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 eventual dissertation will investigate the changing nature of how Romans imagined Greek culture in the eastern Mediterranean during the third and fourth centuries C.E. and how urban populations negotiated imperial identity.

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

Subfield: Atlantic World, Atlantic World Religion, Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, Colonial Empires

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

Subfield: Late Imperial China

Subfield: China

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

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 United States, Race and Popular Music, Political History

2014 Resident Scholar, Autry National Center Institute for the Study of the American West, Undisciplined Research Project

Subfield: 18th-20th Century U.S. & American Indian History

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

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, Caribbean, Soviet Union, and other African nations shaped and intersected in Ghana.

Subfield: Intellectual African History, Nkrumahism, CPP, Ghanaian State, State Capitalism, Modernization, Labor, 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

Subfield: Africa; Diaspora; Islam; Intellectual 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