in 1662 and then in French in 1664. The original manuscript of the Treatise contained perhaps one or two images, but the text called for many more. Accordingly, the editors had to make numerous decisions. I will demonstrate how the language of historia-actio-usus, which Descartes also used, allows us to better understand the editors’ decisions and the many differences between the illustrations in the 1662 and 1664 editions of same text.
Zoom RSVP Link

Dominique Kircher Reill, "Fiume Crisis: Life in the Wake of the Habsburg Empire"
2021-04-21 11:00 - 12:00 | Zoom RSVP
This is the first of a series of book talks hosted by Brian Griffith that, in one way or another, impinge upon the history of Europe’s interwar crisis. These book talks will be open to members both of UCLA’s campus community and the general public, and pre-registration is required.
Dominique Kircher Reill, Fiume Crisis: Life in the Wake of the Habsburg Empire (Harvard, 2020)
“The Fiume Crisis recasts what we know about the birth of fascism, the rise of nationalism, and the fall of empire after World War I by telling the story of the three-year period when the Adriatic city of Fiume (today Rijeka, in Croatia) generated an international crisis. In 1919 the multicultural former Habsburg city was occupied by the paramilitary forces of the flamboyant poet-soldier Gabriele D’Annunzio, who aimed to annex the territory to Italy and became an inspiration to Mussolini. Many local Italians supported the effort, nurturing a standard tale of nationalist fanaticism. However, Dominique Kirchner Reill shows that practical realities, not nationalist ideals, were in the driver’s seat. Support for annexation was largely a result of the daily frustrations of life in a “ghost state” set adrift by the fall of the empire. D’Annunzio’s ideology and proto-fascist charisma notwithstanding, what the people of Fiume wanted was prosperity, which they associated with the autonomy they had enjoyed under Habsburg sovereignty. In these twilight years between the world that was and the world that would be, many across the former empire sought to restore the familiar forms of governance that once supported them. To the extent that they turned to nation-states, it was not out of zeal for nationalist self-determination but in the hope that these states would restore the benefits of cosmopolitan empire. Against the too-smooth narrative of postwar nationalism, The Fiume Crisis demonstrates the endurance of the imperial imagination and carves out an essential place for history from below.”
Zoom Registration Portal: https://ucla.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJwkf-qqpj4oHNfm0GbVXk0y6JrZxt8smPvs

The Unspoken as Heritage: The Armenian Genocide and Its Unaccounted Lives
2021-04-22 11:00 - 13:00 | Zoom

Crisis, Unity, & Revolution: UCLA History's 5th Annual Undergraduate Research Conference
2021-04-23 10:00 - 15:30 | Zoom
Event Recording

Y. Yvon Wang, “Sexology Sells: Licentiousness & Sexual Science on fin-de-siècle Beijing Markets”
2021-04-26 18:00 | Zoom RSVP
Y. Yvon Wang, Associate Professor of History at the University of Toronto, will be giving a talk entitled “Sexology Sells: Licentiousness & Sexual Science on fin-de-siècle Beijing Markets.”

Date & Time: April 26, 6:00 pm PST, in conjunction with Andrea S. Goldman’s History 282B seminar, Gender and Sexuality in Late Imperial and Modern China.

Participants are encouraged but not required to read sections from Wang’s book Reinventing Licentiousness: Pornography and Modern China (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2021) and other readings which will be made available to participants who RSVP to the meeting. Please RSVP no later than April 19th, by sending an email to rmartnz165@g.ucla.edu. The zoom link will also be made available to students who RSVP.

Elizabeth Schiffler, "Snow Eggs: Situated Tastes and Partial Archives"
2021-05-06 12:30 - 14:00 | Zoom
Elizabeth Schiffler, PhD student in Theater and Performance Studies, UCLA
“Snow Eggs: Situated Tastes and Partial Archives”
This talk traces a history of Snow Eggs, from its inception in American gastronomic history to a contemporary Los Angeles performance. Beginning with the recipe from 18th century Chef James Hemings, enslaved to President Jefferson, a study of Snow Eggs reveals the emerging technologies and relations between French and American gastronomy. Extending to the 2020 dinner series ‘Hemings & Hercules’ created by Chef Martin N. Draluck at Hatchet Hall in Los Angeles centers reenactment as a historical method that reveals historical, ecological, and technological entanglements. This talk challenges the dominant culinary narrative of the whiteness of French-American gastronomy, to position American cookbooks adapting French cuisine to be read, and performed, through the legacy of Hemings’ contribution to American foodways.
Register here

Stephen Bittner, "Whites and Reds: A History of Wine in the Lands of Tsar and Commisar"
2021-05-07 12:00 - 13:00 | Zoom RSVP
This is the second of a series of book talks hosted by Brian Griffith that, in one way or another, impinge upon the history of Europe’s interwar crisis. These book talks will be open to members both of UCLA’s campus community and the general public, and pre-registration is required.
Stephen Bittner, Whites and Reds: A History of Wine in the Lands of Tsar and Commisar (Oxford, 2021)
“Whites and Reds: A History of Wine in the Lands of Tsar and Commissar tells the story of Russia’s encounter with viniculture and winemaking. Rooted in the early-seventeenth century, embraced by Peter the Great, and then magnified many times over by the annexation of the indigenous wine economies and cultures of Georgia, Crimea, and Moldova in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, viniculture and winemaking became an important indicator of Russia’s place at the European table. While the Russian Revolution in 1917 left many of the empire’s vineyards and wineries in ruins, it did not alter the political and cultural meanings attached to wine. Stalin himself embraced champagne as part of the good life of socialism, and the Soviet Union became a winemaking superpower in its own right, trailing only Spain, Italy, and France in the volume of its production. Whites and Reds illuminates the ideas, controversies, political alliances, technologies, business practices, international networks, and, of course, the growers, vintners, connoisseurs, and consumers who shaped the history of wine in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union over more than two centuries. Because wine was domesticated by virtue of imperialism, its history reveals many of the instabilities and peculiarities of the Russian and Soviet empires. Over two centuries, the production and consumption patterns of peripheral territories near the Black Sea and in the Caucasus became a hallmark of Russian and Soviet civilizational identity and cultural refinement. Wine in Russia was always more than something to drink.”
Zoom Registration Portal: https://ucla.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJYtde-pqD0vGteO7xk_YPpsnWGw5BTc9ufC

Jacy Young, “Psychology, Questionnaires, and the Morass of ‘Big’ Data.”
2021-05-10 16:00 - 17:00 | Zoom
Spring 2021 Colloquium
May 10 | 4PM – 5PM PST
Speaker Jacy Young (Quest University)
“Psychology, Questionnaires, and the Morass of ‘Big’ Data”
Zoom RSVP Link

Madison Felman-Panagotacos, "La Difunta Correa"
2021-05-12 14:00 - 15:00 | Zoom
May 12 | 2PM – 3PM
“La Difunta Correa”
A Workshop with PhD Candidate from the Spanish and Portuguese department, Madison Felman-Panagotacos (UCLA)

This paper will trace the tumultuous popularization of the devotion to la Difunta Correa,
considering reverence for her in conjunction with changing standards of what constitutes
argentinidad and femininity. Examining cultural productions depicting la Difunta Correa that were
created ion during moments of political upheaval – modernization, the rise of Peronism, and the
military dictatorship – lends insight to the values considered as inherent to Argentine citizenship
at those particular moments. Rewritings of the legend of la Difunta Correa are calculated
reimaginings of what constitutes citizenship and femininity, highlighting exclusionary practices in
nation building that are still present today.

Please contact rmartnz165@g.ucla.edu for the Zoom link and paper.

Bharat Venkat, “At the Limits of Cure.”
2021-05-17 16:00 - 17:00 | Zoom
Spring 2021 Colloquium
May 17 | 4PM – 5PM PST
Speaker Bharat Venkat (UCLA)
“At the Limits of Cure”
What does it mean to be cured, and what does it mean for a cure to come undone? This talk draws from my forthcoming book At the Limits of Cure (Duke University Press, fall 2021), which focuses on the history and present of tuberculosis treatment in India. Drawing on ethnographic and historical materials, as well as film, fiction, and folklore, I examine cure in its various iterations—from sanatoriums and gold therapy to travel and antibiotics—as well as how such cures come up against their limits. Through an anthropological history, this book explores a range of curative imaginations that have taken form around tuberculosis: in debates contrasting idyllic sanatoriums and crowded prisons, through which freedom in its many forms became envisioned as a kind of therapy; in the itineraries of ships filled with coolies and soldiers seeking work and treatment across the British empire; in the networks of scientists who tested antibiotics in India as a means of asking whether poverty really mattered to therapeutic success; in clinics where patients were told that they were cured only to undergo treatment again and again; and in the reworking of midcentury anxieties about population growth in relation to contemporary drug resistance in India’s urban centers. A central contention of this book–and my talk–is that our imagination of cure shapes our understanding of time: not only the temporality underlying histories of science and medicine, but also, the temporality of therapy itself.

Registration Link

Allyson Brantley, "Brewing a Boycott: How a Grassroots Coalition Fought Coors and Remade American Consumer Activism"
2021-05-18 14:00 - 15:00 | Facebook Live
Book Talk featuring Allyson Brantley discussing Brewing a Boycott: How a Grassroots Coalition Fought Coors and Remade American Consumer Activism via the Labor Studies Facebook live feed. You can read more about the event here.

Claudio Fogu, "The Fishing Net and the Spider Web: Mediterranean Imaginaries and the Making of Italians"
2021-05-19 12:00 - 13:00 | Zoom
This is the third of a series of book talks hosted by Brian Griffith that, in one way or another, impinge upon the history of Europe’s interwar crisis. These book talks will be open to members both of UCLA’s campus community and the general public, and pre-registration is required.
Claudio Fogu, The Fishing Net and the Spider Web: Mediterranean Imaginaries and the Making of Italians (Palgrave, 2021)
“This book explores the role of Mediterranean imaginaries in one of the preeminent tropes of Italian history: the formation or ‘making of’ Italians. While previous scholarship on the construction of Italian identity has often focused too narrowly on the territorial notion of the nation-state, and over-identified Italy with its capital, Rome, this book highlights the importance of the Mediterranean Sea to the development of Italian collective imaginaries. From this perspective, this book re-interprets key historical processes and actors in the history of modern Italy, and thereby challenges mainstream interpretations of Italian collective identity as weak or incomplete. Ultimately, it argues that Mediterranean imaginaries acted as counterweights to the solidification of a ‘national’ Italian identity, and still constitute alternative but equally viable modes of collective belonging.”
Zoom Registration Portal: https://ucla.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJAoc-Gqpj4uHNP95cX92KF0uyOSkEM84Tcw

Devin Leigh, "The Origins of an Archive: Enslavers and the Geopolitics of Knowledge Production in an Age of Abolition"
2021-05-20 12:30 - 14:00 | Zoom
Click here to register for the event.

Erika Milam, “Afterlives in Nature: Long-term Ecological Research in the Age of COVID.”
2021-05-24 16:00 - 17:00 | Zoom
Spring 2021 Colloquium
May 24 | 4PM – 5PM PST
Erika Milam (Princeton)
“Afterlives in Nature: Long-term Ecological Research in the Age of COVID”
Registration Link

Annelise Heinz, "Mahjong: A Chinese Game and the Making of Modern American Culture"
2021-05-27 17:00 - 18:00 | Zoom
To learn more about this event and to register, click here.

Edward B. Westermann, "Drunk on Genocide: Alcohol and Mass Murder in Nazi Germany"
2021-06-02 12:00 - 13:00
This is the fourth of a series of book talks hosted by Brian Griffith that, in one way or another, impinge upon the history of Europe’s interwar crisis. These book talks will be open to members both of UCLA’s campus community and the general public, and pre-registration is required.
Edward B. Westermann, Drunk on Genocide: Alcohol and Mass Murder in Nazi Germany (Cornell, 2021)
“In Drunk on Genocide, Edward B. Westermann reveals how, over the course of the Third Reich, scenes involving alcohol consumption and revelry among the SS and police became a routine part of rituals of humiliation in the camps, ghettos, and killing fields of Eastern Europe. Westermann draws on a vast range of newly unearthed material to explore how alcohol consumption served as a literal and metaphorical lubricant for mass murder. It facilitated “performative masculinity,” expressly linked to physical or sexual violence. Such inebriated exhibitions extended from meetings of top Nazi officials to the rank and file, celebrating at the grave sites of their victims. Westermann argues that, contrary to the common misconception of the SS and police as stone-cold killers, they were, in fact, intoxicated with the act of murder itself. Drunk on Genocide highlights the intersections of masculinity, drinking ritual, sexual violence, and mass murder to expose the role of alcohol and celebratory ritual in the Nazi genocide of European Jews. Its surprising and disturbing findings offer a new perspective on the mindset, motivation, and mentality of killers as they prepared for, and participated in, mass extermination.”
Zoom Registration Portal: https://ucla.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJAofuCuqjsvG9Jr9JrNb18L_UfJRfKdT4_C

Brian Griffith’s Book Talk with Dr. Edward B. Westermann
2021-06-02 12:00 - 13:00 | Zoom
Edward B. Westermann, Drunk on Genocide: Alchol and Mass Murder in Nazi Germany
Wednesday, June 2, 2021
12:00 pm -1:00 pm PST
Regsiteration: tinyurl.com/drunk-on-genocide

Alea Adigweme, "A Prelude to the Vestibular: Reading Paratexts in Charles Shepard's 'An Historical Account of the Island of Saint Vincent'"
2021-06-03 12:30 - 14:00 | Zoom
Alea Adigweme, MFA student in Interdisciplinary Studio Art at UCLA
Zoom – Click here to register for the event.

4th Annual Nahuatl Conference at UCLA
2021-06-04 09:00 - 16:00 | Zoom
4th Annual Nahuatl Conference at UCLA
Friday, June 4, 2021
Zoom Registration: bit.ly/3i0qFML
