Subfield: Modern Middle East, Late Ottoman Empire, Mandate Syria and Iraq, Visual Culture, Archaeology, Museums, World War I, Italian colonialism

Subfield: Near East

Subfield: Africa

Subfield: Japan - Post World War II Visual Cultural History

Subfield: Europe

Dissertation: What They Fight For -- The Men and Women of Reenactment. An examination of the modern phenomenon of reenacting, and what it can tell us about the memory of the Civil War and the place of history in modern America.

Subfield: U.S. Civil War and Reconstruction

Subfield: Latin America - Pre-Colombian and Colonial Mexico

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

Subfield: Latin America - African Diaspora, Carribean, Contem Blk Liberation

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

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

MA Thesis: Injecting Modernity: Regulating Hygiene in Porfirian Oaxaca, Mexico

Subfield: Ethnohistory, Indigenous Laguages of the Americas, Latin America, Colonial Mexico

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

At the moment (July 2013), I am beginning my dissertation, which examines a series of sixteenth and seventeenth-century letters from what is now western Mexico. These were written in Nahuatl and with the Roman alphabet.

Subfield: Europe

Subfield: South Asian history, World history, Imperialism, Intellectual history

Subfield: Imperial China; Late Imperial China; Mongols; state employment; state formation; state capacity; political history; military history; fiscal history.

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

Subfield: Ming, Qing China; Vietnam

Subfield: Near East - Modern Middle Eastern History

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)

Subfield: United States

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: United States

Subfield: United States

Subfield: South/Southeast Asia

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

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'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

Dissertation: Between Two Worlds: A Comparative Study of the Representations of Pagan Lithuania in the Chronicles of the Teutonic Order and Rus'

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

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

Subfield: Europe - Environmental Hist French Colonial Maghrib

Subfield: Science - Political and Intellectual History

Subfield: Medieval

Subfield: United States

Subfield: Middle East and South Asia

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

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

Subfield: Japan

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

Subfield: Science

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

Subfield: United States

Subfield: modern Jewish history, history of ethnography, Sephardic studies, Ottoman Empire

Subfield: Japan

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. 

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

Subfield: China - Chinese Social and Economic History

Subfield: United States - California History

Subfield: United States

Subfield: United States - Early Modern Caribbean History, Translantic Hist