Viewing entries tagged
History Department
UC Santa Barbara History graduate student Andrea Serna has been sponsored for her research by the American Councils for International Education’s Title VIII Combined Research and Language Training Program. Serna will use this fellowship to research her dissertation topic, exploring how new borders affected early Soviet republics. In this interview she explains what her plans are for the time that she will spend on the fellowship abroad.
Humanities and Fine Arts Dean Daina Berry and Film lecturer Wendy Jackson joined student moderator Maya Johnson for a panel discussion celebrating Black life in America. They discussed a variety of topics surrounding Black life both personally and within academia, in honor of Black History Month this February.
UCSB’s Department of Germanic and Slavic Studies recently hosted Andreas Bernard, a visiting professor from Leuphana University Luneberg, for a talk on the history of epidemics. He said past theories regarding infections and diseases established successive origin stories that have affected epidemiological narratives today.
UC Santa Barbara’s Carsey-Wolf Center hosted the filmmakers Valerio Ciriaci and Izaak Liptzin to discuss their film Stonebreakers. The speakers talked about the protests surrounding the Columbus monuments during the Black Lives Matter movement and finding new ways to memorialize history.
Writing Program lecturer Christian Thomas recently developed UCSB’s first interactive, choose-your-own-adventure game for an undergraduate writing course. The game responds to the player’s choices, and exposes students to Rome’s rich history of art and archaeology,
With a passion to protect the environment, Jian Hong Shi interned at the Environmental Defense Center, the only public-interest environmental law group from Los Angeles to San Francisco and a partner organization of the Sara Miller McCune Endowed Internship and Public Service Program housed within the Walter H. Capps Center. “In addition to writing updates for our monthly emails, I wrote an item in our biannual printed edition,” she said. “It was about our recent achievement securing a 100-foot buffer between the new Heritage Ridge development project and the Los Carneros Creek, which will protect sensitive wildlife habitat.“
London-based artist Wajid Yaseen said that cassette tapes give a rare glimpse into the lives and immigration experiences of Pothwari-speaking people, whose language has no written form. The lecture was hosted by UCSB’s Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Music, Ethnomusicology Forum, Library Special Collections, and Interdisciplinary Humanities Center.
UCSB’s honors history students Cole Grissom, Madeline Josa, and Raana Naghieh recently spoke about the impact of women on politics in settings ranging from Ancient Rome to Georgian England, at a colloquium hosted by the History department.
Throughout America, the inner workings of the First Amendment right to free speech are constantly being discussed., especially at UC Santa Barbara. To continue to discourse, KCSB held a panel with UCSB activists and professors to understand how free speech operates on campus, and how to respond to adversity.
UC Santa Barbara historian Salim Yaqub recently published his book on contemporary U.S. history, Winds of Hope, Storms of Discord: The United States since 1945. Yaqub aimed to provide a “fresh look” at modern America by documenting modern events as recent as the COVID-19 pandemic, Black Lives Matter protests, and Donald Trump’s presidency to help readers understand America’s past.
In 1951, Moris Sawda’i, an Iraqi Jew, left Baghdad for Israel and worked as an assistant editor on an Israeli film production team. In an unpublished memoir, he wrote, “I hoped to realize my dreams of becoming a great film director. However, at the end of this journey, the fact of working as a small contributor in a big cinema project left me depressed.” Sawda’i went from the top of the film business in his country of birth to starting over, said University of Oslo Middle East cultural historian Pelle Valentin Olsen at a recent UCSB event. The Sawda’i family pioneered the construction of cinemas and established the first Iraqi film studio in the 20th century.
Nasser Rabbat, director of the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, visited UC Santa Barbara’s Center for Middle East Studies to to speak about one of the most important Egyptian historians, Al-Maqrizi, a documentarian of the medieval Mamluk period who impacts Egyptian scholars and students still today.
Robert Weller, anthropology professor at Boston University, spoke to a UC Santa Barbara audience about how Taiwanese religious rituals use both noise and silence to mark transitions, establish rhythm, and create an emotional choreography.
Professor of Media & Communications and author Derek Vaillant, a visiting researcher for the Center for Information Technology and Society at UC Santa Barbara, explained the ways in which World War I expanded opportunities in radio. He said African Americans and women gained access to radio communication skills from the war effort.
UC Santa Barbara’s Art, Design & Architecture Museum celebrated 60 years of its Architecture and Design Collection with a talk from the exhibits curator Silvia Perea. Perea walked guests through a behind-the-scenes tour of some of the hundreds of archives, as well as introduced visitors to an eclectic exhibition, Genius Loci: Domesticity and Identity in Southern California which will be up until early May.
Professor Mario García recently retired after 47 years at UC Santa Barbara, having focused his research on Chicano history with an emphasis on civil rights, Chicano Catholic history, and the Chicano movement. In a recent interview, García discussed his legacy and his passion for Chicano studies.
As an Interdisciplinary Humanities Center Public Humanities Graduate Fellow, UC Santa Barbara religious studies doctoral student Shannon Toribio launched an Oral History Project with the Santa Barbara Trust for Historic Preservation. He works closely with librarian and archivist Dez Alaniz to analyze and store the collections that document the rich history of the Filipino American community at El Presidio Research Center in downtown Santa Barbara. In collecting oral histories as a part of the Trust’s Oral History Project, Toribio has encountered many diverse and enriching stories of migration and community-building.
History and Music student Conor Mack plays guitar for both the UCSB Jazz ensemble and the Isla Vista rock band “Marella.” Mack spoke about how he entered both musical spheres, and how his experience with Jazz helped him fit right in to the world of Rock.
Patrick Hunt, a Stanford University medieval studies scholar came to UC Santa Barbara last week to give a lecture on Hannibal, a military commander from the Second Punic War, and how his tactics are still used today in modern military intelligence. The lecture, “Hannibal’s Secret Weapon,” was co-sponsored by UCSB’s Department of Classics, Department of History and History of Art & Architecture.
Adrienne Edgar, a UC Santa Barbara Professor in history, held a talk about her book The Intermarriage and Friendship of People: Ethnic Mixing in Soviet Central Asia. The talk, sponsored by The Center for Cold War Studies and International History, focused on the historical background of the Soviet Union’s advocacy for intermarriage and the experience of the Soviet people, as well as the aftermath of scientific thinking coming to the forefront in the 1960s.
