Subfield: Ancient Greek Trade; Classical and Hellenistic periods; Nabataean Kingdom; Ancient Economics; Network and Trade Theory

Subfield: Japan - Post World War II Visual Cultural History

Subfield: Europe

Subfield: Medieval - Legal, Middle Eastern & Scandinavian History

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

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.

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

Subfield: China

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

Subfield: Japan

Subfield: North East - Middle East, Modern Era, Ottoman

Subfield: Jewish

Subfield: United States

Subfield: China

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

My dissertation, “Gone Country: White, Urban, and Affluent America’s Appropriation of Southern Rural Identity, 1964-1996,” analyzes the social, economic, and political benefits some Americans received from adopting a “country” identity during the second half of the twentieth century. 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; Political History

Greek History; Ethnogenesis; Transmission of Thought; Difference

Subfield: Ancient Greece & Rome

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

Subfield: Europe - Environmental Hist French Colonial Maghrib

Subfield: Latin America

Subfield: Twentieth-century United States; Black Internationalism; Solidarity

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

Kevin writes on the history of pollution and environmental activism in postwar Japan. He looks at Japanese environmentalism within the history of industrial science and technology and state-led economic developmentalism. He is interested in how the contentious relationship between environmental awareness and economic and scientific progress shapes our response to localized and non-localized environmental disruption.

Subfield: Environmental History, Modern Japan, Science and Technology, Activism

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

Subfield: United States

Subfield: African

Early Modern Trade Network of Julfa Armenians

Subfield: Armenian Studies

Subfield: -Atlantic History-Dutch History-Age of Revolutions-History of the American Revolution-Early American History

Subfield: China - Chinese Social and Economic History

Subfield: United States - California History

Subfield: Science - Europe

Subfield: China - Economic History, Republican Era