Vol. 50, December 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.
| Featured GUHP Publication |
From Books to Airplanes: The Materiality of Global and Urban Entanglements
By Carl Nightingale and Mariana Dantas
This article introduces a special section of the Journal of Urban History coming out in May. The introductory article, available OnlineFirst, was written by GUHP board members and discusses the Global Urban History Project's Dream Conversations.
The articles in this special section of the Journal employ histories of cities to examine the relationship between human ambitions and the transformation of space, the development of power discrepancies, and unequal access to material and natural resources. They also reveal the relevance of this quintessential human creation to global dynamics on our planet by unveiling the complex and often messy intersection between urban trajectories, local, imperial, or national histories and longue durée global developments. More than a case study, each article delves into the details of the materiality of the urban history they examine to explain how cities exist in the world, or in Richard Harris’s words, “how cities matter” to our shared planetary past and present. In this manner, they answer the call for new conversations about the historical relationship between our urban past and our broader global reality. [more]
| | Global Goods and the Country House: Comparative Perspectives, 1650-1800
By Jon Stobart (UCL Press, 2023)
Global goods were central to the material culture of eighteenth-century country houses. Across Europe, mahogany furniture, Chinese wallpapers and Indian textiles formed the backdrop to genteel practices of drinking sweetened coffee, tea and chocolate from Chinese porcelain. They tied these houses and their wealthy owners into global systems of supply and the processes of colonialism and empire. Global Goods and the Country House builds on these narratives, and then challenges them by decentring our perspective. It offers a comparative framework that explores the definition, ownership and meaning of global goods outside the usual context of European imperial powers. [more]
| | | | DIY Urbanism in Africa: Politics and Practice
Edited by Stephen Marr and Patience Mususa
(Bloomsbury, 2023)
Protracted economic crises, accelerating inequalities, and increased resource scarcity present significant challenges for the majority of Africa's urban population. Limited state capacity and widespread infrastructure deficiencies common in cities across the continent often require residents to draw on their own resources, knowledge, and expertise to resolve these life and livelihood dilemmas. DIY Urbanism in Africa investigates these practices. It develops a theoretical framework through which to analyze them, and it presents a series of case studies to demonstrate how residents invent new DIY tactics and strategies in response to security, place-making, or economic problems.[more]
| | | | German Colonialism in Africa: Architecture, Art, Urbanism, and Visual Culture
Edited by Itohan Osayimwese
(Bloomsbury, 2023)
Germany developed a large colonial empire over the last thirty years of the 19th century, spanning regions of the west coast of Africa to its east coast and beyond. Largely forgotten for many years, recent intense debates about Africa's cultural heritage in European museums have brought this period of African and German history back into the spotlight. German Colonialism in Africa and its Legacies brings much-needed context to these debates, exploring perspectives on the architecture, art, urbanism, and visual culture of German colonialism in Africa, and its legacies in postcolonial and present-day Namibia, Cameroon, and Germany. [more]
| | | | Globalization, Cities, and Firms in Twentieth-Century India
By Chinmay Tumbe
Business History Review, June 2022
This article explores the linkages between globalization, cities, and firms in twentieth-century India. Since the interwar period in the early twentieth century, India withdrew from the global economy, reintegrating only in the 1990s. This reshaped the metropolitan hierarchy in India in specific ways, whether through international migration and creation of new supply chains before 1991 or by foreign direct investment in the final decade of the twentieth century. Firms—both Indian and multinational—had to respond to different waves of globalization and accordingly made location choices that in turn shaped the urban evolution. More broadly, this article points to the relevance of integrating urban history more closely with business history in studies of globalization. [more]
| | |  | | Historicizing Real Estate: The East India Company in Early Colonial Bombay
By Issar Sukriti
Enterprise & Society, October 2023
Property-as-real-estate emerged in Bombay at least by the turn of the nineteenth century. Real estate is historicized through previously unexplored archival sources (qualitative and quantitative) by analyzing how property was transacted in a colonial port, and how it became embedded in global circuits of commerce and the accumulation strategies of locals and the English East India Company. The paper demonstrates the existence by this time of legal institutions of publicity and property registration, specialized intermediaries, price-finding mechanisms such as auctions, and imaginaries of a property market as an abstract entity marked by general trends and values. Contrary to the literature that sees prices in this period as erratic and inconsistent, a systematic analysis of prices suggests a rationalized and standardized property market. These findings push back the timeline usually associated with the development of real estate in India. [more]
| | | | The Business of Beaux-Arts: Architecture, Racial Capitalism, and Branqueamento in Belle Époque Brazil
By D.B. Sadifhian
Architectural Histories, November 2023
The turn of the 20th century witnessed profound economic and spatial change in Brazil. Following the suppression of the Atlantic slave trade and the abolition of slavery (1888) during the Imperial era, leaders of the First Republic (1889–1930) outlined a program of national development that took aim at the physiognomy of Brazil’s capital city, Rio de Janeiro. Driven by the social Darwinist theory of whitening (branqueamento), municipal leaders viewed French classical architecture as an instrument for attracting European capital and immigration, thus hastening Brazil’s evolution into a ‘modern’ white nation.[more]
| | | | Global Archives Online
By Linnaeus University
Global Archives Online is directory of open digital collections for the study of colonial and global history. The Global Archives Online is designed to identify and locate open resources for the study of and research on colonial and global history. Aimed primarily at students and researchers interested in imperial, colonial, and global history, the directory gives users around the world an overview of major digital collections containing a variety of primary sources, including digitised manuscripts, newspapers, books, pamphlets, maps, images, and audio-visual material. The user-friendly interface of Global Archives Online allows users to search systematically and helps to organise digital research. In addition, it offers an efficient internal search function and provides useful insider information. All resources included in the directory are open access. [more]
|  | | E. H. Duckworth Photograph Collection
By Northwestern University
Northwestern University has announced that the E. H. Duckworth Photograph Collection has been digitized and is now available for use. Duckworth was a British expatriate officer who lived in Nigeria. He was the founder and original editor of Nigeria magazine. The collection consists of some 12,500 images pertaining to Nigerian culture, history and inhabitants. Please find the link to the collection here. [link]
| Conferences, Workshops, and Events | | Creative Methodologies: Writing the stories of working women from popular classes in African urban milieux, 1920 – 1970
Aubervilliers, France
January 8-10, 2024
IMAF (Institut des Mondes Africains), in partnership with the European Research Council, Women at work and the CNRS, is organizing the Creative Methodologies conference, which marks the beginning of the ERC WomatWork. [more]
| | | Calls for Papers & Proposals | CFP: Cities across the Eastern Mediterranean blog posts
The Metropole
Cities across the Eastern Mediterranean have long shared common material, cultural, and social linkages. This is due to a myriad of factors most notably proximity, trade, and shared governance. Thus the development of the built environment constituting these cities have historically evolved along similar patterns. To highlight both the commonality and divergence of such developments. The Metropole is looking for submissions regarding any aspect of Eastern Mediterranean urbanity for its May 2024 theme month. Guidelines can be seen here. Final submissions should be between 1,200 and 3,000 words. Authors of selected essays will be compensated $200 for their post. Please send pitches to themetropole@urbanhistory.org.
| CFP: Special Issue on Toxic Ecologies of the Global South
The Global South
In this special issue of The Global South, the editors invite contributors to critically engage with what Sourit Bhattacharya theorized as “the toxic ecologies of the Global South” that reflects “the disposable nature of life and living in this part of the world” as well as the “socio-economic and physio-ecological conditions characteristics of the Global South.” Given the saturation of Global South ecologies with wastes, toxins, and pollutants; we invite contributors to examine the implications of unprecedented exposure to toxic contamination and pollution from various sources, such as industrial pollution, chemical and electronic waste, fossil fuel extractions, and climate change in the Global South. Contributors can also reflect on toxic disasters that lead to several other outcomes such as energy conflicts, and climate migrations from (and within) the Global South; or the various ways in which toxic waste remakes the landscapes and ecologies of the Global South. [more]
Submission deadline: December 31, 2023
| CFP: Rethinking the History of Global Capitalism conference
Rio de Janeiro
March 12-14, 2024
This conference aims to rethink capitalism from a global perspective. With a focus on interdisciplinary and comparative approaches, the organizers particularly encourage theoretical-historiographical syntheses. They also welcome case studies insofar as they combine their empirical investigations with fresh theoretical, conceptual, or methodological perspectives that help us rethink more broadly historical capitalism as a changing global process. [more]
Submission deadline: January 1, 2024
| CFP: 47th Annual Conference of the Society for Caribbean Studies
Virtual
July 3-6, 2024
The Society for Caribbean Studies (SCS) invites scholars to submit abstracts of no more than 250 words for research papers, on the Hispanic, Francophone, Dutch and Anglophone Caribbean and their diasporas, for presentation at our 2024 conference. We invite papers from all disciplines of Caribbean Studies across the arts, humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. The Society is eager to receive proposals that centre the non-Anglophone Caribbean.[more]
Submission deadline: January 12, 2024
| CFP: Research Symposium Black Experiences in the Wider Atlantic: Approaches, Methods and the Archive
Penn State University
April 12, 2024
The Research Symposium on the “Black Experiences in the Wider Atlantic” intends to foster conversations, discussions, and intellectual collaboration between historians, literary scholars, African/Black Diasporic researchers, writers, and graduate students interested in discussing approaches, methods, and archival experiences when studying and writing about Black and African descendant people’s experiences in the wider Atlantic. We desire panels that demonstrate cross-generational and academic influences between scholars from all relevant disciplines at any point in their scholarly careers. With these aspirations in mind, we encourage proposals from advanced graduate students, postdocs, junior and senior faculty, and those who work outside of the academy. [more]
Submission deadline: January 15, 2024
| CFP: Interracial Intimacies in France and the French Empire
French Politics, Culture, and Society
French Politics, Culture, and Society seeks contributions to a special issue on interracial intimacy in France and the French empire, co-edited by Elisa Camiscioli and Caroline Séquin. We welcome contributions from history, the social sciences, and cultural studies. In addition to research articles, we will consider shorter reflections on recent events or debates. Abstracts (and article manuscripts if selected) may be submitted in English or French. The issue explores sex, love, conjugality, and desire across the color line in any period of French history. For more than two decades, scholars have shown how such ostensibly private practices have always been matters of state, with interracial intimacy buttressing, challenging, and even redefining broader social, political, economic, and cultural concerns. In the early modern period, race-mixing (métissage) was tolerated in some imperial spaces, whether to foster assimilation or broker political and trade relations. By the early eighteenth century, however, the Codes Noirs signaled the repression of marital (and sometimes sexual) relations across racial boundaries in parts of the empire. And while republican universalism has prevented, in principle, the adoption of laws banning interracial relations in the modern era, a range of legal and extralegal strategies has impeded the practice of interracial intimacy.
[more]
Submission deadline: January 15, 2024
| CFP: 7th International Conference of Contemporary Affairs in Architecture and Urbanism
Alanya, Turkey
May 23-24, 2024
The 7th International Conference of Contemporary Affairs in Architecture and Urbanism, ICCAUA2024, is being jointly organized by Alanya University in collaboration with Anant National University. The conference will feature both in-person sessions at Alanya University and online sessions mutually will be hosted by Anant National University. The conference brings together all the theories, manifestos and methodologies on contemporary architecture and urban spaces to raise the understanding of the future of architecture and urban planning. Overall, the International Conference of Contemporary Affairs in Architecture and Urbanism ICCAUA2024 aimed to establish a bridge between theory and practice in the built environment. Thus, it reports on the latest research findings and innovative approaches, and methodologies for creating, assessing, and understanding contemporary built environments. [more]
Submission deadline: January 23, 2024
| CFP: 17th meeting of the Urban History/Planning History Group - Real Estate Agency: Land, Housing and Finance in Urban and Planning History
University of Sydney
July 11-13, 2024
Urban History/Planning History Group invites papers on all aspects of urban and planning history in Australia, Aoteraoa/New Zealand and the wider Pacific region. As always, this forum welcomes contributions that explore the history of planning, design and regulation of public spaces, infrastructure, and private development; papers on planners, urban designers and architects involved in the city-making process in any period; and work on the historical evolution of urban policy for housing, heritage, the natural environment, and industry. [more]
Submission deadline: January 31, 2024
| CFP: The Global History Student Conference
Humboldt Universität
June 7-9, 2024
Global history targets relations, flows, and actors that challenge the assumption of the nation-state as a natural and inevitable category of historical analysis. It calls attention to the importance of transnational, trans-regional, or trans-local connections and their influence on the past. We invite scholars of the modern, early modern, medieval or classical periods to consider submitting their research. Moreover, global history not only challenges geographical borders, but also tends to transcend disciplinary boundaries. Accordingly, we welcome proposals from any academic field that has points of contact with history (e.g. art history, area studies, social sciences, etc).[more]
Submission deadline: January 31, 2024
| CFP: Spatial Humanities 2024 Conference
Bamberg, Germany
September 25-27, 2024
Spatial Humanities 2024 is concerned with geospatial technologies, such as Geographical Information Systems (GIS), and what they have to contribute to humanities research. The main aim is to explore and demonstrate the contributions to knowledge enabled by these technologies, approaches and methods within and beyond the digital humanities. This year the conference will take place in Bamberg, Germany, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Accordingly, the conference will feature a special session with a focus on Spatial Humanities and Heritage.[more]
Submission deadline: February 15, 2024
| CFP: Commodities and Environments in Early Modern Global Asia
European University Institute in Florence
November 13-15, 2024
The conference will explore the relationship between environments and commodities in early modern Global Asia between 1400 and 1800. It will investigate the environmental consequences in these regions of the extraction, production, and trade in commodities, aiming to integrate multiple historiographies which have sometimes operated in mutual isolation (material culture, environmental history, history of science). This conference aims to integrate multiple historiographies which have sometimes operated in mutual isolation: (i) the literature on material culture and commodities in global history; (ii) the growing field of environmental history; and (iii) studies in the history of science which have examined how the natural sciences and ethnography served Europe’s quest for trade, profit, and colonial domination. [more]
Submission deadline: February 20, 2024
| Fellowships, Grants, & Awards | | Wolfsonian–FIU Fellowship Program
Florida
2024-2025
The Wolfsonian–Florida International University is a museum and research center that promotes the examination of modern visual and material culture. The focus of the Wolfsonian collection is on North American and European decorative arts, propaganda, architecture, and industrial and graphic design of the period 1851–1945. The collection includes works on paper (including posters, prints and design drawings), furniture, paintings, sculpture, glass, textiles, ceramics, lighting and other appliances, and many other kinds of objects. The Wolfsonian’s library has approximately 50,000 rare books, periodicals, and ephemeral items. [more]
Application deadline: December 31, 2024
| | | | Princeton-Mellon Fellows in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities
Princeton University
The Princeton-Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities is an interdisciplinary program supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation that combines the efforts of a diverse group of faculty, programs, and schools to develop a dynamic understanding of urban issues past, present, and future. Its theme, Cities on the Edge, encompass several interrelated concepts, including the juncture of built/natural environmental studies, center/periphery, hemispheric comparatives, migration, New Jersey urbanism, social justice, the humanities as a force of change, and the margin as a place of radical possibility. [more]
Application deadline: January 7, 2024
| | | | Southern African History Book Prize
The Southern African Historical Society and the Historical Association of South Africa are inaugurating a book prize for the best scholarly history publication in book form. The book should be published by a southern African-based press and should be of scholarly and academic merit, as recognised by peers. The first prize will be awarded at the 29th Biennial SAHS conference at the University of Johannesburg in June 2024 and will consider books published with an ISBN publication date of 2021 or 2022. [more]
Application deadline: January 10, 2024
| | | | Collegium Helveticum Fellowships
Zurich
2024-2025
As the joint institute for advanced studies of ETH Zurich, the University of Zurich, and the Zurich University of the Arts, the Collegium Helveticum facilitates research and artistic work across all disciplines. Located in the former Semper Observatory, the Collegium provides a thriving intellectual atmosphere and ideal working conditions for its fellows and promotes exchange across disciplines, engaging different audiences. Fellows are free to pursue their individual projects as outlined in their application and receive support from the Collegium’s team. Projects carried out at the Collegium may convince both by their relevance and originality, spanning from applied science to blue-sky research, as well as from fine arts to artistic research. [more]
Application deadline: February 15, 2024
| | |  | | David Berry Fellowship in the History of Scotland and the Scottish People
University College London
2024-2025
The Fellowship is a new award drawing on the David Berry Fund, donated to the Society in 1929 and used, until 2022, to support the David Berry Prize in Scottish History. The change to a Fellowship from 2024 is in line with the Society’s strategic aims of using available funds to support new research and activity by historians. The David Berry Fellowship may be used to undertake research, and to cover the costs of research, into an aspect of the history of Scotland and / or the history of the Scottish people within the United Kingdom or worldwide, within 12 months of 1 March 2024. The Society is particularly keen to support activities for which alternative sources of funding are very limited, or do not exist. The Society seeks to provide grants to those in greatest need of funding, where options for institutional support are minimal or not available.[more]
Application deadline: March 1, 2024 | | | |