Graduate Students
Field of Study: Middle East
Contact Information
Email: martin.c.adamian@gmail.com
Field of Study: Middle East
Advisor(s): James Gelvin, Sarah Stein, Sebouh Aslanian, Christine Philliou, Kent Schull
Kaleb Herman Adney is a PhD candidate whose dissertation research revolves around the political economy of late Ottoman Macedonia and Thrace and the tobacco industry in particular.
Advanced to Candidacy
Contact Information
Email: kalebherman@g.ucla.edu
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”.
Contact Information
Email: aliceashiwa@gmail.com
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.
Contact Information
Email: cbellwilson@g.ucla.edu
Field of Study: Jewish
Advisor(s): Sarah Abrevaya Stein, Aomar Boum, David Myers
Natalie is a PhD student in History at UCLA, where she works on modern Jewish history. Natalie is primarily interested in the culture, politics, and languages of North African Jewish communities.
Contact Information
Email: nbernstien@g.ucla.edu
Field of Study: Latin America
Contact Information
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.
Contact Information
Email: busem@g.ucla.edu
Field of Study: Latin America
Advisor(s): Robin Derby, Fernando Perez-Montesinos, & Katherine Marino
I am currently a PhD candidate with a focus on modern Central American history.
Advanced to Candidacy
Contact Information
Email: jennifer.carcamo@ucla.edu
Field of Study: Ancient
Contact Information
Email: moc3114@ucla.edu
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
Contact Information
Email: jeanettecharles@g.ucla.edu
Field of Study: History of Science, Medicine, and Technology
Advisor(s): Soraya de Chadarevian
Contact Information
Email: sunnychen@ucla.edu
Field of Study: China
Contact Information
Email: zchen0505@g.ucla.edu
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.
Contact Information
Email: aadarshchunkath@gmail.com
Field of Study: Middle East
Advisor(s): James Gelvin
Deniz Citak is a first year PhD student focusing on the late Ottoman Empire and Qajar Iran. His other research interests include the politics, diplomacy, and culture of modern Turkey, Iran, the Levant, and the Gulf.
Contact Information
Email: dcitak@ucla.edu
Field of Study: Latin America
Contact Information
Email: beatrizcruzl@ucla.edu
Field of Study: United States
My research centers around the labor history of California’s prison system. From prison guards to convict labor to free workers, my work focuses on the various ways in which people’s working lives shaped and were shaped by the trajectory of the various carceral booms that have taken place in California.
Contact Information
Email: mikefzdean@ucla.edu
Office: 2155 Bunche Hall
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.
Contact Information
Email: kayneadoughty@g.ucla.edu
Field of Study: United States
My research is focused on American feminist activism from a transnational perspective in the 1960s and 1970s.
Contact Information
Email: thaliaertman@g.ucla.edu
Contact Information
Email: bfleisch@ucla.edu
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.
Contact Information
Email: dfonseca@g.ucla.edu
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
Contact Information
Email: madona_aoun@hotmail.com
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
Contact Information
Email: jacobogreen@gmail.com
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.
Contact Information
Email: carsongreene17@g.ucla.edu
Field of Study: Latin America
Advisor(s): Dr. Katherine Marino and Dr. Fernando Pérez-Montesinos
Contact Information
Email: sgreenmanspear@ucla.edu
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
Contact Information
Email: pranavgulukota6@g.ucla.edu
Field of Study: Africa
Advisor(s): Hollian Wint
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.
Contact Information
Email: brittongus@g.ucla.edu
Field of Study: China
Advisor(s): Chair: Richard von Glahn, Committee members: R. Bin Wong, Sixiang Wang, David M. Robinson
My project explores the introduction of a new method of military mobilization to China by the Mongol-Yuan, its subsequent adoption by the succeeding Ming dynasty, and the long-term consequences of this adoption.
Advanced to Candidacy
Contact Information
Email: ymingha@ucla.edu
Field of Study: Middle East
Current/Former HGSA Member
Contact Information
Email: safahamzeh@ucla.edu
Field of Study: China
Contact Information
Email: haoxiaowen@g.ucla.edu
Field of Study: South and Southeast Asia
Advisor(s): Vinay Lal
Contact Information
Field of Study: Africa
Contact Information
Field of Study: Latin America
Advisor(s): Dr. Katherine Marino and Dr. Fernando Pérez-Montesinos
Vivian is a History PhD student at UCLA, where she studies modern Latin American women’s and gender history.
Current/Former HGSA Member
Contact Information
Email: vvhernandez@ucla.edu
Field of Study: Middle East
Advisor(s): James Gelvin, Aomar Boum, Kevin Y. Kim, Aslı Balı
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.
Contact Information
Email: hindy@g.ucla.edu
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
Contact Information
Email: phoffman1@g.ucla.edu
Field of Study: Japan
Contact Information
Email: hqqrory@gmail.com
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.
Contact Information
Email: mhudalla@ucla.edu
Field of Study: Middle East
My research interests include histories of modern Egypt, Pan-Africanism, Afro-Arab anticolonial solidarities, and Third World internationalism.
Contact Information
Email: shussein@g.ucla.edu
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
Contact Information
Email: richardibarraucla@gmail.com
Field of Study: Middle East
Erdem Ilter specializes in the late Ottoman Empire and Early Turkish Republic history.
Contact Information
Email: erdemilter@g.ucla.edu
Field of Study: United States
Contact Information
Email: majenrich@gmail.com
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.
Contact Information
Email: rachelkaufman@g.ucla.edu
Field of Study: Japan
Advisor(s): Katsuya Hirano
Ju-Hyun Kim is a Ph.D. student at the Department of History. Her research focuses on the social and cultural history of postcolonial migration of Koreans in the form of repatriation throughout the second half of the twentieth century.
Contact Information
Email: juhyunkim@ucla.edu
Field of Study: United States
Advisor(s): Robin D.G. Kelley (Chair), Peter James Hudson, Toby Higbie, Ananya Roy
Andrew is a Ph.D. candidate researching the intertwined histories of urban development, U.S. empire, and social movements in California.
Advanced to Candidacy
Contact Information
Email: ancklein@ucla.edu
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.
Contact Information
Email: dkopel@ucla.edu
Field of Study: South and Southeast Asia
Advisor(s): Dr. Vinay Lal
- South Asian Vernacular Historiography
- Histories of colonial philology
- Histories of ethnicity
Contact Information
Email: vipin@g.ucla.edu
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.
Contact Information
Email: eml@ucla.edu
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.
Contact Information
Email: briannalavelle@ucla.edu
Field of Study: Modern Europe
Advisor(s): H. Glenn Penny
Contact Information
Email: alexmaxlevine@g.ucla.edu
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.
Contact Information
Email: galolopez123@ucla.edu
Field of Study: Europe
Contact Information
Field of Study: Africa
Advisor(s): Robin D.G. Kelley, Alden Young (African American Studies), Andrew Apter
My research interests focus on the history and political economy of decolonization, development, and extractive industries in 20th century West Africa.
Contact Information
Email: chriscmartinez@g.ucla.edu
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
Contact Information
Email: rmartnz165@g.ucla.edu
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
Contact Information
Email: jmcguffi@ucla.edu
Field of Study: Europe
Contact Information
Email: ethanmefford@gmail.com
Field of Study: Europe
Advisor(s): Peter Stacey (chair), Andrea Moudarres, Anthony Pagden, Stefania Tutino
I study the intellectual history of early modern Europe and the wider history of European political thought.
Advanced to Candidacy
Contact Information
Email: smessarra@ucla.edu
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
Contact Information
Email: rmichaelsen@g.ucla.edu
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.
Contact Information
Email: liammoore28@g.ucla.edu
Field of Study: Latin America
Contact Information
Email: juanpablomg7@gmail.com
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
Contact Information
Email: patmorgan@g.ucla.edu
Contact Information
Field of Study: Japan
Advisor(s): Katsuya Hirano
Contact Information
Email: chul0376@ucla.edu
Field of Study: United States
Advisor(s): Dr. Michael Meranze
Contact Information
Email: crnull@g.ucla.edu
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
Contact Information
Email: marinanye@gmail.com
Field of Study: Middle East
Advisor(s): Sebouh Aslanian (chair), Stefania Tutino, James Gelvin, Tijana Krstić, Sanjay Subrahmanyam
Daniel Ohanian is a PhD candidate specializing in early modern and modern Ottoman-Armenian history.
Dissertation title: “Church of Armenia, Church of Rome: Faith, Print, and Power in Ottoman-Armenian History, 1688–1717”
Contact Information
Email: dohanian@ucla.edu
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.
Contact Information
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
Contact Information
Email: jdpena89@g.ucla.edu
Field of Study: Europe
Advisor(s): Caroline Ford
Pin-Hua Chou is a History PhD student at UCLA. Her research focuses on decolonization of French ethnographic museums from mid-20th century to the present.
Contact Information
Email: phchou42@ucla.edu
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.
Contact Information
Email: anniepowers@ucla.edu
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.
Contact Information
Email: chrisramirez218@ucla.edu
Field of Study: United States
Advisor(s): Carla Pestana
Arranne is a third-year Ph.D. student whose research encompasses the intersection of race and religion in early America.
Contact Information
Email: arrannerispoli@ucla.edu
Field of Study: Latin America
Contact Information
Email: rjrodriguez@ucla.edu
Field of Study: Ancient
Advisor(s): Greg Woolf
Contact Information
Email: ryansaputo@g.ucla.edu
Field of Study: China
Advisor(s): Richard von Glahn
My research is focused on the history of sea merchants in East Asia from the ninth to thirteenth centuries.
Contact Information
Email: gsattler@ucla.edu
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
Contact Information
Email: lisls@g.ucla.edu
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
Contact Information
Email: shiy@g.ucla.edu
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
Contact Information
Email: rachel.smith@ucla.edu
Field of Study: Latin America
Advisor(s): Kevin Terraciano, 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 making, breaking, and debating of “sacred matter” was a major concern in the construction and negotiation of colonial society between the early sixteenth and late seventeenth centuries.
Contact Information
Email: chasesmith@ucla.edu
Office: Bunche Hall 2113
Phone: 14752580051
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.
Contact Information
Email: megspaulding@ucla.edu
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.
Contact Information
Email: patrick.f.stein@gmail.com
Field of Study: Japan
Current/Former HGSA Member
Advanced to Candidacy
Contact Information
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
Contact Information
Email: mthiam@ucla.edu
Field of Study: Europe
Advisor(s): Peter Stacey
I study chiefly European intellectual history in those centuries we have learned to call “early modern” (ca. 1300-1800) with a cardinal emphasis on the history of political thought.
Contact Information
Email: prthomas@ucla.edu
Field of Study: Science, Medicine, and Technology
Advisor(s): Soraya de Chadarevian
Claire Votava is a Ph.D. student in the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine. She studies resistance to scientific and technological development in the 19th and 20th centuries, the long history of Luddism, and the making of global capitalism.
Contact Information
Email: votavac@ucla.edu
Office: Bunche 2155
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
Contact Information
Email: wangyou@ucla.edu
Field of Study: South and Southeast Asia
Advisor(s): Vinay Lal; Katherine Marino; Robin Derby; Sherene Razack
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
Contact Information
Email: rwaxman@g.ucla.edu
Field of Study: Jewish
Advisor(s): David Myers, Sarah Abrevaya Stein
Avery Weinman focuses on modern Jewish history, the history of the modern Middle East, Israel-Palestine, and radicalism.
Contact Information
Email: averyweinman@ucla.edu
Field of Study: Africa
Advisor(s): Ghislaine Lydon
Contact Information
Email: whiskeycristi@g.ucla.edu
Field of Study: Japan
Advisor(s): Katsuya Hirano
Contact Information
Email: nhwimpey@ucla.edu
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.
Contact Information
Field of Study: Middle East
Contact Information
Field of Study: United States
Advisor(s): Robin D.G. Kelley (Committee Chair), Eric Avila, Shana L. Redmond, George Lipsitz
Masayoshi Yamada is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at UCLA, specializing in the cultural history of the United States.
Advanced to Candidacy
Contact Information
Email: masayoshi1028@ucla.edu
Field of Study: Latin America
Advisor(s): Kevin Terraciano
Contact Information
Email: sofiayazpik@g.ucla.edu
Field of Study: South and Southeast Asia
Contact Information
Email: aishazaman@ucla.edu
Field of Study: China
Contact Information
Email: mzhang54@ucla.edu
Field of Study: Middle East
Kaleb Herman Adney is a PhD candidate whose dissertation research revolves around the political economy of late Ottoman Macedonia and Thrace and the tobacco industry in particular.
Advanced to Candidacy
Contact Information
Email: kalebherman@g.ucla.edu
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”.
Contact Information
Email: aliceashiwa@gmail.com
Field of Study: History of Science, Medicine, and Technology
Chloe Bell-Wilson is a PhD candidate who studies the history of synthetic estrogen in the United States.
Contact Information
Email: cbellwilson@g.ucla.edu
Field of Study: Jewish
Natalie is a PhD student in History at UCLA, where she works on modern Jewish history. Natalie is primarily interested in the culture, politics, and languages of North African Jewish communities.
Contact Information
Email: nbernstien@g.ucla.edu
Field of Study: Latin America
Contact Information
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.
Contact Information
Email: busem@g.ucla.edu
Field of Study: Latin America
I am currently a PhD candidate with a focus on modern Central American history.
Advanced to Candidacy
Contact Information
Email: jennifer.carcamo@ucla.edu
Field of Study: Latin America, Caribbean, Afro-Atlantic
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
Contact Information
Email: jeanettecharles@g.ucla.edu
Field of Study: History of Science, Medicine, and Technology
Contact Information
Email: sunnychen@ucla.edu
Field of Study: South and Southeast Asia
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.
Contact Information
Email: aadarshchunkath@gmail.com
Field of Study: Middle East
Deniz Citak is a first year PhD student focusing on the late Ottoman Empire and Qajar Iran. His other research interests include the politics, diplomacy, and culture of modern Turkey, Iran, the Levant, and the Gulf.
Contact Information
Email: dcitak@ucla.edu
Field of Study: United States
My research centers around the labor history of California’s prison system. From prison guards to convict labor to free workers, my work focuses on the various ways in which people’s working lives shaped and were shaped by the trajectory of the various carceral booms that have taken place in California.
Contact Information
Email: mikefzdean@ucla.edu
Office: 2155 Bunche Hall
Field of Study: United States
Kayne is a PhD student in the History Department at UCLA researching 20th century urban California.
Contact Information
Email: kayneadoughty@g.ucla.edu
Field of Study: United States
My research is focused on American feminist activism from a transnational perspective in the 1960s and 1970s.
Contact Information
Email: thaliaertman@g.ucla.edu
Contact Information
Email: bfleisch@ucla.edu
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.
Contact Information
Email: dfonseca@g.ucla.edu
Field of Study: Middle East
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
Contact Information
Email: madona_aoun@hotmail.com
Field of Study: Science, Medicine, and Technology
Jacob is a historian of science and medicine, and the United States.
Current/Former HGSA Member
Advanced to Candidacy
Contact Information
Email: jacobogreen@gmail.com
Field of Study: Ancient
Carson is a History PhD student at UCLA, where he studies the Roman empire in Late Antiquity.
Contact Information
Email: carsongreene17@g.ucla.edu
Field of Study: South and Southeast Asia
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
Contact Information
Email: pranavgulukota6@g.ucla.edu
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.
Contact Information
Email: brittongus@g.ucla.edu
Field of Study: China
My project explores the introduction of a new method of military mobilization to China by the Mongol-Yuan, its subsequent adoption by the succeeding Ming dynasty, and the long-term consequences of this adoption.
Advanced to Candidacy
Contact Information
Email: ymingha@ucla.edu
Field of Study: Middle East
Current/Former HGSA Member
Contact Information
Email: safahamzeh@ucla.edu
Field of Study: South and Southeast Asia
Contact Information
Field of Study: Africa
Contact Information
Field of Study: Latin America
Vivian is a History PhD student at UCLA, where she studies modern Latin American women’s and gender history.
Current/Former HGSA Member
Contact Information
Email: vvhernandez@ucla.edu
Field of Study: Middle East
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.
Contact Information
Email: hindy@g.ucla.edu
Field of Study: Middle East
Philip Hoffman is a third-year PhD student, researching the framing of land reform in twentieth-century Syria.
Current/Former HGSA Member
Contact Information
Email: phoffman1@g.ucla.edu
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.
Contact Information
Email: mhudalla@ucla.edu
Field of Study: Middle East
My research interests include histories of modern Egypt, Pan-Africanism, Afro-Arab anticolonial solidarities, and Third World internationalism.
Contact Information
Email: shussein@g.ucla.edu
Field of Study: Medieval
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
Contact Information
Email: richardibarraucla@gmail.com
Field of Study: Middle East
Erdem Ilter specializes in the late Ottoman Empire and Early Turkish Republic history.
Contact Information
Email: erdemilter@g.ucla.edu
Field of Study: Jewish, Latin America
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.
Contact Information
Email: rachelkaufman@g.ucla.edu
Field of Study: Japan
Ju-Hyun Kim is a Ph.D. student at the Department of History. Her research focuses on the social and cultural history of postcolonial migration of Koreans in the form of repatriation throughout the second half of the twentieth century.
Contact Information
Email: juhyunkim@ucla.edu
Field of Study: United States
Andrew is a Ph.D. candidate researching the intertwined histories of urban development, U.S. empire, and social movements in California.
Advanced to Candidacy
Contact Information
Email: ancklein@ucla.edu
Field of Study: United States
Dana Kopel is a PhD student in History at UCLA. Her research focuses on US labor and working-class organizing in the twentieth century.
Contact Information
Email: dkopel@ucla.edu
Field of Study: South and Southeast Asia
- South Asian Vernacular Historiography
- Histories of colonial philology
- Histories of ethnicity
Contact Information
Email: vipin@g.ucla.edu
Field of Study: Latin America
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.
Contact Information
Email: eml@ucla.edu
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.
Contact Information
Email: briannalavelle@ucla.edu
Field of Study: Africa
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.
Contact Information
Email: galolopez123@ucla.edu
Field of Study: Europe
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Field of Study: Africa
My research interests focus on the history and political economy of decolonization, development, and extractive industries in 20th century West Africa.
Contact Information
Email: chriscmartinez@g.ucla.edu
Field of Study: Latin America
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
Contact Information
Email: rmartnz165@g.ucla.edu
Field of Study: Science, Medicine, and Technology
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
Contact Information
Email: jmcguffi@ucla.edu
Field of Study: Europe
I study the intellectual history of early modern Europe and the wider history of European political thought.
Advanced to Candidacy
Contact Information
Email: smessarra@ucla.edu
Field of Study: United States
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
Contact Information
Email: rmichaelsen@g.ucla.edu
Field of Study: Europe
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.
Contact Information
Email: liammoore28@g.ucla.edu
Field of Study: Medieval
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
Contact Information
Email: patmorgan@g.ucla.edu
Contact Information
Field of Study: United States
My research explores the reuse and repurposing of sartorial culture in the 18th-century British Atlantic.
Advanced to Candidacy
Contact Information
Email: marinanye@gmail.com
Field of Study: Middle East
Daniel Ohanian is a PhD candidate specializing in early modern and modern Ottoman-Armenian history.
Dissertation title: “Church of Armenia, Church of Rome: Faith, Print, and Power in Ottoman-Armenian History, 1688–1717”
Contact Information
Email: dohanian@ucla.edu
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.
Contact Information
Field of Study: Japan
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
Contact Information
Email: jdpena89@g.ucla.edu
Field of Study: Europe
Pin-Hua Chou is a History PhD student at UCLA. Her research focuses on decolonization of French ethnographic museums from mid-20th century to the present.
Contact Information
Email: phchou42@ucla.edu
Field of Study: United States
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.
Contact Information
Email: anniepowers@ucla.edu
Field of Study: Latin America
Chris Ramírez is a first year PhD student specializing in the history of Indigenous Mexicans post Independence.
Contact Information
Email: chrisramirez218@ucla.edu
Field of Study: United States
Arranne is a third-year Ph.D. student whose research encompasses the intersection of race and religion in early America.
Contact Information
Email: arrannerispoli@ucla.edu
Field of Study: China
My research is focused on the history of sea merchants in East Asia from the ninth to thirteenth centuries.
Contact Information
Email: gsattler@ucla.edu
Field of Study: Latin America
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
Contact Information
Email: lisls@g.ucla.edu
Field of Study: China
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
Contact Information
Email: shiy@g.ucla.edu
Field of Study: Jewish
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
Contact Information
Email: rachel.smith@ucla.edu
Field of Study: Latin America
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 making, breaking, and debating of “sacred matter” was a major concern in the construction and negotiation of colonial society between the early sixteenth and late seventeenth centuries.
Contact Information
Email: chasesmith@ucla.edu
Office: Bunche Hall 2113
Phone: 14752580051
Field of Study: History of Science, Medicine, and Technology
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.
Contact Information
Email: megspaulding@ucla.edu
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.
Contact Information
Email: patrick.f.stein@gmail.com
Field of Study: Japan
Current/Former HGSA Member
Advanced to Candidacy
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Field of Study: Africa
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
Contact Information
Email: mthiam@ucla.edu
Field of Study: Europe
I study chiefly European intellectual history in those centuries we have learned to call “early modern” (ca. 1300-1800) with a cardinal emphasis on the history of political thought.
Contact Information
Email: prthomas@ucla.edu
Field of Study: Science, Medicine, and Technology
Claire Votava is a Ph.D. student in the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine. She studies resistance to scientific and technological development in the 19th and 20th centuries, the long history of Luddism, and the making of global capitalism.
Contact Information
Email: votavac@ucla.edu
Office: Bunche 2155
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
Contact Information
Email: wangyou@ucla.edu
Field of Study: South and Southeast Asia
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
Contact Information
Email: rwaxman@g.ucla.edu
Field of Study: Jewish
Avery Weinman focuses on modern Jewish history, the history of the modern Middle East, Israel-Palestine, and radicalism.
Contact Information
Email: averyweinman@ucla.edu
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.
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Field of Study: Middle East
Contact Information
Field of Study: United States
Masayoshi Yamada is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at UCLA, specializing in the cultural history of the United States.
Advanced to Candidacy
Contact Information
Email: masayoshi1028@ucla.edu