Graduate Students

Field of Study: Jewish

Advisor(s): Sarah Stein

Field of Study: Middle East

Field of Study: Europe

Advisor(s): Glenn Penny

Lucia Alvarez is a Ph.D. Student in the European Field and her research focuses on postwar Housing, and Iberian and Latin American migration into East and West Germany.

Field of Study: Japan

Alice Kiwako Ashiwa is a Ph.D. candidate specializing in modern Japanese art, with an interest in the relationship between patronage or institutuional support and avant-garde art, as well the overlaps between “tradition,” “modern,” and “avant-garde”.

Field of Study: History of Science, Medicine, and Technology

Advisor(s): Soraya de Chadarevian (chair), Katherine Marino, Elizabeth O’Brien, and Juliet Williams

Chloe Bell-Wilson is a PhD candidate who studies the history of synthetic estrogen in the United States.

Field of Study: Jewish

Advisor(s): Sarah Abrevaya Stein, Aomar Boum, David Myers, Jessica Marglin

Field of Study: Latin America

Field of Study: Europe

Advisor(s): Minayo Nasiali, Robin Derby

Erin is a PhD Student in History at UCLA. Her research focuses on the impact of agricultural development on individual and community relationships to healthcare systems in the French Caribbean.

Field of Study: United States

Michael Buse is a PhD student at UCLA researching California, urban history, and the intersections of settler colonialism and heritage work. He is also interested in Russian colonialism and anti-colonial movements throughout the Pacific.

Field of Study: Ancient

Field of Study: Latin America, Caribbean, Afro-Atlantic

Advisor(s): Robin Derby, Robin D.G. Kelley, Winston James, Andrew Apter

Jeanette is a PhD candidate focused on Latin American, Caribbean, and Afro-Atlantic histories. Her dissertation centers the relationship and trajectory of Black radicalism, political economy, and popular religions in contemporary Venezuela from 1958-2013.

Advanced to Candidacy

Field of Study: History of Science, Medicine, and Technology

Advisor(s): Soraya de Chadarevian

Field of Study: China

Field of Study: South and Southeast Asia

Advisor(s): Professor Vinay Lal

I am a historian of South Asia and my research interests broadly encompass the modern period particularly the late colonial state and society, and the anticolonial movement.

Field of Study: Middle East

Advisor(s): James Gelvin (chair), Koh Choon Hwee, Nile Green, Kevan Harris

Field of Study: Latin America

Field of Study: History of Science, Latin America

Field of Study: United States

Advisor(s): Eric Avila

Kayne is a PhD student in the History Department at UCLA researching 20th century urban California.

Field of Study: United States

Advisor(s): Katherine M. Marino (chair), Robin D.G. Kelley, Grace Kyungwon Hong, Kevin Y. Kim

Thalia is a PhD candidate who studies feminist activism in the United States from the 1970s-1990s. Her dissertation project focused on feminist anti-nuclear activism from 1975-2000, with a particular interest in how this activism was concerned with women’s health and women’s bodies.

Advisor(s): Dr. Robin D.G. Kelley

My research interests include Pan-Africanism, black Marxisms, and anti-colonialism with an emphasis on the decolonization of Lusophone Africa in the 1970s, into the neocolonial and neoliberal turn of the 1980s.

Field of Study: Middle East

Advisor(s): James Gelvin

My research explores the relationships between gender, property, and women’s position in the family in late Ottoman Beirut.

Current/Former HGSA Member

Advanced to Candidacy

Field of Study: Science, Medicine, and Technology

Advisor(s): Theodore Porter, Soraya de Chadarevian, Michael Meranze, Amir Alexander and Mary Terrall

Jacob is a historian of science and medicine, and the United States.

Current/Former HGSA Member

Advanced to Candidacy

Field of Study: Ancient

Advisor(s): Greg Woolf

Carson is a History PhD student at UCLA, where he studies the Roman empire in Late Antiquity.

Field of Study: Latin America

Advisor(s): Dr. Katherine Marino and Dr. Fernando Pérez-Montesinos

Field of Study: South and Southeast Asia

Advisor(s): Vinay Lal

I am a PhD student interested in the social, political, and intellectual history of twentieth century South India, with particular interest in anticolonial movements, the Telangana Rebellion, and the Dravidian movement.

Current/Former HGSA Member

Field of Study: Africa

Britton is a first-year History PhD student at UCLA, where he studies African history and the history of medicine. He focuses on East Africa and disease.

Field of Study: Middle East

Current/Former HGSA Member

Field of Study: China

Field of Study: South and Southeast Asia

Advisor(s): Nile Green, Vinay Lal, James Gelvin

Field of Study: South and Southeast Asia

Advisor(s): Vinay Lal

Field of Study: Africa

Field of Study: Latin America

Advisor(s): Katherine Marino, Fernando Pérez-Montesinos, Elizabeth O'Brien, and Alexandra Minna Stern

Vivian is a History PhD student at UCLA, where she studies modern Latin American women’s and gender history.

Current/Former HGSA Member

Field of Study: Middle East

Advisor(s): James Gelvin, Aomar Boum, Kevin Y. Kim, Aslı Ü. Bâli

Lily Hindy is a PhD candidate in History at UCLA whose dissertation research focuses on how the Kurdish nationalist movement in Iraq and in the diaspora utilized the growing bureaucracy of human rights to publicize their plight internationally and gain support for autonomy between the 1970s and 2003.

Field of Study: Middle East

Advisor(s): James Gelvin

Philip Hoffman is a third-year PhD student, researching the framing of land reform in twentieth-century Syria.

Current/Former HGSA Member

Field of Study: Japan

Field of Study: Jewish, Middle East

Madeline Hudalla is a PhD student in History at UCLA, where she studies modern Middle Eastern and Jewish history.  She focuses on Mizrahi, Iraqi, and Iranian history.

Field of Study: Middle East

My research interests include histories of modern Egypt, Pan-Africanism, Afro-Arab anticolonial solidarities, and Third World internationalism.

Field of Study: Medieval

Advisor(s): Teofilo Ruiz, Rowan Dorin (History, Stanford), Stefania Tutino, Jessica Goldberg, Meredith Cohen (Art History), Celine Dauverd (History, Univeristy of Colorado-Boulder)

Richard Ibarra is interested in the construction of community (particularly in urban contexts), the extension of communal memory across time and space, and the social and cultural underpinnings of integration and naturalization.

Advanced to Candidacy

Field of Study: Middle East

Erdem Ilter specializes in the late Ottoman Empire and Early Turkish Republic history.

Field of Study: United States

Field of Study: History of Science, Medicine, and Technology

Advisor(s): Elizabeth O'Brien

Field of Study: Jewish, Latin America

Advisor(s): Kevin Terraciano & Sarah Stein

Rachel Kaufman is a PhD Candidate in Latin American & Jewish History. Her poetic and historical work explore diasporic memory and the ways in which literary and historical works transmit the past, and her dissertation focuses on the Mexican Inquisition and cross-ethnic networks of female religious ritual in colonial New Spain.

Field of Study: Japan

Advisor(s): Katsuya Hirano (co-chair), Namhee Lee (co-chair), Kevin Y. Kim, Vinay Lal

Ju-Hyun Kim is a Ph.D. candidate whose research is about the twentieth-century postcolonial repatriation of Koreans, focusing on the case of Koreans in Sakhalin. Using both state and personal records, she explores the structures of (post-)colonial exclusion in order to address the questions of decolonization that were neglected in both Japan and South Korea during the Cold War. She is also currently a special research student at the Department of Area Studies, University of Tokyo.

Field of Study: United States

Advisor(s): Robin D. G. Kelley

Dana Kopel is a PhD student in History at UCLA. Her research focuses on US labor and working-class organizing in the twentieth century.

Field of Study: South and Southeast Asia

Advisor(s): Dr. Vinay Lal

• South Asian Vernacular Historiography
• Histories of colonial philology
• Histories of ethnicity

Field of Study: Latin America

Advisor(s): Robin Derby, Carla Pestana

Elizabeth’s research centers on the analysis of everyday life practices and the material realities that sustained marginalized communities throughout the broader Atlantic Caribbean during the early modern period.

Field of Study: Jewish

Brianna Lavelle is a PhD student in History at UCLA. Her research interests include Jewish migration in the early twentieth century to the United States and Palestine, histories of mental illness and suicide, and history of emotions.

Field of Study: Modern Europe

Advisor(s): H. Glenn Penny

I study nineteenth- and twentieth-century European and global history. Special focus on internationalism between the world wars and information flows between Europe and the world.

Field of Study: Africa

Advisor(s): Robin Kelley, Ghilaine Lydon, and Andrew Apter

Galo focuses on prisons and inmate experiences in twentieth century Kenya, with case studies in Latin America, the United States, and other countries in Africa.

Field of Study: Europe

Field of Study: Africa

Advisor(s): Dr. Robin D.G. Kelley (co-chair), Dr. Alden Young (co-chair), Dr. Andrew Apter, Dr. Hannah Appel, Dr. Saïdou Mohamed N'Daou

Chris Abdul Hakim Martinez is a Ph.D candidate specializing in the history decolonization, development, and economic sovereignty in 20th century West Africa.

Advanced to Candidacy

Field of Study: Latin America

Advisor(s): Kevin Terraciano, Teofilo Ruíz, Katherine Marino, Fernando Perez-Montesinos

Rebeca Martínez is a PhD Candidate specializing in the history of women in colonial Mexico. Her dissertation examines the relationship between women and bigamy from the 16th to the 18th century.

Current/Former HGSA Member

Advanced to Candidacy

Field of Study: Science, Medicine, and Technology

Advisor(s): Soraya de Chadarevian, Stephen Aron, Ted Porter, Elizabeth DeLoughrey

I am a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at UCLA. My research focuses on intersections between biology, medicine, race, and the environment during the US atomic project.

Current/Former HGSA Member

Advanced to Candidacy

Field of Study: Europe

Field of Study: United States

Advisor(s): Brenda Stevenson

Rebekka Michaelsen is a PhD candidate who studies the history of medical incarceration for mental disability in the United States in the early twentieth century.

Current/Former HGSA Member

Advanced to Candidacy 

Field of Study: Latin America

Advisor(s): Robin Derby

Field of Study: Europe

Advisor(s): Caroline Ford

Liam is a PhD student in History at UCLA. His research interests include the history of urban mobility, everyday life, and access to urban space in 19th-20th century France.

Field of Study: Latin America

Field of Study: Medieval

Advisor(s): Jessica Goldberg (Chair), Teo Ruiz, Sharon Gerstel (Art History), Luke Yarbrough (Near Eastern Languages and Cultures), Alexander Roberts (Classics, USC)

I study the legal history of the Kingdom of Sicily in the twelfth century and its connections to the Mediterranean world.

Current/Former HGSA Member

Advanced to Candidacy

Field of Study: Japan

Advisor(s): Katsuya Hirano

Field of Study: United States

Advisor(s): Dr. Michael Meranze

Field of Study: United States

Advisor(s): Dr. Katherine Marino

My research explores the reuse and repurposing of sartorial culture in the 18th-century British Atlantic.

Advanced to Candidacy

Field of Study: United States, Latin America

Advisor(s): Katherine Marino

Field of Study: Middle East

Advisor(s): Sebouh Aslanian (chair), Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Stefania Tutino, Tijana Krstić, James Gelvin

Daniel Ohanian is a PhD candidate in Ottoman and Armenian history.

Dissertation title: “Church of Armenia, Church of Rome: Faith, Print, and Power in Ottoman-Armenian History, 1688–1717”

Field of Study: South and Southeast Asia

Shubhanga works on modern South Asia, with interests in histories of communication, diplomatic and bureaucratic culture, manuscript traditions and textual practices in 18th- and 19th-century Nepal, the Himalaya, and the north Indian subcontinent.

Field of Study: Japan

Advisor(s): William Marotti

Jessica Peña is a History PhD student at UCLA. Her research focuses on feminist activism in post-war Japan, particularly during the U.S. Occupation of Japan 1945 – 1952.

Current/Former HGSA Member

Field of Study: South and Southeast Asia

Advisor(s): Dr. Nile Green

Spencer Pennington is a Ph.D candidate whose work focuses on the history of the different religious communities in British North India during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  His academic training is in both history and religious studies and, prior to becoming an academic, his professional background was in video game development.

Advanced to Candidacy

Field of Study: Latin America

Advisor(s): Kevin Terraciano

First-year student working on indigenous sources and social relations in colonial Mexico.

Field of Study: Europe

Advisor(s): Caroline Ford

Pin-Hua Chou is a History PhD student at UCLA. Her research focuses on the dynamics of ethnological knowledge and museum narratives between metropolitan France and Indochina, with a particular focus on Vietnam, spanning both the colonial and postcolonial periods.

Field of Study: United States

Advisor(s): Robin D. G. Kelley

Annie Powers is a scholar of landless people’s political movements in the United States. She studies the history of housing and homelessness – and poor people’s urban land struggle – in the US and the world. Annie is an organizer with Union de Vecinos, the Eastside Local of the Los Angeles Tenants Union.

Field of Study: Latin America

Advisor(s): Fernando Pérez Montesinos

Chris Ramírez is a first year PhD student specializing in the history of Indigenous Mexicans post Independence.

Field of Study: United States

Advisor(s): Carla Pestana (Chair), Brenda Stevenson, Michael Meranze, Stefania Tutino, Stuart Banner.

Arrannè (Uh-Ron-Aye) is a Ph.D. candidate whose research encompasses the histories of race, law, and religion in early America. His dissertation project,  tentatively titled “The Justice of Malicious Intent: Capital Punishment and the Architecture of Black Criminality in Early New England,” examines the trans-Atlantic debates over mens rea (criminal intent) and enslavement, which he argues generated the mythologized figure of the “Black criminal” in the colonial imagination.

Field of Study: Latin America

Field of Study: Medieval

Advisor(s): Jamie Kreiner

Ryan Saputo is a History PhD student at UCLA in the Medieval field studying the Roman Empire in Late Antiquity. His research focuses primarily upon civil wars, rebellion, and usurpation, with a particular emphasis on the construction of political legitimacy. Other research interests include political violence, numismatics, imperial propaganda, and the enigmatic source known as the Historia Augusta.

Field of Study: China

Advisor(s): Richard von Glahn

My research is focused on sea merchants, government officials, and diaspora communities in the history of maritime Asia from the eighth to twelfth centuries.

Field of Study: History of Science

Advisor(s): Elizabeth O'Brien

Field of Study: Latin America

Advisor(s): Kevin Terraciano (chair), Stella Nair, Efrain Kristal, Juan Ossio, Teo Ruiz

Lisl Schoepflin is a PhD candidate in the UCLA History Department. Her scholarly interests focus on indigenous and colonial ethnohistory and social memory practices in the Andes, with an emphasis on Inca and Spanish colonial oral and literary arts and material culture.

Advanced to Candidacy

Field of Study: South/Southeast Asia

Advisor(s): Vinay Lal

Field of Study: China

Advisor(s): Andrea S. Goldman (Chair), R. Bin Wong, Richard von Glahn, Kathryn Norberg, Helen Rees.

Yu’s research centers on the social and cultural history of late imperial and modern China, with a particular focus on the global media industry, folk performance, urban society, and gender studies.

Advanced to Candidacy

Field of Study: Jewish

Advisor(s): Sarah Abrevaya Stein, David Myers, Aomar Boum, James Gelvin

Rachel Smith is a PhD candidate whose dissertation explores the history and politics of Jewish ethnography in the Ottoman world.

Current/Former HGSA Member

Advanced to Candidacy

Field of Study: Latin America

Advisor(s): Kevin Terraciano (Chair), Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Stefania Tutino, Charlene Villaseñor Black

Chase is a historian of religious knowledge encounters between European missionaries and Nahua peoples in central Mexico. Using textual, visual, and material evidence, Chase explores why and how the production, circulation, and negotiation of knowledge in the religious sphere was a major concern in early colonial society between the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

Field of Study: History of Science, Medicine, and Technology

Advisor(s): Soraya de Chadarevian (chair); Alexandra Minna Stern, Elizabeth O'Brien, Robin D.G. Kelley, Carolin Görgen

Margaret (Meg) Spaulding studies the history of eugenics in California from roughly the 1860s until the 1940s, with a special focus on how landscape photography, geography, and the environment of California shaped eugenics in the state.

Research Interests Include: California, eugenics, visual culture, environment, race, disability.

Field of Study: China

Patrick studies the impact of novel international trade networks on local communities in the “Eastern Sea” circuit of Fujian, Taiwan, and the Philippines between the 16th and 19th centuries.

Field of Study: Japan

Current/Former HGSA Member

Advanced to Candidacy

Field of Study: Africa

Advisor(s): Ghislaine Lydon (Chair); Robin D.G. Kelley; Makhroufi Ousmane Traoré; Minayo Nasiali; Andrew Apter

I completed my PhD in May 2022, with a dissertation entitled “Seeking Freedom in the Sahel: Frontiers of Liberation and Geographies of Belonging in an Atlantic-Saharan Crossroads.”

Advanced to Candidacy

Field of Study: Europe

Advisor(s): Peter Stacey (chair), Stefania Tutino, Craig Yirush, Anthony Pagden

I study European intellectual history and political thought in the period ca. 1300-1800 and especially the Italian Renaissance.

Field of Study: Latin America

Advisor(s): Kevin Terraciano

Field of Study: United States

Advisor(s): Benjamin Madley

Field of Study: Science, Medicine, and Technology

Advisor(s): Soraya de Chadarevian

Claire Votava is a Ph.D. candidate in the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine at UCLA. Her research examines the afterlives of nineteenth-century Luddism as a framework for technoscientific critique, with a focus on the radical science movement in twentieth-century Britain and its challenges to the social and ethical dimensions of science.

Field of Study: China

At the intersection of environmental history, economic history, and the social history of technology, my research examines the everyday interactions of village women and men with water- and landscapes through hydraulic institutions, knowledge production, and a gendered labor regime between the sixteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Advanced to Candidacy

Field of Study: South and Southeast Asia

Advisor(s): Vinay Lal; Katherine Marino; Robin Derby; Sherene Razack; Rukmini Sen

Rebecca Waxman is a Ph.D. Candidate specializing in the history of gender and sexuality in modern India. Her dissertation examines discourses of sexualized violence in late colonial and postcolonial India.

Current/Former HGSA Member

Advanced to Candidacy

Field of Study: Jewish

Advisor(s): David Myers

Field of Study: Africa

Advisor(s): Dr. Hollian Wint-Frederick (Chair), Dr. Andrew Apter, Dr. Minayo Nasiali, Dr. Wendy Laura Belcher

Field of Study: Japan

Advisor(s): Katsuya Hirano

Field of Study: United States

William Wood’s research interests are in legal history, particularly California history and the jurisprudence around Native title in California.  He is an Associate Professor of Law at Southwestern Law School.

Field of Study: Middle East

Field of Study: Latin America

Advisor(s): Kevin Terraciano

Field of Study: South and Southeast Asia

Field of Study: China

Field of Study: China

Advisor(s): Andrea Goldman