Vol. 44, June 2023
Have you published something new in Global Urban History? Are you hosting a conference, workshop, or event? We'd like our members to know!
GUHP is a member-supported organization.
| GUHP Essay Prizes for Emerging Scholars
Up to three GUHP Essay Prizes will be awarded annually to early-career scholars for unpublished essays associated with graduate and post-graduate work in the field of Global Urban History. Eligible applicants should be GUHP members and can include graduate students, post-graduate scholars not in a tenure-track position, or early career scholars in the first three years of a tenure track position at the time of submission. Scholars who work at institutions in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia are especially encouraged to apply, as are scholars who work on periods before 1850.
Essays must be no longer than 8,000 words in English inclusive of citations, be based on original research, contain full citations to archival and relevant secondary sources, and engage with critical themes in global urban history. Essay topics can include studies of cities as creations and creators of larger-scale historical phenomena of all kinds - from empires and capitalism to global cultural communities and ecosystems; of connective, cross-border, ocean-, river- or borderland urban history; of comparative or connective urban histories; of urban environmental history; and/or studies that in general expand historical research to cities and urban regions that are underrepresented in the current urban historical literature.[more]
Application deadline: September 29, 2023 | | Join GUHP at the WHA!
GUHP members and authors of new and forthcoming Elements in Global Urban History volumes will discuss their contributions to the Elements series and the state of the field of global urban history Friday, June 23, at 8:30 EST.
Roundtable: Introduction to Cambridge Elements in Global Urban History
Chair: Tracy Neumann, Wayne State University
Speakers:
Emma Hart, University of Pennsylvania
Kristin Stapleton, University at Buffalo SUNY
Matthew Vitz, University of California San Diego
Carl Nightingale, University at Buffalo SUNY | Related Network Event Spotlight | | 50 years of the Urban History Journal Conference
The State of Urban History: Past, Present, Future
University of Leicester, July 11-13, 2023
GUHP members who plan to attend the conference, take note of three GUHP-sponsored panels!
GUHP Dream Conversation on the Anthropocene
Round Table: Urban pasts, Urban futures - a roundtable on the Anthropocene
Tuesday July 11, 11:15-12:45
GUHP Dream Conversations on Cities, Empires, and their (Dis)contents
Empires and Global Urban History
Wednesday, July 12 1430-1600
GUHP Dream Conversations on Theory For, Of, and By Urban Historians
Round Table: Urban theory of, for, and by urban historians: the state of a two-year conversation at the Global Urban History Project
Thursday, July 13, 11:30-13:00
| | Earthopolis: A Biography of Our Urban Planet (audiobook)
By Carl H. Nightingale
Cambridge University Press, 2023
This is a biography of Earthopolis, the only Urban Planet we know of. It is a history of how cities gave humans immense power over Earth, for good and for ill. Carl Nightingale takes readers on a sweeping six-continent, six-millennium tour of the world’s cities, culminating in the last 250 years, when we vastly accelerated our planetary realms of action, habitat, and impact, courting dangerous new consequences and opening prospects for new hope. In Earthopolis we peek into our cities’ homes, neighborhoods, streets, shops, eating houses, squares, marketplaces, religious sites, schools, universities, offices, monuments, docklands, and airports to discover connections between small spaces and the largest things we have built.[more]
| | | | Seeking Bread and Fortune in Port Said: Labor Migration and the Making of the Suez Canal, 1859–1906
By Lucia Carminati
University of California Press, 2023
Seeking Bread and Fortune in Port Said maps the everyday life of Port Said's residents between 1859, when the town was founded as the Suez Canal's northern harbor, and 1906, when a railway connected it to the rest of Egypt. Through groundbreaking research, Lucia Carminati provides a ground-level perspective on the key processes touching late nineteenth-century Egypt: heightened domestic mobility and immigration, intensified urbanization, changing urban governance, and growing foreign encroachment. By privileging migrants' prosaic lives, the book shows how unevenness and inequality laid the groundwork for the Suez Canal's making.[more]
| | | | Hong Kong Public and Squatter Housing: Geopolitics and Informality, 1963–1985
By Alan Smart and Fung Chi Keung Charles
University of Chicago Press, 2023*
Alan Smart and Fung Chi Keung Charles trace the development of squatting in Hong Kong from 1963 to 1985. The authors reconstruct government policy on squatting through both ethnographic and archival research. This book sheds new light on the consequences of various attempts to control encroachment on scarce urban space. The authors argue that intersecting policy agendas resulted in decisions that were often not desired, but which emerged as practical solutions from prior failures. [more]
*Use discount code 20CP2023 to save 20% by ordering via the University of Chicago Press website (valid through June 23, 2023)
| | | | New York
By Jill Gross and Hank Savitch
Columbia University Press, 2023
Jill Gross and Hank Savitch examine the New York metropolis through the lens of a series of twenty-first century pressures related to demography, economic growth, urban development, governance, immigration, leadership and globalization. How New York's institutions and policies have either risen to meet these challenges, stagnated in the face of them, or simply failed to resolve them is the focus of the book. In particular, the authors examine the muncipality of New York City, as the heart of the megacity, and how it navigates the increasingly complex battles with higher levels of government over rights to the city and resource needs. [more]
| | | | In the Skin of the City: Spatial Transformation in Luanda
By António Tomás
Duke University Press, 2022
António Tomás traces the history and transformation of Luanda, Angola, the nation’s capital as well as one of the oldest settlements founded by the European colonial powers in the Southern Hemisphere. Drawing on ethnographic and archival research alongside his own experiences growing up in Luanda, Tomás shows how the city’s physical and social boundaries—its skin—constitute porous and shifting interfaces between center and margins, settler and Native, enslaver and enslaved, formal and informal, and the powerful and the powerless. [more]
| | | | Spatial Revolution: Architecture and Planning in the Early Soviet Union
By Christina E. Crawford
Cornell University Press, 2022
Spatial Revolution is the first comparative parallel study of Soviet architecture and planning to create a narrative arc across a vast geography. The narrative binds together three critical industrial-residential projects in Baku, Magnitogorsk, and Kharkiv, built during the first fifteen years of the Soviet project and followed attentively worldwide after the collapse of capitalist markets in 1929. Among the revelations provided is the degree to which outside experts participated in the construction of the Soviet industrial complex, while facing difficult topographies, near-impossible deadlines, and inchoate theories of socialist space-making.[more]
| | |  | | How “Neighborhood” Arose, Changed, and Grew: A Bilingual Canadian Story
By Richard Harris
Journal of Urban History
Online First, May 10, 2023
“Neighborhood” is routinely used when referring to the history of residential areas in North American cities. In fact, it is unclear whether this has always been the preferred term, and how its meaning has changed. A survey of the English- and French-Canadian experience, including a case study of Toronto using digital newspaper files, indicates that in the early twentieth century other terms were common. “Neighborhood” referred primarily to poorer, immigrant districts. Especially since the 1960s, it has been much more commonly used and in a general sense. In that regard, its evolving meaning has converged with the francophone usage of quartier. It is only recently that local associations have dropped “ratepayer” from their names in favor of “residents” or, to a lesser extent, “neighborhood.” This now disguises the fact that such associations are dominated by property owners. Getting the language right is important for a clear-eyed understanding of both the past and the present.[more]
| | | Conferences, Workshops, and Events | | Copying and Imitation in Early Modern Architecture International Conference
Ghent, June 15-16, 2023
This international conference starts from the premise that practices of imitation and copying were integral to the making of architecture in early modern Europe. Extending from classical rhetoric, imitation was said to entail an element of invention, which allowed for the adaptation and skilled use of models. Following this formulation, scholars of early modern architecture have written extensively about the numerous parallels between literary and architectural theory, mining the former in devising frameworks for the conceptualization of architecture. By contrast, this conference seeks to direct attention to verifiable practices and material documentation of copying and imitation in the workshop and on the building site, and how this evidence sheds new light on the production of architecture.[more]
| | | | Lagos Studies Association Conference
University of Lagos/Zoom, June 20-24, 2023
All 137 sessions of Lagos Studies Association 2023 conference on the theme "Rethinking Decoloniality:African Decolonization and Epistemologies in the 21st Century" are accessible, free of charge, to the audience attending virtually and physically at the University of Lagos.[more]
| | | | World History Association Conference
University of Pittsburgh, June 22-24, 2023
From June 22-June 24, 2023, the World History Association, in partnership with the University of Pittsburgh’s World History Center, will hold its 32nd Annual Meeting on the theme "Energies."[more]
| | | Calls for Papers & Proposals | CFP: Migrants and the City
Urban History Review / Revue d’histoire urbaine
This special issue invites scholars to ask: To what extent have migrants and minorities with migrant backgrounds enjoyed access to urban space, to housing and property, to places of entertainment and leisure? How have authorities and developers planned and managed urban spaces with these populations in mind? How have migrants drawn the attention of urban institutions? How have their activities contributed to the local economy? To what extent have they driven economic change? In what ways have migrants and migrant communities interacted with the mainstream population and with other minorities? What issues have shaped their conflicts and struggles? How have they contributed to public debates, to intellectual and artistic production, to the dissemination of knowledge?[more]
Submission deadline extended to June 30, 2023
| CFP: De-Centering the History of International Organisations
KADOC, KU Leuven
November 29-December 1, 2023
This workshop seeks to explore how different methodological approaches to international and transnational organisations can bring new histories into view. Rather than approaching international and transnational organisations from a strictly institutional point of view, we, instead, wonder how these organisations and their archives can become the basis for telling other, local, regional or international, stories that shift the focus to the broader context in which these organisations operated.[more]
Submission deadline: July 4, 2023
| CFP: Urban History Association Graduate Student Blogging Contest
The Metropole, the official blog of the Urban History Association, is looking for submissions for its Seventh Annual Graduate Student Blogging Contest. The contest exists to encourage and train graduate students to blog about history—as a way to teach beyond the classroom, market their scholarship, and promote the enduring value of the humanities.This year’s theme is Stumble.[more]
Submission deadline: July 14, 2023
| CFP: Archives of Revolution
John Carter Brown Library
Providence, June 20-22, 2024
Creating, exploring, promoting, preserving and most of all critically engaging with the nature and process of archives and archiving helps us to understand the past that we’re making. As archivists, literary scholars, librarians, historians, and more, we all interact with and help shape the past through its material and textual remains. Sharing more about the process of making archives of revolution, of using them, and of their changing nature in the twenty-first century, prompts new conversations about the past. It is also a way of engaging scholars, archivists, and the public in a civil conversation about who owns it, has owned it, and who shapes it.[more]
Application Deadline: August 15, 2023
| CFP: African Urban Echoes
The Flute
African urban space anthology The Flute is looking for submissions highlighting the tales of African cities. The anthology is looking to publish works in the genre of poetry and photography focusing on African urban spaces such as Lagos, Accra, Kinshasa, Lonligwe, Durban, Marrakesh, Nairobi, Ouagadougou, Dakar, Luanda, Yaounde, and more.[more]
Submission deadline: September 1, 2023
| CFP: AHA Perspectives articles on “urbanism and rurality”
The American Historical Association’s Perspectives on History seeks pitches for articles or other short-form writing related to urbanism and rurality for its 2023-2024 issues.[more] | Fellowships, Grants, & Awards | | International Fellowships
Urban Studies Foundation
Applications are invited to the USF’s International Fellowships for urban scholars from the Global South. Each award will cover the cost of a sabbatical period at a university of the candidate’s choice, worldwide, for the purpose of writing-up the candidate’s existing research findings in the form of publishable articles and/or a book. The proposed work should be completed under the guidance of a chosen mentor in the candidate’s field of study. Funding is available for a period ranging between 3-9 months, and eligible research may cover any theme pertinent to a better understanding of urban realities in the Global South.[more]
Application deadline: June 20, 2023
| | | | Istanbul Research Institute
2023-2024 Research Grants
Istanbul Research Institute offers a variety of scholarship programs to researchers working on projects related to its departments of Byzantine, Ottoman, Atatürk and Republican-Era studies, and its “Istanbul and Music” Research Program. One scholar will be awarded Research and Write-Up Grant for PhD Candidates; five scholars will be awarded Travel Grants; five scholars will be awarded Conference Grants. Applications can be prepared in English or Turkish.[more]
Application deadline: July 3, 2023
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