History Department

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.

The UC Davis History department would like to congratulate Manoel Rendeiro Neto on his new position as a Yale Postdoctoral Associate for 2025-2026 and an Assistant Professor of Latin American History at Yale University starting Fall 2026!

Ph.D. student Faith Bennett has been awarded an AAUW Dissertation Fellowship! The American Association of University Women’s American Fellowship Program began in 1888, a time when women were discouraged from pursuing an education. It is AAUW’s largest fellowship program and the oldest non-institutional source of graduate funding for women in the United States. (https://www.aauw.org/.../current-opportunities/american/) Faith also received 2024 Alice Kessler-Harris Dissertation Prospectus Award!

Dante Barksdale, ABD, has accepted a tenure-track position in the History Department at Sacramento City College in African American, African, and Africa Diaspora History. Dante's research focuses on the Haitian Revolution and Atlantic and Caribbean history. Congratulations, Dante!

Second-year PhD student Fransisca Espinosa has been awarded the James R. Scobie Memorial Award. This highly competitive travel grant, awarded by the AHA affiliated Conference on Latin American History, will support her pre-dissertation fieldwork in Chile this summer. Congratulations, Francisca!

Graduate student Temirlan Tileubek has been awarded the Maya K. Peterson Dissertation Research Grant in Environmental Studies. This extremely prestigious grant, awarded by the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, will support his dissertation fieldwork in Kazakhstan this summer. Congratulations, Termirlan!

PhD student Oluwasola Daniels was awarded a West African Research Association (WARA) Fellowship to conduct research for her dissertation “The Other Half: Men’s Sexual and Reproductive Health in Nigeria (1900-1985).” The award letter states that among a pool of extremely competitive applications Oluwasola’s proposal “rose to the top as particularly well-conceived, innovative, and rigorous.” Congratulations, Oluwasola!

Dr. Renzo Aroni has accepted a tenure-track position at NYU. It’s a joint position focused on Indigenous Studies in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and The Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, with an affiliation in the History Department. He will begin in January 2025. Renzo received his Ph.D. in history in 2020, with Designated Emphases in Native American Studies and Human Rights. He currently teaches at La Católica University in Lima. From 2020-2022 he held a post-doc at Columbia University. Congratulations, Renzo!

Graduate student David Morales has been selected as a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellow for 2024-25 for his dissertation, "Attending Conquest: Power and Performance in the US-Mexico Borderlands, 1820s-1880s." Congratulations, David!

Read more here!

Bedros Torosian will join the UC Davis Department of History in Fall 2024 as a UC Davis Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellow. Currently finishing his PhD in History at UC Irvine, Torosian's research examines the intersections of race and gender among writers in Ottoman Arab and Armenian diasporas in the early twentieth century. At UC Davis, he will develop his dissertation into a book while collaborating with faculty in Middle East studies, migration studies, and human rights.

Second-year PhD student Francisca Espinosa not only published her first book, Justicia material y políticas de consumo en el gobierno de la Unidad Popular (1970-1973 (Santiago: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2024), but a leading newspaper, La Tercera, cited it as one of the must reads in 2024! Congrats Francisca!

Learn more about the American plunder of antiquities in Mandate Syria in Ph.D. student Charles Sills’ article "Cultural Imperialism and the American Scramble for Antiquities in Mandate Syria, 1920-1939." in the July 2023 issue of Middle Eastern Studies!

Charles' article can be found here!