Welcome
The Department of Special Research Collections acquires, preserves, and makes accessible rare, valuable, or unique materials that support UC Santa Barbara students, faculty, and research programs, as well as the scholarly community. The department's holdings are non-circulating but are available for research in the reading room by appointment Monday through Friday 9AM to 4PM.
For instructions on how to request an appointment, please visit our Planning Your Research page.
Requesting Materials
You are welcome to submit questions via our Contact Form or email the appropriate staff. We will answer questions as best we can although there may be delays in response.
All requests to use our department's materials can be made prior to your visit using your Special Collections Research Account. This account offers researchers an efficient way to manage Special Research Collections visits and requests online – anytime and from anywhere. After a one-time required registration process, researchers are able to:
- Request books in advance along with other materials from Special Research Collections (journals, magazines, microfilm, manuscripts, and even audiovisual materials) directly from the Library Catalog
- Compile multiple requests for an event, such as class visits, lectures/talks, and research visits
- Order digital scans, photocopies, and audio/video reproductions
- Track the progress of requests in order to plan visits accordingly and avoid delays and other inconveniences
- Securely access account history to keep track of previous requests and orders
- Pay for copies and scans with a credit card.
Kenneth Karmiole Endowed Research Fellowship
The Kenneth Karmiole Endowed Research Fellowship program enables research professionals, post-doc scholars and graduate students to pursue research lasting from one to three months in UCSB Library’s Special Research Collections.
One annual fellowship will be awarded in the amount of $5,000 to allow a scholar to pursue research in the humanities, sciences, social sciences, visual and performing arts, and/or UCSB history.
In the Spotlight
Congrats to Jennifer Alpers - 2026 Karmiole Fellowship Recipient
Jennifer Alpers is a PhD candidate in History at the University of California, Davis. She earned her BA in History at the University of California, Davis. Her dissertation,“Devil of a Time: Imperiled Children, Race, and Coalition Building during the Satanic Panic, 1975-1995 United States,” aims to expand our knowledge of the moral panic that emerged in the United States in the late twentieth century through centering race, gender, and childhood. Though often viewed as a bizarre anomaly driven by a growing religious right, the “Satanic Panic,” as it is often called, offers an important look into white middle-class anxieties which led to a broad coalition of activists who organized to “protect the children.” Through chapters on fears about the AIDS crisis, drunk driving, daycare centers, fantasy role playing-games, pornography, and music, her research seeks to analyze the ways parents worried about threats to their children’s safety, and how these worries—on both the left and right—reflected and reinforced white middle-class anxieties about race, gender, and hierarchy during the 1980s and 1990s. Historians have often viewed the culture wars as a linear progression from the 1970s to the present. However, a close examination of coalition building during the Satanic Panic proves this assumption to be much more complicated. Her project not only illuminates the political strength of projecting childhood at risk, a strategy that drew crusaders across a broad spectrum of political and religious beliefs, but also reveals how the moral and political logic of the late twentieth century was intertwined with shifting notions of childhood innocence and race.
Inaugural Cedric and Elizabeth P. Robinson Archival Research Grant
We are pleased to announce the four recipients of the inaugural Cedric and Elizabeth P.
Robinson Archival Research Grant for the 2026-2027 academic year. The award supports
research in the Robinson Archives, a collection of research and teaching papers, ephemera and
digital materials related to the careers of the Robinsons, renowned for their influential and wide-
ranging scholarship and activism. Long time community activists with a global outlook, the
Robinsons have worked to strengthen the fabric of democracy as champions of media
transparency and community-based media platforms and through their support for anti-war, anti-
racist and other social justice causes from the Black Power movements of the late 1960s to the
War on Terror in the twenty-first century.
- Mridula Sharma is a PhD student in English and American Studies at the University of
Manchester. Sharma’s proposed research examines the politics and practices of African
anticolonial and activist archiving through a detailed study of Ikwezi No. 20 (July 1982). Ikwezi
is a South African Marxist-Leninist journal, whose twentieth issue features an article titled,
“Palestine Will Never Die! Zionism, White Supremacy and the Palestinian Revolution,” which
foregrounds the Palestinian struggle as a site of transnational anticolonial solidarity. The 1982
issue shows how African radical publications deliberately archived the histories of global
liberation struggles, producing both a material record and a political counter-public that
challenges hegemonic narratives. Sharma’s research highlights Ikwezi’s success in contesting
epistemic hegemony from an African perspective as well as important parallels between African
revolutionary print practices and Black internationalist networks in the African diaspora. - Steven Osuna is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at California State
University, Long Beach. Osuna’s research draws upon Cedric Robionson’s writings to unpack
the artifices of imperialism, this project explores Robinson’s thoughts on U.S. counterinsurgency
in Central America during the dirty wars of the 1980s. Robinson covered the role of U.S. foreign
policy and imperialism in creating the destructive and chaotic setting brought about by political,
social, and economic intervention, or what he called the “chaos of capitalism.” However,
Robinson’s work invites us to interrogate the culture and political economy of US intervention.
The subjective and conscious actions of the revolutionary movements in Central America
required intervention to sustain the imperial expansion of racial capitalism. While Robinson’s
analysis is set in the 1980s-90s, it provides valuable lessons in our current conjuncture in
interpreting U.S. foreign policy as a reactive politic that attempts to sustain attempts of creating a
“morally just world.” - Ashley May is a third year PhD student in Sociocultural Anthropology at Brown University.
May’s dissertation project seeks to make important interventions on the historiography and
ethnography of revolution in Ethiopia from the vantage point of the Arsi community in San
Diego as living, moving archives and part of a transoceanic network of Oromo political struggle.
As a Robinson Archive Visiting Scholar, May will engage in ethnographic archival study to
compile a community engaged archive, that is both a project of deep counter-mapping and a
spatial counter-history of Arsi revolutionary history and broader global networks of Black
struggle. May will use methods such as deep mapping and hypertext to assemble and represent
an (an)archival, counter-historiographical project that will serve as a visual and sonic argument
against the master narratives in Ethiopian historiography and ethnographies of revolutionary
movement and political thought in the Horn of Africa more broadly.
and the border regime in the UK as part of an extended colonial legacy. Cowan is researching
feminist and abolitionist community and activist media output from the 1980s onwards—
particularly outlets that were working from an internationalist Black Marxist tradition and
squaring up to the harms of neoliberalism and globalisation, as is central in the Robinsons’ work.
Cowan is keen to spend time in the archive of Elizabeth P. Robinson as they are interested in
learning how her work, thinking, and activities combined information-sharing with the
generation of ideas that inspired action, dissent and resistance. Cowan arrives at this research
area through grassroots organising against Britain’s border regime and delivering casework
support for homeless migrant families in the UK. Their organising and casework background
inspires their interest in developing creative ways to communicate ideas and information about
community support, solidarity, and defence for marginalised groups against forms of state and
border violence.
