-
Grace A. Ballor
Dissertation Overview: With the rise of American and Asian firms in the 1960s and 1970s, fueled by technological revolutions, deregulation and financialization, European companies in comparison found themselves increasingly relegated to the margins of the globalizing economy. In response and with confidence inspired by the early steps toward integration, many European firms regionalized, expanding beyond their domestic markets and into a larger regional market. In addition to the development of these regional supply and value chains, European multinational firms also appealed for further integration by means of organized interest groups, service as policy consultants, regional industry associations and interpersonal networks between firm executives and politicians in Brussels. By the mid 1980s, these efforts helped to re-launch the stalled integration process with the Single Europe Act, and by 1992 the Internal Market was complete. By conducting case studies of firms from three primary economic sectors and situating them within the broader history of European integration, this dissertation project examines European multinational firms as agents of integration. This dissertation project is part of a larger research agenda on the economic history of modern Europe, centered around themes of political economy, capitalism, and the relationships between society and economy.
Subfield: Modern Europe Economic History European Union Political Economy Capitalism Globalization Business History
-
Chris Bingley
My primary research interests concern ethnicity, gender, and notions of empire during the High Roman Empire through the early period of Late Antiquity. My dissertation investigates the works of the third-century sophist Philostratus and the how they react to contemporary cultural change by especially focusing on the nature of foreign ethnicity in an imperial context. Philostratus overall portrays foreign identity as disruptively ambiguous and often localized in the Near East, sentiments directly and indirectly tied to the Severan regime.
Subfield: Late Antiquity, Roman History, Greek History
-
Scottie Buehler CPM
Scottie Hale Buehler is a midwife turned historian of medicine. After earning her BA in Sociology and Women and Gender Studies from the University of Texas at Austin (2006), she became a Certified Professional Midwife and founded and operated Motherwit Midwifery, a homebirth midwifery practice in Austin, Texas. Scottie researches the history of midwifery, obstetrics, and gynecology from 1500-1800 in France and England. Her dissertation employs practice and object-oriented methodologies to the study of midwifery training programs in the second half of eighteenth-century France. Complicating traditional narratives of male usurpation of the female domain of midwifery, Scottie explores gendered professional demarcation practices around and within these courses. Rather than attempting to eliminate midwifery as previous historical narratives have suggested, these courses represented an effort to regulate and control the practice.
Subfield: History of Science and Medicine; women in medicine; medicine and gender; history of surgery; objects/material culture; history of the book; history of anatomy and the body; French History; social history
-
Xiang Chi
Sovereignty, War, and Natural Resource: Northeast China’s Economic Development (1901-1931) My dissertation project aims at offering a comparative analysis of the emergences, practices and values of state rationality in terms of the capacity to exert control over timber resources in Northeast China between the Japanese and Chinese forestry regime-making in the early 20th century, focusing on the state planning, the government-firm relation, Korean migration, and the forest species hierarchy change in Fengtian and Jilin provinces during 1901-1937. The interplay between Japanese merchants, Chinese huozhan leaders, and Korean migration showed the multi-layered sovereignty conceptions. The involvement of the Mitsui timber firms changed the hierarchy of the forest species and contributed to the efficiency growth in the 1930s that the PRC government inherited.
Subfield: Modern Chinese History; Environmental History, Economic History, Social History of Forests, History of Manchuria, History of Japanese Imperialism
-
Iris I. Clever
My research focuses on the history of anthropometry from 1880-1960. In my dissertation, I discuss how anthropometry transformed from being the primary technique in physical anthropology to becoming an important method in post-war health and nutrition studies. Specifically, I follow the caliper, one of the most important instruments in anthropometry, and trace its development from measuring skulls to estimating subcuteanous fat. Other chapters focus on the various standardization efforts in the 19th and 20th century, the introduction of biometric approaches in physical anthropology, and the re-use of anthropometric data on skulls and bodies in present-day economic history. This dissertation brings together a transnational group of scholars whose work relied heavily on data practices and who were central to the development of physical anthropology (UK/US/Germany). Moreover, it traces the history of a single anthropological instrument: the caliper. The caliper not only connects the encounters during which measurements were taken with the production of data, it also allows me to trace the use of anthropometric methods after World War II: where the caliper mostly measured skulls and heads before the war, the instrument transformed into a skinfold device in the 1950s to meet the research efforts of health studies.
Subfield: History of Science and Medicine
-
Elizabeth Comuzzi
Elizabeth Comuzzi is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of History at UCLA. She is interested in the economic and social history of the late medieval Mediterranean (c. 1000-1450), with a particular focus on medieval Catalonia during the 13th and 14th centuries. Her dissertation research explores the economy and economic connections of the Pyrenean town of Puigcerdà and its surrounding region between 1260 and 1360. This research contributes to broader discussions on the nature of economic change around the year 1300, the rise of the Catalan Cloth industry and the extent of regional economic interconnection in the late medieval Mediterranean.
Subfield: Medieval European History
-
Michael Dean
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. I seek to uncover stories that explain how and why California embarked on the largest prison expansion project in history, what the social and human consequences of that development have been, and also the myriad alternatives that have been imagined, possibilities foreclosed, and paths not taken.
Subfield: Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century United States History; Labor History; Social History; Carceral Studies
-
Arnon Degani
Currently I am interested in how the mechanisms of the Israeli state prior to 1967 contributed to the incorporation of the Palestinian-Arab citizens of Israel into the Israeli body politic. Methodologically, I have a bias towards extensive archival research of the Israeli civic and military bureaucracy which contain many small instances where the system was challenged by individual people and unforeseen circumstances. These vignettes reveal the daily struggles the Palestinian-Arab citizens faced but also shed light on the inner logic of Zionism. Analytically, my research utilizes a particular reading of the theoretical literature of settler colonial studies which takes note of the historical tendency of settler colonial societies to enact inclusive political frameworks with remnants of the indigenous population.
Subfield: Colonialism; Settler-Colonialism; Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
-
Daniel Franken
I use anthropometric evidence on human stature to track the secular trend in material well-being of the Brazilian population from 1830 to 1960. During that interim, the Brazilian economy and polity underwent profound structural transitions. The extant data on living standards has prevented scholars from understanding the consequences of export-led growth and industrialization. My preliminary data culled from military records?a previously untapped source?display significant improvement in physical stature beginning in the 1880s, when modernization and industrialization began. I hypothesize that the confluence of real income growth, improved education, health, and sanitation account for the upswing in the standard of living.
Subfield: Latin America, economic history, Brazil
-
Nicole Dannielle Gilhuis
I am currently completing a Phd in African and Latin American Fields of the UCLA History Department, concentrating on Atlantic History. My dissertation “Atlantic Made: The French in Mi’kmaq Kinship, Daily Practice, and Family, 1680-1803” is being written under the direction of co-chairs Carla Pestana and Robin Derby. My dissertation focuses on the daily practice and cultural exchange of the Mi’kmaq on the Eastern Coast of Acadie and the group of European-descended people incorporated into the Mi’kmaq community and culture in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By following the Guédry and Mius families I analyze how these families became intertwined with and were formed by the Mi’kmaq community. Although these families have been treated as members of the Acadian community, this work shows how they adopted Mi’kmaq fishing, hunting, marrying and celebratory practices. Using an interdisciplinary approach and a range of sources—including census records, colonial maps, court records, travel records, archaeological surveys, and fishing equipment--this project follows these families as they integrated into Mi’kmaq kinship networks in the late seventeenth century, were forced to relocate to Ile Royale in the 1740s and faced deportation to Louisiana in the 1750s.
Subfield: Atlantic World, Early Modern World History, Indigenous History, Cultural History, Borderlands History, Entangled History, Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, and Colonial Empires.
-
Caroline Harris
My dissertation seeks to uncover the meaning of interracial worship at the Azusa Street Revival and its subsequent fading from Pentecostal practice by the second decade of the twentieth century. Charting the migrations of the revival's participants, from the Midwest and South to Los Angeles beginning in the 1880s, I argue that an understanding of the racial landscapes of Los Angeles, as well as currents of religious thought from earlier revival moments in American history, will aid our understanding of Pentecostalism?s nascent growth in Southern California. The imagined meanings of religion and race worked in tandem to not just foster the development of early Pentecostalism, but also cut short its socially transgressive practices.
Subfield: American West, African American History, History of Religion
-
Richard Ibarra
My broad research interests include lay medieval and early modern religion and its manifestations in urban and rural settings as well as diaspora and immigrant merchant groups and the social and cultural role they played in their adoptive communities. I am particularly interested in the naturalization, self-representation, and integration of Italian merchants (Genoese, Florentine, Milanese, etc.) in fifteenth and sixteenth century Castile, especially in the public, commercial, and religious life of Seville and Andalucia more broadly.
Subfield: Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Spain and Italy)
-
Naveen Kanalu Ramamurthy
My dissertation research examines the nature and structure of Islamicate sovereignty in the seventeenth-century Mughal Empire in South Asia. I develop an historical narrative to question the dominance of so-called Hanafi "legalism" in imperial politics. I address this problematic through a philological study of the imperial compilation of Hanafi rules, Al-fatawa al-‘alamkiriyya or “The Institutions of the World Conqueror” made in the 1660s as well as less-known Hanafi texts in Arabic and Persian from the seventeenth century. Questioning the prevalent historiographical position, which attributes Hanafi legalism to the Mughal Sultan, Aurangzeb 'Alamgir’s (r. 1658–1707) “Islamic orthodoxy” and "conservative religious policies", my research focuses instead on the doctrines of Sunni juridical authorities, networks, and institutions in the recomposition of the of Sultanate as a political institution. The elaboration of Islamic law transformed the Mughal polity from a more flexible Turco-Persian entity it inherited from the Delhi Sultanate into a regionalized empire under greater normative diversity. Examining a large corpus of Persian and Arabic jurisprudential and political texts and commentaries, which have been understudied, my dissertation seeks to demonstrate how the Mughal polity increasingly constituted itself as a “body-politic” in Islamic jurisprudential terms. In my research, I critically reassess the status and characteristics of early modern Islamic law, the posterity of Aurangzeb Alamgir’s compilation, and other Mughal jurisprudential treatises as they formed the basis for colonial modes of governance of Muslim communities before what came to be known as “Anglo-Mohammedan” civil law in late nineteenth-century British India.
Subfield: Early Modern South AsiaSeventeenth-century Mughal EmpirePremodern Islamicate CultureLegal and Political ThoughtCritical Theory
-
John Leisure
Researching the emergence of middle class consumer households in postwar Japan using danchi apartment complexes as a site of social change.(B.A. History, University of Southern California; B.A. Political Science, University of Southern California; M.A. Regional Studies East Asia, Columbia University; Fulbright Fellow, Japan)
Subfield: Modern Japan
-
Janice Levi
Janice Levi's project primarily centers on the oral narrative of the House of Israel (Ghana) and how their faith identity is constructed through knowledge of oral histories, performative/ritual memory, and encounters with normative Judaism. Her project seeks to historicize the oral narrative through archival record, practical memory, and via sites of memory (archaeological and abstract). Additionally, she is interested in how ideological trends concerning Hebraic heritage (may have) influenced the narrative of this community.
Subfield: African History | Research Interests: African History, Jewish History, Memory Studies, Identity Studies, Race Politics, and Material Culture
-
Pauline Lewis
Pauline is a PhD candidate in the Modern Middle Eastern field, specializing in the history of transnational technology and technical expertise in Ottoman and post-Ottoman societies. Her dissertation, "A Sociotechnical History of the Telegraph in the Modern Ottoman Empire, 1855-1908," explores the connection between telegraphy and the emergence of new practices and discourses in the empire, specifically the concepts of territorial sovereignty and technocratic authority, alternative understandings of space and time, and the entanglement of private capital and public infrastructure. For this project, she drew on a range of sources in Ottoman Turkish, Arabic, and French, including documents from the Ottoman state archives; biographies of Ottoman telegraphers; literary, musical, and visual texts; records from British telegraph companies; and maps and circulars from the International Telegraph Union. Research: Ottoman Empire; History of Technology; Modern Middle East
Subfield: Modern Middle East
-
Fredrick Walter Lorenz
Fredrick Walter Lorenz's research focuses on migrations and empire shaping in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Ottoman Empire. He studies the impact of large-scale migrations to and resettlements in the Balkans, Anatolia, and Syria on the political, social, and cultural foundations of the late Ottoman Empire.
Subfield: Modern Middle East, Ottoman Empire, Migration, Borderlands
-
Amanda Martinez
My dissertation analyzes the social, economic, and political benefits white, urban, and affluent Americans received from adopting a “country” identity between 1964 and 1994. Though economically advantaged Americans frequently found value in co-opting a white and rural persona during this period, this behavior often came at the direct expense of the very people being idolized. The main subject of my work looks at a growing consumption of country music, and chronicles periods like the “redneck chic” moment of the 1970s, and the “Urban Cowboy” craze of the 1980s. I also consider the value corporations such as Coca-Cola, Wal-Mart, and The Ford Motor Company found in associating their brands with country music, and the similar advantages major figures like Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush found in appealing to the music during their presidencies. Overall, my work is particularly interested in the role country music played in perpetuating a whiteness defined by wholesomeness and agrarianism, and how and why the music’s overwhelmingly urban, and middle to upper class audience remained drawn to the genre.
Subfield: 20th Century U.S. History; Race and Popular Music; Urban/Suburban History
-
Kelly Midori Mccormick
Kelly McCormick is a Ph.D. Candidate in modern Japanese history whose research focuses on the intersection of visual and material culture through the lens of the Japanese camera. Through analysis of the mass press, materials from corporate and government archives, and in-depth interviews with photographers and designers she is developing a picture of how discourses on gendered applications of photography, the professionalization of women, economic recovery, and national identity were deeply tied to the domestic and international success of the Japanese camera. Her dissertation shows how the symbolic and material meanings fixed into the camera by those who produced and used it are the key to understanding postwar Japanese discourses around the technology of photography and consumer culture and the international meanings of the mass practice of photography. Before coming to UCLA, she completed an M.A. in East Asian Languages and Cultures at Columbia University (2012) and received her B.A. from UC Santa Cruz (2008). Kelly has lived in Kagoshima, Osaka, Hakodate, Yokohama, and Tokyo, Japan.
Subfield: Modern Japan; History of photography, technology, gender, consumer culture, and design
-
Juan Pablo Mercado
Juan Pablo is a PhD candidate in U.S. History specializing in Chicana and Chicano History and currently is a managing editor for Regeneración Tlacuilolli: UCLA Raza Studies Journal. Juan Pablo is also an interviewer for the UCLA Library’s Center for Oral History Research, conducting oral histories on the High Potential Program at UCLA between 1968-1971.
Subfield: Twentieth-Century United States; Chicana/o History
-
Nana Osei-Opare
My dissertation, “The Red Star State: State-Capitalism, Socialism, and Black Internationalism in Ghana, 1957-1966,” provides a new theoretical framework to understand the post-colonial African state’s political-economy. It explores the Soviet connection in shaping Ghana’s post-colonial economic agenda, its Pan-African political imaginations, and its ideas of citizenship against the backdrop of a global white racial and economic hierarchy. It is also a history of how ordinary Africans—the working poor and informal sector—grappled with state-capitalism, the functions of state-corporations, and the economic and political spaces they opened and closed to the national body politic. The dissertation draws on two years of English and Russian archival research in multiple sites in Ghana, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Subfield: Africa
-
Susan Rosenfeld
Trans-Atlantic slave trade; West African history; mythology and folklore; Afro-Brazilian returnees; Afro-Caribbean intellectual and cultural production and radicalism; Pan-Africanism; and Yoruba systems of divination. I am also working as a research assistant for the Marcus Garvey and UNIA Papers Project under Professor Robert Hill.
Subfield: African History; History of the African Diaspora; Yoruba History; History of Afro-Brazilian returnees
-
Fernando Serrano
In my research I consider the impact of silver mining in colonial Guanajuato on the indigenous cummunities that provided the labor force for the mines. In particular, I consider the participation of workers from Purépecha communities in Michoacan.
Subfield: Latin American History; Ethnohistory; Colonial Mexican History; Michoacán and Guanajuato
-
Madina Thiam
My research focuses on the global circulation of people and ideas from the Western Sahel. My dissertation, entitled "From Mecca to Jamaica: Sahelian Itineraries and Imaginaries," is centered around the trajectories and writings of a set of Muslim travelers (enslaved, pilgrims, merchants and scholars) from present-day Mali.
Subfield: Islam in the Sahel and Sahara; The Black Atlantic; New Imperial History.
-
Marjan Wardaki
My research focuses on Asian and Middle Eastern students and academic, who studied at German technical universities. I examine their knowledge production at these educational centers, and trace their lives and scholarship back to Asia. My research employs a mobile heuristic tool that blends global- and microhistory.
Subfield: South Asia and Europe
-
Adam Woodhouse
My doctoral research considers the place of the Roman Republic and its imperialism in the formation of Italian humanist thinking about empire from c. 1350 to c. 1550, culminating in a systematic reconstruction of Machiavelli's theory of republican empire in his Discourses on Livy.
Subfield: Late Medieval and Early Modern European Intellectual History
-
Meng ZHANG
Meng ZHANG (張萌) has received her Ph.D. in History from UCLA in July 2017. Dissertation: “Timber Trade along the Yangzi River: Market, Institutions, and Environment, 1750-1911.” For updated information, please see my personal website: https://sites.google.com/site/mengzhang1654/
Subfield: Late Imperial and Modern China, Economic History, Environmental History, Business, Governance, Legal History, Diaspora, Material Culture, Comparative Institutional Analysis, Social Network Analysis, Early Modern Globalization
Grad Students