Post-Doctoral Scholars

Aram Ghoogasian is a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of History at UCLA. He is a cultural historian of nineteenth-century West Asia specializing in the Ottoman Empire, the Caucasus, and Armenian studies. His book in progress is a history of Armenian print culture in the middle decades of the nineteenth century and deals with the history of the book, periodicals, language, literacy, and literature. It argues that printers, publishers, editors, authors, translators, scholars, teachers, and other members of the learned classes spurred the emergence of a culture of print from within an already existing tradition of printing by using and interpreting print technology in novel ways.

Aram’s work has appeared in Kritika, Middle Eastern Literatures, the Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association, Études arméniennes contemporaines, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. He received his PhD from Princeton University and holds an MA in Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Chicago and undergraduate degrees in History and English from UCLA.

Isidro González Granados is a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow in History at UCLA. He received his PhD from the University of California Santa Bárbara and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Claremont McKenna College. The question of how disabled people were/are made guides his research. Specifically, he explores histories and legacies of eugenic practices, methods, and data in the 20th-century U.S. Southwest. González Granados is working on two book projects. Eugenic Spectrums: Gendered Science, Racial Defects, and the Making of Disability in the U.S. Southwest from Progressive Reform to the Second World War argues that part of the success of eugenics rested on the ability of white female sociomedical workers who created a space in which they could strategically assert their positionality as female scientists—as demanded by the heteropatriarchal state—through the execution of their jobs as ungendered objective data collectors. His other project, Disordered: Race, Disability, and Sociobiological Interventions in Cold War California, delves into the history of behavioral interventions and how Latinx and other racialized people experienced them in the post-World War II era in southern California.

In support of his research, González Granados received the Andrew Vincent White and Florence Wales White Scholarship in the Medical Humanities from the University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI) for a project that showed how intimate dialogue between observer and observed demonstrated ways in which bedside manner, cultural insensitivity, and an ideology that some minds are worth more than others led to long lives of confinement, surveillance, and sexual sterilization for patients/inmates or, for eugenic professionals, to successful, generative, and long careers in the sciences. González Granados’s work has appeared in Southern California Quarterly, Sage Research Methods: Diversifying and Decolonizing Research, and Pacific Historical Review.

Beatriz Cruz López is a UC Alianza MX Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History at UCLA. Her dissertation, “From Ancient Quèhui to Colonial Yòholàhui. Zapotec Sociopolitical and Territorial Reorganization in the Valley of Oaxaca, Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries,” studies how the Zapotec traditional dynastic rulership was replaced by the cabildo, the Spanish-style municipal council, as symbolized by the change of the quèhui or traditional palace by the yòholàhui or community house. Using Spanish-, Nahuatl-, and Zapotec-language sources, as well as pictorials, it explores how colonialism, ethnic conflicts, and class conflicts shaped the transition from Zapotec lordships to colonial pueblos, and how they self-governed and managed their territories and other resources.

Beatriz is a first-generation Zapotec scholar interested in how Zapotecs and other indigenous nations in the Americas not only survived colonialism but also built societies in which communal practices are pretty much alive. She received her Ph.D. in History from UCLA and holds an MA in Mesoamerican Studies from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and a BA in Ethnohistory from the National School of Anthropology and History (ENAH) in Mexico. Her first book, Pueblos en movimiento. Conflicto y poder en el Valle de Tlacolula durante la época colonial, was published by El Colegio de Michoacán. Other works have appeared in Tlalocan, Ichan Tecolotol, and Americanía.