The Center for World History presents the fourth Graduate Student Conference: “The Micro as Macro: Narrating World Histories of Science, Technology, and Environment” in Humanities 1, Room 210 (and online), 8:30 a.m. to 6 p.m.

While world history topics have expanded recently to include diverse areas, the Euro-American experience continues to dominate scholarship and is often treated as the assumed global model. The UCSC Center for World History’s fourth graduate student conference explores non-European places and actors by centering on techno-scientific, environmental, sensorial, and spatial-based themes that reveal how the relationship between “small” subjects like microorganisms have shaped world history in ways that challenge or reimagine conceptions of progress and development. With this in mind, this conference will focus on histories spanning from 1700 to the present that tell global stories through small subjects such as viruses, cotton seeds, and metal alloys. By inviting a wide range of chronological and geographic loci, we hope to expand our definition of world history to one that does not default toward Euro-American experiences.

The program is available here.

Register for online participation here.

Dr. David Fedman, Associate Professor of History at UC Irvine and author of Seeds of Control: Japan’s Empire of Forestry in Colonial Korea, will deliver the keynote address.

This is a hybrid conference. To attend virtually, please register here. If you can join in person, we would love to see you in Humanities 1, room 210.

Conference Organizing Committee: Clara Bergamini, Piper Milton, Alexyss McClellan-Ufugusuku, Jinghong Zhang

Free and open to the campus community and the public.