Europe and the Mediterranean World

The Europe and the Mediterranean World concentration offers students the opportunity to explore the histories of Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East, and connections between these places and the larger world. We look at the continual flow of ideas, people, and material goods across this region, from the earliest states in the ancient world until today. We examine how empires, colonialism, religion, culture, the environment, and social and economic forces, including the development of capitalism and of the nation-state, shaped these interactions in profound ways. Collectively, we trace over 5000 years of intersecting histories, examining linkages and conflicts forged by geography, trade, war, migration, imperial aspirations, colonial violence, religious and ethnic minorities, and struggles for liberation.
The caucus includes intensive study of the histories of Europe, Russia, North Africa and the Middle East, as well as imperial, colonial, and transnational histories that trace the changing relations among these places. Major periods and areas of focus include the ancient and medieval worlds, oceanic empires in the early modern period (1450-1800), modern imperialism and colonialism, and decolonization and postcolonial states in the twentieth century.
Major Requirements
The history major requires a minimum of 12 unique courses. At least eight of the 12 courses must be upper-division (HIS 100-199). A maximum of four courses, including the introductory survey course, may be lower-division (HIS 1-99).
Major Planning Worksheet
Copy a History Major Planning Worksheet and Sample Academic Plans to your UCSC Google Drive.
Region of Concentration: Europe and the Mediterranean World (6 courses)
I. One lower-division introductory survey course:
- HIS 41, The Making of the Modern Middle East
- HIS 58, From Pirates to Refugees: The History of the Modern Mediterranean (Effective Fall 2022)
- HIS 65B, Plagues, Peasants, and Pirates: Late Medieval Europe, 1000-1500 (Effective Fall 2022)
- HIS 70A, Modern European History, 1500-1815
- HIS 70B, Modern European History, 1815-Present
- HIS 74, Introduction to Jewish History and Cultures (Effective Fall 2022)
- HIS 74A, Introduction to Middle Eastern and North African Jewish History: Ancient to Early Modern (Effective Fall 2022)
- HIS 74B, Introduction to Middle Eastern and North African Jewish History, 1500-2000 (Effective Fall 2022)
HIS 41, 65B, 70A, and 70B satisfy the Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC) general education requirement. HIS 58, 74, 74A, and 74B satisfy the Ethnicity and Race (ER) general education requirement.
II. Four additional Europe and the Mediterranean World courses, three of which must be upper-division
III. One Europe and the Mediterranean World Comprehensive Requirement
Historical Skills and Methods (1 course)
IV. HIS 100, Historical Skills and Methods
HIS 100 introduce history majors to historical methods and provides preparation for advanced historical research. Students develop critical reading, historical analysis, research, and disciplinary writing skills. HIS 100 also satisfies the Textual Analysis and Interpretation (TA) general education requirement.
Students who enter UCSC as frosh are expected to complete HIS 100 by the end of their second year. Transfer students are expected to complete HIS 100 no later than their second term at UCSC.
Catalog of Course Requirements
The History Catalog of Course Requirements indicates what region(s) of concentration and what chronological distribution requirement(s) individual history courses may apply toward.
Breadth Requirements (4 courses)
V. Two courses from each of the remaining two regions of concentration:
Upper-Division Elective (1 course)
One additional upper-division history course of your choice from any of the three regions of concentration
Distribution Requirements
Of the 12 courses required for the major, at least three must meet chronological distribution requirements. One must be set before 600 C.E., and two must be set in periods prior to the year 1800 C.E.
Intensive Major Option
The intensive history major offers students a pathway to enrich their study of history, refine their skills in writing and research, and receive a designation on their transcripts that signals their ambition and accomplishment to potential employers and graduate schools. All history majors are eligible to declare the intensive track, including junior transfers. If a student attempts but does not complete the intensive track they may still graduate with a standard history degree, provided the appropriate major coursework has been completed.

- Pronouns he, him, his, his, himself
- Title
- Associate Professor
- Division Humanities Division
- Department
- History Department
- Phone 512-804-6165
- Website
- Office Location
- Stevenson College Academic Building, 279
- Office Hours Spring and Summer 2024: By appointment, please email to set up a zoom or in-person meeting
- Mail Stop History Department
- Faculty Areas of Expertise Science Studies, Colonialism, Digital Humanities, Drug Policy, World History
- Courses HIS 70A , HIS 196F , HIS 100 , HIS 2A , HIS 177A
- Advisees, Grad Students, Researchers Piper Milton
Summary of Expertise
I'm an associate professor of history at UCSC interested in the history of science, medicine, empire, and the long-term impacts of technological change. My most recent book, Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science, was published in 2024 and positively reviewed in The New Yorker (here's their review article), The New York Times, Science, Publisher's Weekly, and The Wall Street Journal. I was interviewed about the book by Terry Gross for the National Public Radio show Fresh Air.
My first book The Age of Intoxication: Origins of the Global Drug Trade (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019) explores how drug users and sellers in the British and Portuguese empires helped to shape imperialism, global trade, and scientific practice in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It won the 2021 William H. Welch Medal from the American Association for the History of Medicine.
My doctoral advisor at UT Austin (PhD, 2015) was Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, and I was trained as a historian of the early modern Iberian empires and the Atlantic world. I am currently working on two book projects (one a history of the entangled concepts of extinction and apocalyptic technology in the early modern period, the other a family and imperial history of applied science in the period between the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa and the outbreak of World War I).
As of summer, 2024 I am accepting graduate students in the fields of comparative or global early modern history, the history of medicine, drugs, and pharmaceuticals, the history of science, and the history of technology and its social or cultural impacts.
I'm also very interested in the use of AI for experiential learning, and am actively exploring the educational potential of LLM-based historical simulations; you can read about some of this work in progress here.
You can find my CV here.
Research Interests
Early modern world history; history of science, medicine, and technology; Spanish and Portuguese empires; history of drugs and poisons; history of globalization; history and anthropology of magic in a cross-cultural context.
Biography, Education and Training
Ph.D., University of Texas at Austin, May 2015.
Honors, Awards and Grants
2020-21 National Endowment for the Humanities Award for researching and writing Tripping on Utopia.
Society of Fellows Postdoctoral Fellowship, Columbia University 2015-2016
Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship in Critical Bibliography, 2014-16
Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship, 2014-15
Dissertation Fellow, McNeil Center for Early American Studies, University of Pennsylvania, 2013-14
Fulbright fellowship to Portugal, 2011-2012
Selected Publications
Books:
Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science (Grand Central/Hachette Book Group, 2024).
The Age of Intoxication: Origins of the Global Drug Trade (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019; paperback, 2021).
• Winner of the 2021 William H. Welch Medal from the American Association for the History of Medicine.
Peer-reviewed articles & chapters (all available as PDFs below):
“The Flip Side of the Pharmacopoeia: Poisons in the Atlantic World,” in Matthew Crawford and Joseph Gabriel, eds., Drugs on the Page: Pharmacopoeias and Healing Knowledge in the Early Modern Atlantic World (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019).
“Semedo’s Sixteen Secrets: Tracing Pharmacological Networks in the Portuguese Tropics,” in Paula Findlen, ed. Empires of Knowledge: Scientific Networks in the Early Modern World (Routledge, 2018).
“Drugs and Early Modernity,” History Compass, Vol. 15, No. 4 (April, 2017).
Selected popular writing:
"Our Strange Addiction," Lapham's Quarterly, March 15, 2021.
"'Theire Soe Admirable Herbe': How the English Found Cannabis," Public Domain Review, February 19, 2020.
“Palm Trees and Potions: On Portuguese Pharmacy Signs,” The Recipes Project, July, 2016.
"Into the Mystic," Aeon Magazine, 2015.
“Victorian Occultism and the Art of Synesthesia,” in The Public Domain Review, 2014.
"The King of the Islands of Refreshment" in The Appendix, 2014.
"The Literature of Laughing Gas," in The Paris Review, 2014.
"The Pre-Modern History of Outer Space," in The Atlantic, 2013.
Teaching Interests
- Early modern and modern science, medicine, and technology
- History of the Iberian peninsula and of the Spanish and Portuguese empires
- History of drugs and poisons
- Social and cultural responses to technological change
- AI and education