UCLA Historian
Summer 2006 Newsletter
New Chair
The theme of this issue of The Historian is transitions. After three very productive years, Professor Teofilo Ruiz stepped down as chair of the department at the end of June 2005. Teo served as chair during an especial difficult financial period for the University of California. Nevertheless, his tenure as chair was marked by a very successful reorganization of the staff and budget, and remarkable success in faculty hirings. The new chair of the department is Professor Edward A. Alpers. A member of the UCLA faculty since 1966, Ned also taught at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania (1966-1968) and the Somali National University (1980) as a Fulbright Fellow. Previously, Ned served as both undergraduate and graduate vice chair of the department and he was Dean of Honors and Undergraduate Programs in the College of Letters & Science from 1985 to 1996. In 1994 he was elected President of the African Studies Association, the world’s largest scholarly association in his area of expertise.
Ned’s research and writing focus on the history of trade and society in eastern Africa and the Indian Ocean. He has published Ivory and Slaves in East Central Africa (1975) and a wide range of chapters in books and scholarly articles. He has co-edited with Pierre-Michel Fontaine Walter Rodney: Revolutionary and Scholar (1982), with William Worger and Nancy Clark Africa and the West: A Documentary history from the Slave Trade to Independence (2001), with Vijaya Teelock History, Memory, and Identity 2001), with Amy Catlin-Jairazbhoy Sidis and Scholars: Essays on African Indians (2004), with Gwyn Campbell and Michael Salman Slavery and Resistance in Asia and Africa (2005), and with Benigna Zimba and Allen F. Isaacman Slave Routes and Oral Tradition in Southeast Africa (2005). He is currently writing a political economy of eastern Tanzania in the nineteenth century while at the same time engaged in a long-term study of the African diaspora in the Indian Ocean. He is also writing a text entitled African Diasporas: A Global Perspective.
Ned teaches undergraduate courses on the history of eastern Africa and the Indian Ocean; he has chaired fifty Ph.D. committees and currently serves as chair or co-chair for nine graduate students.
New and Recent Hires
Caroline Ford came to UCLA in 2004 as Professor of History. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and previously taught as associate professor at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver (1995-2004) and as assistant and associate professor at Harvard University (1988-95), where she was also a research associate at the Center for European Studies.
Ford is a specialist of the political and cultural history of nineteenth and twentieth-century France. She is the author of two books, Creating the Nation in Provincial France: Religion and Political Identity in Brittany (Princeton, 1993) and Divided Houses: Religion and Gender in Modern France (Cornell, forthcoming May 2005). She is completing a third book, Nature and Artifice: Landscape, Culture and Conservation in Metropolitan and Colonial France, which will be published by Harvard University Press. She then plans to write a book on Islam in France after 1945.
Ford has won numerous fellowships and awards. They include grants from Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (1997-2001); a Fulbright Faculty Fellowship (1997); the Pergamon Prize (1993); a fellowship from The Women’s Study in Religion Program at the Harvard Divinity School (1994-95); various fellowships from the Georges Lurcy Educational Trust, the Ford Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council in New York. She was named Distinguished University Scholar at the University of British Columbia in 2004 and currently serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Modern History.
Ford teaches course on modern Europe, France, religion, nationalism, and European landscape and environmental history in comparative perspective.
Kelly Lytle Hernández earned a B.A. from the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, San Diego in 1996. After living and teaching at a farm school just outside of Johannesburg, South Africa she returned to the United States to pursue a Ph.D. in the Department of History at UCLA. In June of 2002, she completed her dissertation, “Entangling Bodies and Borders: Racial Profiling and the History of the U.S. Border Patrol,” which was born of her many years of volunteer work with undocumented workers/families living in the canyons/migrant camps of San Diego County. Immediately after earning her Ph.D. she was awarded a University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship and returned to the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, San Diego where she worked with George Lipsitz and completed her forthcoming book, “Mexican Brown: Race, Nations and the United States Border Patrol, 1924-2001.” “Mexican Brown” explores how police violence has influenced the racialization of Mexicanos in the United States while examining how transnational capital and international migration have transformed state violence within Mexico and the United States. In addition to studying the history of Mexican immigration to the United States, Lytle Hernández is interested in examining the impact of global capital and international migration upon blacks in the Americas and critically engaging how identity structures historical narratives. She teaches courses on Mexican immigration, the Prison-Industrial complex, and the history of California.
William Marotti
Bill Marotti grew up in the Detroit metro area; he attended the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, majoring in History with a focus on Southeast Asia. After several years of clerking for a law firm, Bill entered the FALCON full-time, intensive Japanese program at Cornell University, and in 1992, began graduate work at the University of Chicago, in the Department of East Asian Civilizations and Cultures. Working with Harry Harootunian, Tetsuo Najita, William Sibley, and Moishe Postone, Bill explored cultural and intellectual history and critical theory, developing a dissertation project on the cultural politics of avant-garde art and performance in 1960s Japan. Based at the University of Tokyo during 1996 and 1997, with grants from the Japan Foundation and the Japan Cultural Arts Foundation, he researched these evolving, interrelated forms of art, music, Butoh dance, photography, film, drama, and performance, and their relation to the politics of culture since the end of WWII in Japan.
Completing his dissertation in 2001, Bill was selected by the New York University International Center for Advanced Studies as their Woodrow Wilson postdoctoral fellow for 2001-2003 to participate in their Project on the Cold War as Global Conflict. He offered courses through the History and Asian Studies departments. In the fall of 2003, Bill accepted a postdoctoral fellowship to the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University to take part in their Expanding East Asian Studies project (ExEAS) and offer courses through the History department.
Bill came to California in 2004 as a Visiting Assistant Professor in the History department at UC Santa Cruz, where he taught the complete three-course Japan history sequence (Ancient, Early Modern, and Modern), developed upper-level seminars on the Cold War in East Asia and on The Occupation of Japan, revised the Modern East Asia introductory course, and offered The Global 1960s As History, with sections on East Asia, Algeria and France, the United States, and Mexico. His teaching was recognized with an Honorable Mention by the Center for Teaching Excellence in 2006.
Bill's current project is a book manuscript based on his dissertation. Money, Trains and Guillotines: Art and Revolution in 1960s Japan, is an investigation of the politics of culture and the everyday in postwar Japan, viewed through an analysis centered on transformations in avant-garde artistic production and performance. The book examines the advent of this art-based activism in Japan in the late 1950s and early 1960s in its complex relation with an internationalized art world, mass culture, domestic protest movements, and evolving forms of state practice and surveillance. It reflects upon the significance of this history for understanding the 1960s as a global moment, and the particular role of art and performance in these transformations.
Bill has published papers in Postcolonial Studies and in Japanese publications. He has given invited lectures at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, the University of Chicago, New York University (in association with the Grey Gallery), the University of Tokyo, Niigata International Information University, and at the Japan Dance Critics Association annual meeting. He has organized and chaired sessions on politics and culture in postwar Japan, and on 1960s Japan, at the Association for Asian Studies.
Michael Meranze
Michael Meranze has just joined the department as Professor of History. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley and has taught in the history department at the University of California, San Diego since 1989. Previously, he was an Assistant Professor of History at the College of William and Mary and a fellow of the Institute of Early American History and Culture from 1987-1989. Meranze has received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies among others.
Meranze specializes in United States intellectual and legal history with an emphasis on early America. He published Laboratories of Virtue, an examination of the birth of the penitentiary in the context of the contradictions of the American Revolution and early Liberalism, edited a volume of Benjamin Rush's essays, and has written on the history of the body, the death penalty, conscience, and the relationship between the European Enlightenment and the present. He is completing an essay on the criminal law and the colonial project for a forthcoming Cambridge History of Law in America and is currently working on two long-term projects: one, an analysis of sensibility and violence in the Revolutionary Atlantic and the other an attempt to rethink the history and meaning of the American death penalty from the eighteenth-century to the present.
Anthony Pagden holds joint appointments in the departments of History and Political Science. He was educated in Santiago (Chile) London, Barcelona and Oxford. He holds a D.Phil. from the University of Oxford and has been University Reader in Intellectual History at Cambridge and the Harry C. Black Chair of History at Johns Hopkins. He has also held visiting positions at Harvard, Michigan, and The European University Institute. He joined UCLA in the Fall of 2002 and holds a joint position in Political Science and History. His research has concentrated on the relationship between the peoples of Europe and its overseas settlements and those of the non-European world from the Atlantic to the Pacific. He is primarily interested in the political theory of empire, in how the “West” sought to explain to itself how and why it had come to dominate so much of the world, and in the present consequences of the erosion of that domination. He has also written on the history of anthropology and law, and on the perennial question of what we mean by the term “human”. His research has also led to an interest in the formation of the modern concept of “Europe” and in the ideological sources of the independence movements in Spanish-America. His most recent publications include, Lords of all the World. Ideologies of Empire in Britain, France and Spain (1995), “Civil Society and the fate of the Republics of Latin America,” (with Luis Castro Leiva) in Sudipta Kaviraj and Sunil Khilnani eds. Civil Society History and Possibilities (2001), Peoples and Empires (2001), La Ilustración y sus enemigos (2002), and, as editor, The Idea of Europe from Antiquity to the European Union (2002).
Sanjay Subrahmanyam was born in New Delhi, and after finishing high school in 1977 from Sardar Patel Vidyalaya, went on to do all his college degrees (BA and MA in Economics) in the University of Delhi, where he also received his PhD in Economic History in 1987 at the Delhi School of Economics for his thesis on ‘Trade and the Regional Economy of South India, c. 1550-1650’. From 1983, he had begun to teach economic history and comparative economic development at the Delhi School of Economics, where he continued until 1995 as first Associate Professor (1989-93) and then Professor of Economic History (1993-95).
In these years, his interests broadened from economic and commercial history, to the study of the interplay of political and economic history, to the study of political culture and cultural history. This is already reflected in his first set of books: The Political Economy of Commerce: Southern India, 1500-1650 (Cambridge University Press, 1990), which is a revised version of his PhD; Improvising Empire: Portuguese Trade and Settlement in the Bay of Bengal, 1500-1700 Oxford University Press, 1990); a joint work with V. Narayana Rao and David Shulman, Symbols of Substance: Court and State in Nayaka-period Tamilnadu (Oxford University Press, 1992), and The Portuguese Empire in Asia, 1500-1700: A political and economic history (Longman, 1993), a work of synthesis reflecting his interest in the history of the Iberian empires.
In the course of the 1990s, Subrahmanyam’s work has embraced new sources and archives, not only those from South India, or of the Portuguese and Spanish empires and the Dutch and English East India Companies, but also materials reflecting his growing interest in the history of the Mughal empire, and the comparative history of early modern empires. This accompanied his move to Paris as Directeur d’études in the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, where his position from 1995-2002 was defined as ‘Histoire économique et sociale de l’Inde et de l’Océan Indien, XVe-XVIIIe siècles’. A second set of books reflects his later interests: The Mughal State, 1526-1750 edited jointly with Muzaffar Alam (Oxford University Press, 1998); The Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama (Cambridge University Press, 1998); Penumbral Visions: Making Polities in Early Modern South India (University of Michigan Press, 2001); and another joint work with V. Narayana Rao and David Shulman, Textures of Time: Writing History in South India, 1600-1800 (The Other Press, 2003).
In 2002, Subrahmanyam was appointed as the first holder of the newly created Chair in Indian History and Culture at the University of Oxford. His most recent work, published by Oxford University Press, in 2004, is in 2 volumes, and is entitled Explorations in Connected History (Vol. I is entitled “Mughals and Franks,” and Vol. II bears the title “From the Tagus to the Ganges”). He is also the Joint Managing Editor of The Indian Economic and Social History Review, published from New Delhi (www.sagepub.com/journal.aspx?pid=241). His current research includes a joint book, nearing completion, with Muzaffar Alam, on travel-writing in the Indo-Persian world from 1400 to 1800. He also continues to collaborate with V. Narayana Rao and David Shulman on other projects of cultural history relating to South India.
Sanjay Subrahmanyam teaches courses on medieval and earlymodern South Asian history; the history of European expansion, the comparative history of early modern empires, and world history.
R. Bin Wong
Before coming to UCLA in 2004, Bin Wong served as Director of theCenter for Asian Studies at UC Irvine where he was also Chancellor's Professor of History and Economics. At UCLA he is responsible for overseeing and coordinating activities in five research centers and developing new initiatives in Asian Studies fields. Wong's own research has examined Chinese patterns of political, economic and social change, especially since eighteenth century, both within Asian regional contexts and compared with more familiar European patterns. Among his books, China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience (Cornell University Press, 1997) is the best known. Japanese and Korean translations are under way. Wong has also written or co-authored some fifty articles published in North America, East Asia and Europe, published in Chinese, English, French and Japanese in journals that reach diverse audiences within and beyond academia. Recent publications include an essay "East Asia as a World Region in the 21st Century" in NihonKeizai Shimbun. A ten-page interview regarding his scholarship, intellectual background and vision appears in the August 2004 issue of Shehui kexue, published by the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences.
Craig Yirush received his B.A. (1990) and M.A. (1994) in history from the University of British Columbia. He then took an M.Phil. in Political Thought and Intellectual History from Cambridge University (1995). He completed his doctorate, entitled “From the Perspective of Empire: The Common Law, Natural Rights, and the Formation of American Political Thought,” at The Johns Hopkins University (2003). His research interests include the development of political ideas in the early modern British Atlantic, church-state relations in colonial America, the question of Amerindian rights in the first British Empire, and the connection between law and political theory in early modern Europe. In 2005-2006 he was a Warren Fellow at Harvard University.
Retirements
After almost twenty years at UCLA, Carlo Ginzburg, the Franklin D. Murphy Professor of Italian Renaissance Studies will retire from UCLA on July 1, 2006 so that he can take up a professorship at the Escola Normale in Pisa, Italy. Among the most internationally renowned members of the UCLA History faculty, Carlo is the author of many distinguished books and articles, the most influential of which is undoubtedly The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth Century Miller (published in Italian in 1976, translated into English in 1980 and also translated into German, French, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Japanese, Portuguese, Serbo-Croat, Polish, Hungarian, Greek, and Turkish), which caused a revolution in the writing of microhistory. Although we will miss having Carlo as a regular member of our faculty, we hope that he will maintain an annual presence at UCLA on a short-term basis well into the future.
Philip Huang joined the History faculty in 1966 and for almost four decades was an important presence in the department. His many publications focus on the economic and social history of peasants in modern and contemporary China. Perhaps his major contribution to the field was has been his role as founding in 1975 and continuing to serve as editor of the influential journal, Modern China: An International Quarterly of History and Social Science. Since retiring from UCLA in 2004, Philip has been teaching in China, where he also edits a journal in Chinese that he established in 2001, Rural China: An International Journal of History and Social Science.
After four decades as a member of the Department of History faculty, medievalist Richard Rouse retired in 2005, although he continues to teach an annual course on medieval paleography through the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Richard’s work focused on the production of the medieval book and culminated in the publication in 2000 of Manuscripts and their Makers. Commercial Book Producers in Medieval Paris 1200-1500, 2 volumes, with his wife and research partner, Mary A. Rouse.
When Geoffrey Symcox retires at the end of the current academic year, UCLA will lose one its most outstanding teachers (see Faculty News). Geoffrey works in early modern European history, up to and including the French Revolution. His focus of interest has always been the development of the absolutist state, construed in a broad social context. He seeks to examine the fit -- or lack of one -- between social hierarchies and political institutions, between economic structures and fiscal systems, between a particular society and its armed forces. His books include The Crisis of French Sea Power 1688-1697 (1974), Victor Amadeus II. Absolutism in the Savoyard State 1675-1730 (1983), and a series of six chapters on Turin in the later 17th-early 18th centuries that form part of a nine volume collaborative history of the city, published under the aegis of the Turin Academy of Sciences. Professor Symcox also served as General Editor of the Repertorium Columbianum, coordinating an international team of specialists producing a thirteen volume series of up-to-date editions, with English translation, of the documentary sources for the Columbian voyages, published by Brepols (Turnhout, Belgium). Although he is retiring, we are fortunate that Professor Symcox will continue to teach on recall.
In Memoriam
Eric Monkkonen
Professor Eric Monkkonen, Distinguished Professor of History and Public Policy, died May 30, 2005 after a long battle with cancer. Eric grew up in Duluth, Minnesota, earned his undergraduate (English), master’s (American Studies) and Ph.D. (History) degrees all from the University of Minnesota. During his career he conducted influential research on urban finance, local governments, police, crime and violence. He authored and edited several books and published more than 50 research articles. His book titles include, America Becomes Urban: The Development of U.S. Cities and Towns, 1780-1980, which colleagues describe as the definitive history of urbanization in the United States. His later work focused on the history of local public finance and on urban crime, culminating in another major book, Murder in New York City, is based on a statistical time series back through the early nineteenth century. The book examines some of the major social shifts considered to affect homicide. These include the effects of immigration, urban growth, the Civil War, changes in weapons, demographic changes, and Prohibition. His work with nineteenth century coroner’s inquests allows ethnographic reconstruction of fatal violence, showing how gender roles and weapons shaped fatal individual conflicts. Further, by comparing New York City to London and Liverpool, he sets the current receding wave of violence in an international context. His recent work focused on violence in Los Angeles, while a major posthumous essay, “Homicide: Explaining America’s Exceptionalism,” was featured in a forum in the February 2006 volume of The American Historical Review.
Eric, who began his academic career at UCLA in 1976, was recognized not only for his historical research but also for his methodological contributions. He received grants and fellowships from organizations including the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Justice, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Social Science Research Council.
Colleagues described Monkkonen not only as an outstanding scholar, but as a dedicated teacher. “Eric loved UCLA and actively contributed to its life. Not only was he an active citizen of the university, he was a dedicated and personable colleague and teacher,” said Sanford Jacoby, professor of management, history, and public policy.
In addition to his scholarly pursuits, Professor Monkkonen was involved in several organizations. He formerly served as president of the Urban History Association, Social Science History Association, and was a member of the National Consortium for Violence Research. He is survived by his wife, Judy, and sons Pentti and Paavo.
The Eric Monkkonen Fund for the Support of U.S. History has been established. Contributions may be sent to Edward A. Alpers, UCLA Department of History, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1437, (Please make checks payable to UCLA Foundation - Monkkonen Fund.)
The Eric Monkkonen Fund for the Support of U.S. History has been established. Contributions may be sent to Edward A. Alpers, UCLA Department of History, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1437, (Please make checks payable to UCLA Foundation - Monkkonen Fund.)
Feature Stories
THE UCLA INTERDISCIPLINARY GROUP FOR THE STUDY AND TREATMENT OF PAIN
In 1999, Professor Margaret Jacob (History of Science and Early Modern Europe) organized a unique interdisciplinary collaboration of faculty and students from History, Pediatrics, Psychiatry, Sociology, and Anthropology, which has grown into the UCLA Interdisciplinary Group for the Study and Treatment of Pain. The team developed an innovative three-part protocol, the History and Narratives of Pain Study, to study recurrent pain problems in children, using the methodologies of oral history, conversational analysis, and quantitative data analysis. Professor Jacob received a $1.7 million grant award from the National Institute of Mental Health to carry out this research.
Recurrent intractable pain occurs in some 10-25% of children ages 10-24; it is poorly understood and difficult to treat. The current study seeks to help doctors and researchers learn how children develop pain problems, how children and their families deal with pain, and what their experiences have been with different types of pain treatments. The data gathered will provide valuable information about how children and families cope with a serious chronic health problem in the context of the American health care system. Methodologically, this is a demonstration project for the use of historical analysis – in particular oral history – as a research tool in health services research. Central questions of this exercise are: what changes over time for this patient? What factors – clinical, family, personal – contributed to this change? What is the child’s testimony? How does it differ from the parent’s and how can these be reconciled? How do the qualitative narratives enhance the data from the quantitative analysis and vice versa? Finally, if the patient and family agree, the project will deposit the tapes and transcripts, with all identifying information removed, in the Liebeskind History of Pain Collection at the UCLA Biomedical Library, where they will be available for study by qualified researchers in the future.
The knowledge accumulated from this study will help us understand the real experience of children in pain, both in the past and in the present, and how their experience may be changed by the social and clinical aspects of treatment. This understanding may help other children with chronic pain, and may give doctors a better understanding of the patient’s (and family’s) experiences, so that they might treat their patients more effectively. The conceptualization of the project is a remarkable testimony to the vision of Peg Jacob to the way in which historians of science can collaborate with basic scientists and physicians for both scholarly and patient-based purposes.
FACULTY AND STUDENT EXCHANGE PROGRAMS
Through the Division of Social Sciences, faculty of the department have recently participated in exchange programs with the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), Paris, and the University of Utrecht, in the Netherlands.
The UCLA-EHESS program involves month-long exchanges of faculty. UCLA Exchange Faculty at the EHESS have included Lynn Hunt, Deborah Silverman, Mary Terrall, and Caroline Ford, while other UCLA History faculty who have lectured or presented seminars there during this period include Ned Alpers, Andrew Apter, Ruth Bloch (colonial United States), Patrick Geary (Medieval), Naomi Lamoreaux (United States economic), Gabriel Piterberg (Ottoman), Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Bin Wong, and Mary Yeager (United States economic). EHESS Exchange Faculty in History at UCLA have been Jean-Claude Schmitt (medieval history), F. Rosenthal (modern France), Jacques Revel (French Revolution), and François Hartog (ancient history and historiography), as well as Jean-Pierre Amselle in Anthropology. As this newsletter goes to press, the original five-year exchange agreement is in the process of being renewed.
The Utrecht program similarly involves annual faculty exchanges between our two universities. From UCLA, Ellen DuBois (United States women’s history), Eric Avila (U.S.), Russell Jacoby, Gabi Piterberg, Ted Porter, Claudia Rapp (Late Antiquity and Byzantine), Norton Wise, and, this quarter, Ghislaine Lydon (West Africa) have lectured for a term at Utrecht; from Utrecht Bob de Graaf, Inger Leemans , Wijnand Mijnhardt, Judith Thissen, Andre van der Velden, and Jaap Verhuel have lectured at UCLA for a quarter. Both of these exchanges provide wonderful opportunities for UCLA faculty to exchange ideas with new colleagues and to reach different students. In addition, the EHESS program offers a rare opportunity for one graduate student annually from each institution to study at the other with full support. Both programs speak eloquently to the high international reputation of the department and its faculty.
HISTORY FACULTY TEACH IN INNOVATIVE GE CLUSTERS
The College's General Education Cluster Program is a curricular initiative that is designed to strengthen the intellectual skills of entering freshmen, introduce them to faculty research work, and expose them to such "best practices" in teaching as seminars and interdisciplinary study. Clusters are year-long, collaboratively taught, interdisciplinary courses that are focused on a topic of timely importance such as the "global environment," or "interracial dynamics." These courses are taught by some of the university's most distinguished faculty and seasoned graduate students and are open only to entering freshmen. During the fall and winter quarters, students attend lecture courses and small discussion sections and/or labs. In the spring quarter, these same students enroll in one of a number of satellite seminars dealing with topics related to the cluster theme. Department of History faculty and graduate Teaching Fellows have participated in or served as coordinating faculty for GE Clusters such as Interracial Dynamics in American Culture, Society, and Literature; The History of Modern Thought; The History of Social Thought; The Global Environment; The United States, 1963-1974: Politics, Society, and Culture; and Towards a World Economy – The Perils and Promise of Globalization. These colleagues include Joyce Appleby, Robert Hill, Lynn Hunt, Russell Jacoby, Margaret Jacob, Theodore Porter, Janice Reiff, Brenda Stevenson, Richard Von Glahn, Norton Wise, Robert Wohl, and Henry Yu.
Faculty News
Members of the UCLA History faculty regularly are invited to lecture internationally and are recipients of major national and international recognition through fellowships, prizes, and election to scholarly societies. Here are some of the awards that our colleagues have recently received.
The Department of History has a well earned reputation as the leading teaching department in the College. Data from the 2005 Senior Survey, in which 488 History majors participated, indicate that the Department of History rates above the average of both the Division of Social Sciences and the College of Letters and Science in students’ satisfaction with the quality of faculty instruction (94%), advising by faculty (83%), availability of courses in the major (83%), and access to small courses in the major (71%). The same survey confirmed that History majors had a “Course so interesting [that you] did more than [the] required work” (20%), wrote a paper longer than 5 pages (88%), and took an exam requiring substantial written responses (92%). This reputation reflects the dedication of the faculty and graduate Teaching Assistants to providing quality instruction to UCLA’s undergraduates [see sidebar on departmental data].
Continuing the department’s tradition of teaching excellence, in the past three years two of our colleagues have been received the campus Distinguished Teaching Award. In 2004, Joan Waugh (United States) earned the Distinguished Teaching Award, for which she was especially cited for her ability to engage undergraduates through her exceptional use of multimedia (see http://www.uclalumni.net/AlumniStories/Awards/bio/Waugh.cfm); the previous year she also won the UCLA Award for Innovation in Teaching with Technology. In 2006, Geoffrey Symcox was recognized for a long career as a dynamic undergraduate lecturer who has taught a wide range of upper division courses in European history lower division General Education courses in both Western Civilization and World History, and as an inspirational mentor to generations of graduate students (see http://www.uclalumni.net/AlumniStories/Awards/bio/Symcox.cfm). Although their lecturing styles are quite different, both Joan and Geoffrey excel in their ability to engage students, hold their attention, and inspire them to do their very best work. In addition, Valerie Matsumoto, who has a split appointment with Asian American Studies, won the first C. Doris and Toshio Hoshide Distinguished Teaching Prize in Asian American Studies.
The faculty continues to garner awards for the publications and professional achievement.
Margaret Jacob was named University Research Lecturer at UCLA in 2004 and in 2005 won an award for the best book on French Masonic history from the Institut Maconnique de France for Les Lumières au Quotien: franc-maçonnerie et politique au siècle des Lumières (translated from Living the Enlightenment: Freemasonry and politics in eighteenth-century Europe (1991). Teo Ruiz was elected to a three-year term as Vice President for Research of the American Historical Association. Naomi Lamoreaux was elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Norton Wise was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. This June Lynn Hunt received an honorary doctorate from Northwestern University and Carlo Ginzburg an honorary doctorate from Hebrew University.
In 2004 Ellen DuBois was a Fulbright Senior Scholar at the University of Bologna in Italy. Patrick Geary was a Resident Fellow at the American Academy in Rome for Spring Quarter 2006. Lynn Hunt and Margaret Jacob will be Consortium Scholars at the Getty Research Center next year. Emeritus Professor Peter Loewenberg is the Sir Peter Ustinov Visiting Professor at the University of Vienna this summer. Anthony Pagden was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship this year, which he will take in 2007-2008. This past year Gabi Piterberg was the Alistair Horne Fellow in Middle Eastern History at the University of Oxford and his An Ottoman Tragedy: History and Historiography at Play won the M. Fuat Köprülü prize from the Turkish Studies Association. In 2004 Claudia Rapp was invited to be the Belle van Zuylen Professor at Utrecht University and in 2005 she received a fellowship at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, DC. Jan Reiff was a co-editor of the multiple award-winning The Encyclopedia of Chicago in 2004. William Summerhill was a Fulbright Research Fellow in Brazil; next year he will be an American Academic of Learned Societies Burkhardt Fellow at the Huntington Library. Finally, last year Craig Yirush was a Warren Fellow at Harvard University.
Jose Moya is on leave at Barnard College where he has been asked to establish a new center for migration studies. Jessica Wang has accepted a position as Associate Professor of History at the University of British Columbia. Henry Yu is on leave at the University of British Columbia, where he has been serving as Director of a new program in Asian immigration.
Alumni News
David Northrup (Ph.D. 1974), Professor of History at Boston College, was President of the World History Association during 2004 and 2005.
Martin J. Sherwin (Ph.D. 1971), the Walter S. Dickenson Professor of History at Tufts University, was co-author of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Biography, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer.
Giving Back
The department is extremely fortunate, and even more grateful, for the exceptional generosity of its many donors. In addition to the annual support we receive from alumni and friends organizations Friends of History and History Bruins, the department has recently been the beneficiary of several extraordinary gifts.
First among these is a genuinely extraordinary anonymous gift of $5 million that has funded two named chairs in the history of the United States and provided an endowment to support graduate students. The two chairs are named after two of our most eminent emeriti, Joyce Appleby and Gary Nash. The Gary Nash Chair is designated for a leading scholar in modern U.S. history, while the Joyce Appleby Chair is designated for the exciting new field called United States and the World. There is a wonderful article on this gift that features a photograph of and interviews with Joyce and Gary in the most recent edition of The UCLA College Report http://www.college.ucla.edu/report/volume5_full.pdf). We will be searching for a scholar to occupy the Gary Nash Chair in the next academic year.