News

Name: Celeste Palmer
Major: History
Current Position/Status: History PhD student and Teaching Assistant at UC San Diego.

Year Graduated: 2024

Americorps Student Success Coach at City Year Sacramento

Congratulations to Professor Stacy Fahrenthold, the 2025 winner of the Nikki Keddie Book Award! Given by the Middle East Studies Association of North America, the award recognizes outstanding scholarly work in the area of religion, revolution, and/or society in the Middle East.

Name: Jacob Feinstein
Major: History
Minor: Professional Writing, Religious Studies
Current Position/Status: Graduate Student at Georgetown University

Year Graduated: 2024

"Study Abroad with the History Department! That was the best opportunity that I did during my time in UC Davis. I was a transfer student to UC Davis and I would encourage students to get involved in the campus to feel more connected to UC Davis.

Name: Pilar Svendsen
Major: History
Current Position/Status: History Teacher at Santa Clara High School

Year Graduated: 2012

Congratulations to Sofia Hosseinzadeh on her 2nd Place Lang Prize win for her honors thesis “‘How that Stevenson Rumor Started’: The 1952 Election and Cold War Gender and Sexuality”! Hosseinzadeh‘s research sheds new light on the role of gender and sexuality in Cold War-era American society. She examined newspaper articles, gossip magazines and FBI transcripts to unpack the origins of the rumor that 1952 presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson was gay.

Amy Fallas will join the UC Davis Department of History in Fall 2025 as a UC Davis Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellow. Currently finishing her PhD in History at UC Santa Barbara, Fallas specializes in modern Egypt as well as transnational exchanges between Latin America and the Arab Middle East. Her research examines religious difference, communal institutions, charitable networks, sectarianism, and collective memory.

The UC Davis History Department would like to congratulate PhD Candidate ibrahim Bàbátúndé Anọ́ba who won a Huntington/Birmingham Exchange Fellowship for the 2025-2026 academic year!l He will be in residence for one month at the Cadbury Research Centre, University of Birmingham, working on materials related to Òrìṣà Religion’s encounters with Western-articulated modernities.

The UC Davis History Department would like to congratulate PhD student Charlotte Hansen Terry on her appointment as Assistant Professor in U.S. history at Utah State University Uintah Basin campus starting this fall. She will complete her PhD. this spring. Her dissertation explores Mormon missionization efforts during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and responses to these efforts by Pacific Islanders and their governments, U.S. imperial agents, and other missionary organizations.

The UC Davis history department would like to congratulate graduate student Brianna Tafolla Riviere, who will be awarded her Ph.D. in June 2025 for her appointment as Assistant Professor of History at Boston University, starting in Fall 2025! Her dissertation “Reel Red Power: Indigenous Activism, Visual Sovereignty, and the Film Industry” focuses on the effort of Native American activists to remake the representation of Indigenous Peoples and United States history in film.