The History and Politics Lab’s goal is, to use Toni Morrison’s words, to shed critical light on the “politics and history calculated to render the suffering of millions mute,” by refusing “arrogant pseudo-empirical language crafted to lock creative people into cages of inferiority and hopelessness.”

The lab, which is hosted by UC Irvine’s School of Social Ecology, is currently developing the following projects:

U.S. Concentration, Detention, and Internment Camps (DREAM Project). For many, camps such as Alligator Alcatraz represent an anomaly in American history. This project contradicts this common assumption. It offers the first database of U.S. concentration, detention, and internment camps from the First World War to the present day. Sub-projects include an oral history of the Temporary Detention Camp for Japanese Americans in Santa Anita, an ethnography of families whose members have been in ICE detention camps in California, and a theoretical article on what makes a camp a “concentration camp.” Participants include 8 undergraduate students, 1 graduate student, and 1 high school student.

History and Politics Virtual Community (Western Political Science Association, with Vikram Visana). Created in 2024, this virtual community aims to bridge political science and history through a series of online events for interested scholars worldwide. It has organized 10 events to date.

“Freedom of Expression in the History of Political Thought,” with Kevin Pham (Amsterdam) and Ani Chen (Cornell), 2 April 2025;
“Navigating History and Politics at Once: A Conversation with Duncan Bell,” 28 May 2025;
Author-Meets-Critics Panel on Jeff Wasserstrom (UC Irvine), The Milk Tea Alliance (with Jeppe Mulich, Meredith Weiss, and Eraldo Souza dos Santos as discussants), 4 June 2025;
Leigh Jenco (LSE), “Commoner Agency and Commoner Verse: The Generative Act of Transmission in Two Early Modern Examples” (with Simon Luo, NTU Singapore, as discussant), 17 June 2025;
“Four Hands: A Conversation with Ryan Doerfler and Samuel Moyn,” 18 June 2025;
Author-Meets-Critics Panel on Sam Klug (LUM), The Internal Colony (with Errol Henderson, Daniel Matlin, Erin Pineda, and Nazmul Sultan as discussants), 25 June 2025;
“Navigating History and Politics at Once: A Conversation with Jennifer Pitts,” 15 October 2025;
Sherene Seikaly (UCSB), “On the Question of Palestine” (with Khirad Siddiqui, UC Irvine, as chair), 10 April 2026;
1^st Mini-Conference “History & Politics,” with a keynote speech by Marcus Lee (Princeton), 2 June 2026;
Author-Meets-Critics Panel on Yann Allard-Tremblay’s Disjunctures: Indigenous Redirections in Political Theory (with Ritwik Bhattacharjee, Burke Hendrix, and Kouslaa Kessler-Mata as discussants), 12 June 2026;

Brasil Initiative (CAPES, Ministry of Education, Brazil)

Igor Simões (UERGS, Brazil), “Absent Presence: Afro-Brazilian Artists in the International Debate on Art and the African Diaspora” (organized with Sora Han, Department of Criminology, Law and Society, and co-sponsored by the Poetic Justice Cluster), 21–22 October 2024;
Keisha-Khan Perry (Penn), “The Fire Inside: The Social Justice Imperative at the Heart of African Diaspora Studies,” 27 October 2025;
Alex Ungprateeb Flynn (UCLA), Book Talk: Pathways to Utopia: Time and Transformation in the Landless Workers Movement of Brazil (organized with Abigail Lapin Dardashti, Department of History of Art, and co-sponsored by the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies).
Miqueias Mugge (Brazil LAB, Princeton) and Victoria Bergbauer (Emory), “Empires of Fantasy and Fear: Unfree Migrations in the Age of Emancipation,” 10 March 2026;
“Intimate Histories of Brazil: Family, Memory, and Echoes of the Past,” with talks by Daniel Silva (UFSC, Brazil), José Henrique Bortoluci, and Eraldo Souza dos Santos (organized with Jerry Won Lee, Department of English), 25 March 2026;
“Also Known as a Black Samurai: Yannick Hara in Concert,” Co-sponsored by the Poetic Justice Cluster and the Illuminations Initiative, 6 April 2026;
Conversations with Maurílio Martins (Filmes de Plástico, Brazil): “From One Street Corner to the Next: Cinema Inspired by Everyday Life,” 15 June 2026; “Memory and Resistance: Building an Independent Cinema in the Age of Artificial Intelligence,” 16 June 2026; The Last Episode, 17 June 2026;
Conversations with Clayton Nascimento, October 2026 (more information soon);
First UC Irvine-UFAM (Federal University of Amazonas) Colloquium, November 2026 (more information soon).

Critical and Interpretive Methods in Law and Society: A Workshop for Graduate Students and Early Career Scholars (2025 Advance Grant, Law and Society Association)

Daniel Silva (UFSC), “Talking Back to the Law: A Workshop on Language, Rights, and Refusal in Brazil’s Favelas,” 5 June 2026;
Uahikea Maile (Chicago), “Haunting Dispossession: A Workshop on Indigenous Methodologies,” to be determined;
Elizabeth Cohen (Boston), Studying Time, to be determined;
Katrina Forrester (Harvard), Feminist Methods, to be determined.

The Voices of Democracy: A Ten-minute Monologue Festival (2025 VOICE Grant, UC National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement). In Samuel Beckett’s groundbreaking play, Waiting for Godot (1953), Lucky, enslaved by Pozzo, remains silent throughout. But with one exception: when his master allows it, Lucky delivers a long, incoherent monologue that sheds light on his experience with unfreedom. Lucky is no exception in the history of playwriting and theater: Monologues have been used across history to give voice to the unheard and remain one of the most common genres for expressing challenges to free expression. In the United States, there has been a long tradition of organizing festivals for ten-minute plays that gather actors, directors, and playwrights from across the country each year. This project, funded by the Valuing Open and Inclusive Conversation and Engagement (or VOICE) Initiative of the UC National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement, will organize the first festival of this kind in the University of California system. Three monologues will be selected for staging at UC Irvine in September 2026.

More soon!