Message from the Chair

In June some 250 undergraduate students were honored at the History commencement ceremony in Dickson Plaza. UCLA Professor Emeritus of History who served as History chair, Dean of the Division of Social Sciences, and Executive Vice Chancellor, Scott Waugh, delivered the commencement address. Scott spoke eloquently about how much has changed and has not changed in Westwood and the world since he was a student at UCLA in the late 1960s. Ten doctoral students from History were hooded in a separate ceremony in Royce Hall. We value these special occasions for the students, their families, and their teachers and mentors. And now that our campus is quiet, it feels more like summer, at last.

Summer is a time in the academic calendar when the pace slows down a bit and we can reflect on what we did, and what we now want and need to do. This past academic year was both rewarding and challenging. We returned to on-site instruction as the pandemic subsided. We worked together through a strike in the fall, which resulted in significant salary increases for graduate student and other academic employees. The 8-year internal and external review of our Department was concluded this year, resulting in a 35-page report that provides both encouraging feedback and constructive advice for addressing our department’s needs and building on our strengths. Despite a spate of retirements and the spiraling cost of education and living in Los Angeles, our History program remains one of the best in the world.

We hired three new faculty members to help replace the six who retired last year. Our new Weber Chair in European History is Stella Ghervas, whose most recent award-winning book, Conquering Peace: From the Enlightenment to the European Union (Harvard University Press), is a brilliant, timely history of war and peace in Europe. We also welcome Elizabeth O’Brien to the History of Science, Medicine & Technology field; Elizabeth specializes in medical interventions and women’s reproductive rights in Mexico. Our third new colleague is Jared McBride, whose current research focuses on ethnic diversity and mass violence in Nazi-occupied Ukraine and the Soviet Union. We have three more searches scheduled for the coming year: in medieval history (Wellman Chair), China, and the U.S. in the 19th century. We are grateful to work with Interim Dean of Social Sciences, Abel Valenzuela, on these crucial appointments and searches.

Our faculty continue to win multiple accolades: Sanjay Subrahmanyam was awarded the Comite International des Sciences Historiques CISH International Prize for History (also known as the Nobel Prize for History), and Ted Porter was awarded the Sarton Medal by the History of Science Society for lifetime scholarly achievement. Our prolific faculty published 12 books last year and won seven book awards.

We also hired seven key staff members this year: Gabriela Arrieta-Rivera, Rose Campbell, Jay Jang, Janette González, Judy Hernández, Serena Silk, and Edward Trujillo. In fact, I am pleased to report that our staff is now at full strength. I thank Ann Major for filling in as Chief Administrative Officer for several months this past year, in addition to her usual role as Assistant to the Chair and Operations Manager, and I thank our former Chief Adminstrative Officer, Asiroh Cham, for doing everything possible to facilitate a smooth transition for Ann and our new CAO, Jay Jang. And I thank other staff members who stepped up to meet the department’s needs last year, including Verna Abe, Mary Johnson, Tessa Villaseñor, Indira García, Mahea Ayoso-Sadsad, and Khris Go. Working with our amazing staff has been one of the most gratifying aspects of my service as department chair.

I am pleased to report that History Professor David Myers has agreed to continue as director of the Luskin Center for History and Policy (LCHP), founded three years ago through a generous gift by Meyer and Renee Luskin. David Myers and Assistant Director, Dr. Rose Campbell, continue to set a high bar for the center. The podcast “Then & Now,” which brings historical texture to pressing issues of the day, has been downloaded 34,000 times since its debut. Recently the LCHP hosted its third annual Summer Research Institute, which offered an introduction to historical methods and the juncture of history and policy to more than fifty undergraduate and graduate students from UCLA and other institutions. The LCHP is also sponsoring research teams working on a variety of topics, including: Los Angeles street naming policies and practices (team leader Prof. Tawny Paul); the history of the environmental justice movement in California (team leader Prof. Jon Christensen); an examination of the University of California’s reliance on real estate from its origins as a land-grant institution to the emergence of real estate as a key feature of its investment portfolio (research leaders Sammy Feldblum and John Schmitt); and an exploration of the challenge of governing Los Angeles as a city and county (researcher Alisa Belinkoff Katz).

The Public History Initiative (PHI) continues to grow and thrive under the direction of History Professor Tawny Paul. The HistoryCorps internship program is expanding, offering internships to 15 students every quarter and organizing several new partnerships and internship placements. The PHI is also opening new opportunities for graduate students. In collaboration with the Wende Museum, the PHI established the Peter Baldwin UCLA History Fellowship for graduate students. Baldwin Fellows will work at the Wende, where they will combine historical methodologies and scholarship with on-the-job training in archives, collections, digitization, curation, and public programming, gaining real-world experience for potential careers in museums and public history. The PHI finished the first year of its flagship project, “History in the Streets,” which considers street names in Los Angeles as forms of commemoration and engages students and community members as researchers. Finally, the PHI released the Public History Toolkit, which seeks to strengthen public history across the department by providing tools to help faculty integrate public history projects into their courses.

The famous Million Dollar Hoods (MDH) project, led by History Professor Kelly Lytle Hernández and housed in the History Department, is an innovative research team of students, staff, and community members who continue to compile an archive of historical records documenting five decades of incarceration in Black, Latinx, Indigenous and working-class communities in Los Angeles. The project’s goal is to end mass incarceration.

The LCHP, PHI, and MDH are cornerstones of our department’s mission to demonstrate how the study of history is essential to understanding the present, and how historians can play a role in making relevant knowledge available and intelligible to the public, with implications for policy change at the local and national levels. Our symposium series, Why History Matters, is a public program that addresses contemporary events and issues from historical, informed perpectives. History Professor Toby Higbie, Director of the Institute for Labor and Employment, is organizing a special session this fall on the Los Angeles area hotel workers’ strike, featuring speaker Susan Minato of UNITE HERE Local 11.

Finally, in the Fall we will welcome many new undergraduates, as well as nine incoming graduate students and three Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellows: Bernard Gordillo; Mia Dawson; and Anne Napatalung.

We look forward to an exciting, productive year and to seeing you at some of our many events and programs planned for the fall.

Kevin Terraciano
Department Chair and Professor