U.C. Davis History Department - Research Clusters

Borderlands

Encouraging comparative intercultural research , we move the history of the Americas beyond the fragmentation of strictly national histories. Reconceptualizing American borders, and redrawing them, we place the Americas within a comparative and global context, illuminating processes of colonialism, state formation, migration, capital investment, and environmental exchange and transformation. In this process, actors and themes formerly on the periphery of American history take center stage. Our aim is to produce histories of the Americas which reveal transnational processes through local experiences and challenge assumptions about national cultures through a focus on diverse American cultures, genders, races, and places.

Associated Faculty: Lorena Oropeza, Andres Resendez, Alan Taylor, Charles Walker, Louis Warren

Cross-Cultural Women's and gender History

Beginning in 1992, Cross-Cultural Women's History was offered as a minor field in the history department at U.C. Davis. In 2004 the minor was renamed to acknowledge the increasing importance of gender studies to the understanding of women's history, and the minor is now designated as Cross-Cultural Women's and gender History (CCWgH). For more information, please visit our website at http://history.ucdavis.edu/ccwh/

Associated Faculty: David Biale, Robert Borgen, Beverly Bossler, Cynthia Brantley, Joan Cadden, Omnia El Shakry, Catherine Kudlick, Victoria Langland, Benjamin Lawrance, Susan Mann, Lisa Materson, Sally McKee, Lorena Oropeza, Eric Rauchway, Baki Tezcan

Economic and Labor History

What is the relationship between economics, labor and historical change? How can we document and explain transitions in labor standards, practices and models? What are the historical dimensions to the relationship between capital and labor? We consider economic and labor history as a broad research agenda, encompassing everything from wages, living standards and resource access to economic institutions, long-term changes and national and international policy as directed toward employment and capital.

Associated Faculty: William Hagen, Norma Landau, Benjamin Lawrance, Sally McKee, Eric Rauchway, Baki Tezcan, Charles Walker

Empires

The Empire Research Cluster consists of historians interested in the comparative and cross-cultural history of empires spanning the pre-modern to the colonial and modern periods in East Asia, South Asia, Africa, Russia, the Americas and Europe (Western and Eastern).

Associated Faculty: Robert Borgen, Beverly Bossler, Cynthia Brantley, William Hagen, A. Katie Harris, Thomas Holloway, Kyu Hyun Kim, Benjamin Lawrance, Susan Mann, Sally McKee, Eric Rauchway, Sudipta Sen, John Smolenski, Baki Tezcan, Charles Walker, Emily Albu

Environmental History

We study changing relations between people and nature, loosely framed as how people have perceived nature and reshaped it to suit their own ideas of good living. Our subjects include how communities have altered natural systems for fields, villages, and cities, how they have represented nature in painting, literature, and oral traditions, and how organisms and ecosystems respond to social changes with unforeseen biotic shifts, new disease environments, or other developments requiring people to reshape cultures, economies, and politics. We study the social frictions and unrest - - from fence cutting to clean air litigation - - that flow from these processes. We are equally intrigued with material environmental change and cultural perceptions, customary and legal arrangements for apportioning nature and with social conflicts over those arrangements, with the use of natural symbols to legitimize and critique social and political systems, and with the ways societies know and fail to know nature.

Associated Faculty: Norma Landau, Don C. Price, Michael Saler, Alan Taylor, Charles Walker, Louis Warren

Ethnicity, Race, Nationalism

The faculty in the Ethnicity/Race/Nationalism Research Cluster work on aspects of these interrelated themes that span much of the globe. Their interests extend chronologically from the pre-modern world to recent U.S. history. Among the many questions our cluster focuses on are: How should we go about describing ethnicity, nationalism, and race? Should we treat them as primordial or as social constructions? If they constructed, and by whom (or by what)? What onstrains/structures these constructions? What purposes do these constructions serve? Whom do they serve? Are some constructions better representations of identity than others, and what does this mean?

Associated Faculty: David Biale, Robert Borgen, Beverly Bossler, William Hagen, A. Katie Harris, Thomas Holloway, Benjamin Lawrance, Lisa Materson, Sally McKee, Andres Resendez, Baki Tezcan, Clarence Walker, Emily Albu

Law, Culture and Society

The Law, Culture and Society Research Cluster is interested in the following questions: how does a society conceptualize law, institutionalize law, and use law? How can historians compare legal systems and cultures? We consider legal history as a broad topic, covering everything from formal legal institutions (legislatures, courts, etc) to expanded social process through which formal institutions intersect with social structures, to legal cultures. As a group, we cover broad expanses of topography -- Europe, the Americas, Asia, and Africa, and of chronology -- from the ancient world to the twentieth century.

Associated Faculty: David Biale, William Hagen, Thomas Holloway, Norma Landau, Benjamin Lawrance, Ted Margadant, Sally McKee, Don C. Price, Eric Rauchway, Sudipta Sen, John Smolenski, Kathy Stuart, Baki Tezcan, Louis Warren

Mass, Popular, Folk Cultures

The Mass/Popular/Folk Cultures Research Group address questions relating to the definitions of "elite" and "popular" expressions and their modes of interaction within societies; cross-cultural comparisons of traditions, practices, and representations; processes of cultural diffusion, and the ways in which representations and their effects can be interpreted; the impact of mass communications and information technologies within a globalizing environment.

Associated Faculty: Beverly Bossler, William Hagen, A. Katie Harris, Kyu Hyun Kim, Benjamin Lawrance, Susan Mann, Kathy Olmsted, Michael Saler, Louis Warren

Mobilities

The movement of people, objects, information, and ideas through space, over time and across cultures - Mobilities - forms a field of inquiry in which several faculty members are principally engaged.

Associated Faculty: David Biale, Cynthia Brantley, A. Katie Harris, Kyu Hyun Kim, Catherine Kudlick, Norma Landau, Susan Mann, Ted Margadant, Lisa Materson, Sally McKee, Eric Rauchway, Andres Resendez, Clarence Walker, Emily Albu

Religion and History

Religious practices, rituals and beliefs have been central to the histories of every part of the world and they remain as central even in the age of secularism and Enlightenment. Members of the UC Davis History Department devote varying parts of their research and teaching to these questions.

Associated Faculty: David Biale, Robert Borgen, A. Katie Harris, Benjamin Lawrance, Susan Mann, Lisa Materson, Michael Saler, John Smolenski, Baki Tezcan, Charles Walker, Emily Albu

Science, Technology, Medicine

Science plays a central role in our cultural, political and economic life. Not only is the authority of modern medicine based on science, the sciences permeate all aspects of industrial society, from the designs and processes used in the manufacture of goods, through to the information we draw on to make choices as consumers. As historians of science, technology and medicine, we are interested in how science and scientific knowledge came to achieve this authority in human affairs.

Associated Faculty: Robert Borgen, Cynthia Brantley, Joan Cadden, Omnia El Shakry, Catherine Kudlick, Benjamin Lawrance, Andres Resendez, Michael Saler, Kathy Stuart, Charles Walker