Subfield: Near East

My dissertation is an institutional history of the médersas, "Franco-Muslim" schools that provided both Islamic and European education in French colonial northwest Africa from the 1850s to the 1950s. I examine the role of these schools in the formation of a bi-cultural Muslim intermediary class and the trans-Saharan impact of the médersa model on relationships between Muslim communities and French colonizers. I have conducted archival and oral history research for this project in Algeria, France, Mauritania, and Senegal. I also have a secondary project analyzing the tensions of Pan-Africanist ideologies of culture, especially at the First Pan-African Cultural Festival in Algiers in 1969.

Subfield: Modern Africa, especially northwest Africa (Maghrib, Sahara, Sahel); Islam; colonialism

Subfield: South Asia, Islam in South Asia, Indian Ocean,

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

My primary research interests concern religion, 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, his portrayal of ethnicity, and the identity crisis he undergoes regarding the status of “foreigners” in the Mediterranean world.

Subfield: Late Antiquity, Roman History, Greek History

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

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

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

My dissertation is entitled, "Little Island into Mighty Base: Indigeneity, Race, and U.S. Empire in Guam, 1941-1962," which examines the U.S. military expansion of Guam through indigenous land stewardship and civilian military labor. This process of militarization resulted in various interracial encounters among Chamorros, Filipinos, and white Americans that were peaceful, violent, and in some instances deadly. Thus, my study underscores the connections between empire, indigeneity, and diaspora in a highly contested racialized island. This project relies on a transnational approach that includes archival sources from California, Guam, Maryland, the Philippines, and Washington D.C. These records are combined with oral history interviews that I conducted on Guam with activists, educators, professors, farmers, landowners, former civilian military laborers, and former politicians."

Subfield: 20th Century United States History; Pacific Islander History; Asian American History; Native American History; Empire; Immigration; Indigeneity; Labor; Race/Ethnicity; Oral History; U.S. and the World.

Subfield: Science

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.

Chinese opera, actors and entertainers, migration, native-place networks

Subfield: Late Imperial China

Subfield: China

Subfield: History of Gender and Sexuality; Early Modern Europe; France; Gender Studies; Singleness Studies

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 (especially Genoese) in fifteenth and sixteenth century Castile.

Subfield: Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Spain and Italy)

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 

Subfield: Modern European History, 19th Century Germany, Immigration

Subfield: Modern European Jewish History

Subfield: 20th Century U.S.; Southern California; History of Education

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

Subfield: European Medicine in China, History of Medicine

“Southern California Chivalry: The Convergence of Southerners and Californios in the Far Southwest, 1846-1866.” Ph.D. diss., 2015.

Subfield: US, World, History Education

Subfield: 20th Century U.S. History; Race and Popular Music; Urban/Suburban History

Dissertation: A Lethal Education: Institutionalized Negligence, Epidemiology, and Death in United States Off-Reservation American Indian Boarding Schools, 1879-1934

Subfield: 18th-20th Century U.S. & American Indian History American Indian Off-reservation Boarding Schools American Indian Health

Subfield: 20th Century US, California, Western US, Urban, Planning, Cultural, Oral History, Public History

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

Subfield: Middle East and South Asia

Nana Osei-Opare is a Ph.D. Candidate in UCLA’s Department of History, focusing on twentieth-century African history. His dissertation is tentatively titled, "The African Revolutionaries: Labor, Bureaucracy, State-Capitalism & Revolution in Ghana, 1957-1966." His research interests include the first socialist African revolution, the coherency of Kwame Nkrumah’s political and economic ideas, and Ghana’s economic and state-building methods in relation to the Soviet Union’s New Economic Policy. While his work is primarily Ghana-centric, it explores how the intellectual processes and formulations in the United States, Britain, the Caribbean, the Soviet Union, and other African nations shaped and intersected in Ghana.

Subfield: Intellectual African History, Black Radical Tradition, Ghanaian State, State Capitalism, Modernization, Soviet Union, Intellectual Networks, South Africa

Science museums, history of anthropology, German history of science in the Kaiserreich, visual culture of science and scientific publications.

Subfield: History of Science, Medicine and Technology

Subfield: United States

Property Ownership, Race, Political Subjectivity, Militarization and Historicity in nineteenth-century Haiti and the Caribbean

Subfield: Latin American and Caribbean History, Afro-Atlantic History, Environment and History

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

Dissertation: "From Mecca to Jamaica: Sahelian Itineraries and Imaginaries, 1790s - 1970s." I explore the movement of people and ideas in and out of present-day Mali, in the Western Sahel, understanding the region as a global space connecting Saharan, Red Sea, and Atlantic histories. To better grasp these connected histories, I track the trajectories, networks, and writings of specific individuals, situating those in their broader historical contexts.

Subfield: Islam in the Sahel and Sahara; The Black Atlantic; New Imperial History. 

Subfield: Atlantic History, Dutch history, American revolutionary history, the history of espionage and information states.

My research focuses on Asian and Middle Eastern students and educators, who travelled to Europe, in particular interwar Germany, to study at technical universities. I examine their early years of study at these educational centers, and trace their lives and scholarship into a complex trajectory of German-Asian knowledge production and flow. My research employs a mobile heuristic tool that blends global- and microhistory.

Subfield: South Asia and Europe

Subfield: United States