Vol. 51, January 2024
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.
| Narrating Urban Lives
Join Us for an exciting series of five events that emerged from GUHP's "Dream Conversations"
Save the dates below!
| Announcing Our New Board Members
Anwesha Ghosh, National Law School India University, Bengaluru
E. Sasu K. Sewordor, Critical Urbanisms, University of Basel
Wangui Kimari, UTA -Do Nairobi and University of Cape Town
Katherine Zubovich, University at Buffalo SUNY
Marcio Siwi, Towson University, Maryland
Emilio De Antuñano, Trinity University, Texas
| Call For Book Proposals
Palgrave Macmillan is interested in expanding its publications in the field of Urban History and Global Urban History. If you have a project or book proposal you would like to discuss with them, please contact Carly Silver (carly.silver@palgrave-usa.com)
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Children of the Soil: The Power of Built Form in Urban Madagascar
By Tasha Rijke-Epstein
(Duke University Press, 2023)
In Children of the Soil, Tasha Rijke-Epstein offers an urban history of the port city of Mahajanga, Madagascar, before, during, and after colonization. Drawing on archival and ethnographic evidence, she weaves together the lives and afterlives of built spaces to show how city residents negotiated imperial encroachment, colonial rule, and global racial capitalism over two centuries. From Mahajanga’s hilltop palace to the alluvial depths of its cesspools, the city’s spaces were domains for ideological debates between rulers and subjects, French colonizers and indigenous Malagasy peoples, and Comorian migrants and Indian traders. In these spaces, Mahajanga’s residents expressed competing moral theories about power over people and the land. The built world was also where varying populations reckoned with human, ancestral, and ecological pasts and laid present and future claims to urban belonging...[more]
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In the Shadow of War and Empire: Industrialization, Nation-Building, and Working-Class Politics in Turkey
By Görkem Akgöz
(Brill, 2023)
In the Shadow of War and Empire offers a site-specific history of Ottoman and Turkish industrialisation through the lens of a mid-nineteenth-century cotton factory in the “Turkish Manchester,” the name chosen by the Ottomans for the industrial complex they built in the 1840s in Istanbul, which, in the contemporary words of one of the country’s most prominent contemporary Marxist theorists, became “the secret to and the basis of Turkish capitalism" in the 1930s…[more]
| | | The City in the City: Architecture and Change in London's Financial District
By Amy Thomas
(MIT Press, 2023)
An exploration of the dramatic transformation of London's financial district after 1945, viewed at four spatial scales: city, street, facade, interior. In The City in the City, Amy Thomas offers the first in-depth architectural and urban history of London's financial district, the City of London, from the period of rebuilding after World War II to the explosive climax of financial deregulation in the 1980s and its long aftermath. Thomas examines abstract financial ideas, political ideology, and invisible markets as concrete realities; working on four spatial scales—city, street, facade, and interior—the book explores the grand plans, hidden alleys, neo-Georgian elevations, and sweaty dealing floors that have made the financial center work…[more]
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Poverty, Children and the Poor Law in Industrial Belfast, 1880-1918
By Olwen Purdue and Georgina Laragy
(Liverpool University Press, 2024)
The late nineteenth-century city acted as a magnet for the poor of rural Ireland, attracting them with the promise of employment and economic independence. For many, however, urban life meant economic precarity, marginalization and destitution, with the workhouse as an all-too-present reality. Young families were particularly vulnerable, with the result that thousands of children found themselves confined within the workhouse walls. This book explores the changing role of the Irish poor law in child welfare in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century city. Taking as its focus Belfast, a burgeoning industrial and port city at the heart of a global trade network and a city deeply divided along political and confessional lines, it examines the ways in which that city's poorest children and their families engaged with the poor law and used the workhouse as part of their economy of makeshifts…[more]
| | |  | The New Suburbia: How Diversity Remade Suburban Life in Los Angeles after 1945
By Becky M. Nicolaides
(Oxford University Press, 2023)
The New Suburbia explores how the suburbs transitioned from bastions of segregation into spaces of multiracial living. They are the second generation of suburbs after 1945, moving from starkly segregated whiteness into a more varied, uneven social landscape. The suburbs came to hold a broad cross-section of people—rich, poor, Black American, Latino, Asian, immigrant, the unhoused, and the lavishly housed, and everyone in between. In the new suburbia, white advantage persisted, but it existed alongside rising inequality, ethnic and racial diversity, and new family configurations. Through it all, the common denominators of suburbia remained—low-slung landscapes of single-family homes and yards and families seeking the good life. On this familiar landscape, the American dream endured even as the dreamers changed. The New Suburbia focuses on Los Angeles, at the vanguard of this trend…[more]
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Soviet Adventures in the Land of the Capitalists: Ilf and Petrov's American Road Trip
By Lisa A. Kirschenbaum
(Cambridge University Press, 2024)
In 1935, two Soviet satirists, Ilia Ilf and Evgeny Petrov, undertook a 10,000 mile American road trip from New York to Hollywood and back accompanied only by their guide and chauffeur, a gregarious Russian Jewish immigrant and his American-born, Russian-speaking wife. They immortalized their journey in a popular travelog that condemned American inequality and racism even as it marveled at American modernity and efficiency. Lisa Kirschenbaum reconstructs the epic journey of the two Soviet funnymen and their encounters with a vast cast of characters, ranging from famous authors, artists, poets and filmmakers to unemployed hitchhikers and revolutionaries. Using the authors' notes, US and Russian archives, and even FBI files, she reveals the role of ordinary individuals in shaping foreign relations as Ilf, Petrov and the immigrants, communists, and fellow travelers who served as their hosts, guides, and translators became creative actors in cultural exchange between the two countries…[more]
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Indigenous Peoples and Borders
Edited by Sheryl Lightfoot and Elsa Stamatopoulou
(Duke University Press, 2024)
The legacies of borders are far-reaching for Indigenous Peoples. This collection offers new ways of understanding borders by departing from statist approaches to territoriality. Bringing together the fields of border studies, human rights, international relations, and Indigenous studies, it features a wide range of voices from across academia, public policy, and civil society. The contributors explore the profound and varying impacts of borders on Indigenous Peoples around the world and the ways borders are challenged and worked around. From Bangladesh’s colonially imposed militarized borders to resource extraction in the Russian Arctic and along the Colombia-Ecuador border to the transportation of toxic pesticides from the United States to Mexico, the chapters examine sovereignty, power, and obstructions to Indigenous rights and self-determination as well as globalization and the economic impacts of borders. Indigenous Peoples and Borders proposes future action that is informed by Indigenous Peoples’ voices, needs, and advocacy...[more]
| | | The Overlooked Nigerian Activist Whose Story Offers a Lesson for Today’s Labor Movement
By Halimat Somotan
Time Magazine, (December, 2023)
Around the world, workers are mobilizing for higher wages while citizens are questioning the very functioning of democratic institutions. In the United States, workers across various industries from film to car manufacturers to coffee shops are demanding adequate compensation. In Nigeria, similar demands are being made. Meanwhile, just as in the U.S., there is rising distrust in electoral practices. With ordinary people in Nigeria facing significant hardship partly because of the government’s removal of a critical oil subsidy, the country’s largest unions called for and went on a short national strike in November…[more]
| | |  | The Plague in Madras: The Making of an “Immune” City
By Aditya Ramesh
The Journal of Urban History (December, 2023)
In 1912, the Lancet published an article titled “The City of Madras and its immunity from epidemic plague.” The Lancet’s article was part of a spate of investigations by sanitary officials, bacteriologists, and epidemiologists into the reasons as to why the city remained largely free from the plague pandemic, which hit colonial India especially hard in the latter half of the 1890s. The absent epidemic in Madras suggests new ways to understand plague in colonial India and the relationship between the etiology of epidemics and cities more broadly. Colonial officials assumed that the plague would affect Madras in a similar fashion to the deadly outbreaks in Bombay and Hong Kong. The article follows varied explanations for the absence of the plague, showing how tropical environments were hardly inherently vulnerable to disease. Rather, the disease was constituted in specific urban environments, which had implications on understanding of disease vulnerability and immunity. [more]
| | | | Gold Rushes, Universities and Globalization, 1840–1910
By Caitlin Harvey
Past & Present (November 2023)
Clues to the gilded heritage of public universities exist today on the surface of those institutions’ campuses: in their named edifices, buildings and monuments. These monuments gesture to a history of universities, or of ‘colleges on a hill’, that in fact began underground…[more]
| | |  | | Migration and Asylum Lab
By Stanford University
The Migration and Asylum Lab seeks to inform immigration courts about country conditions in Latin America through the use of the most up-to-date and rigorous research on issues relevant to asylum cases. The scholars involved in the lab are supremely qualified to provide current and dependable information on country conditions in the context of asylum proceedings. They include political scientists, data analysts, historians, and international relations scholars. They have decades of experience in their field and are widely recognized for their work, which includes peer-reviewed books published by university presses and articles in the top academic journals. The Lab’s mission is to provide thorough, dependable country conditions information to help adjudicators to make well informed decisions as to the merit of claims for asylum protection. Our role as expert witnesses is not to act as advocates, but rather to conduct impartial analysis of country conditions based on a wide range of sources, including academic scholarship, government and non-government reports, and media reporting from inside the country and the international press…[more]
|  | | Digital Exhibit: The Dawn of Rapid Transit in NYC
By The Gotham Center for New York City History
In this new digital exhibit from the Gotham Center, Elizabeth K. Moore previews her forthcoming history of the Long Island Rail Road (LIRR) with a spotlight on the LIRR's role as a forerunner of rapid transit in New York City during the steam age. As the nation’s oldest railroad still operating under its original name, the LIRR is freighted with almost two centuries of history. Its early years show how radical the advent of steam was for the economy, social habits, and even basic conceptions of time and space. Studies of greater New York tend to focus on the automobile's impact on the city's built environment. But the railroads were here first. And what they built shaped everything that followed. As the first form of mechanized transportation serving commuters in Brooklyn and Queens, the LIRR also built NYC’s first, short-lived subway. It ran the fastest trains in North America, which were, ever so briefly, Wall Street’s prime conduit for business intelligence. For a century, those trains played a critical, and very controversial, role in the urbanization of the two boroughs that now hold most of the city’s population. They also brought dozens of Long Island villages into being. And they were the economic lifeline for agriculture in the region. But the legacy of this period is a track network that demonstrates the steep price New Yorkers paid in leaving its development in the hands of private enterprise. [more]
| Conferences, Workshops, and Events | | Transcribe-a-thon: Remaking the World of Arturo Schomburg
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York
January 24, 2024
Fisk University and the Schomburg Center have partnered to create a digital edition of the archival papers of Arturo Schomburg, the bibliophile who built two of the world’s most important collections on Black history—one in Harlem and another in Nashville. Join teams in each city to celebrate Schomburg’s 150th birthday by helping transcribe his newly digitized papers. We welcome all participants—no previous transcription experience necessary! [more]
| | | | The British Way in Trade Policy in global perspective: from the Corn Laws to ‘Global Britain’
Institute of Historical Research, London
February 6, 2024
This workshop is designed broadly to come within the ambit of the AHRC-funded Letters of Richard Cobden Online project and will draw from those letters in order to enhance our understanding of British trade policy in its formative period. This seminar is designed to bring together historians, policymakers, politicians, and members of think-tanks and interested academics and members of the public. [more]
| | | Lecture series: Architectural History & Theory Seminar, University of Edinburgh
January 30-April 2, 2024
Edinburgh, Scotland and Online
Each year the History of Architecture and Built Environment (HABE) research group in ESALA welcomes guest speakers and colleagues to present an evening seminar on their research. The events are a fantastic opportunity to hear about the latest research in the fields from researchers working in the UK, Europe and beyond. These events are free and open to all. This academic year, the AH&T Seminar Series will run as live hybrid events. [more]
| | | Calls for Papers & Proposals | 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: Phanariot Materialities: Aspects of Domestic Architecture, Urban Culture, and Social Mobility
Istanbul, 29–30 June 2024
The Research Center of Anatolian Civilizations (ANAMED), in collaboration with Meşher and Sismanoglio Megaro, welcomes submissions from scholars at any stage in their careers to an international symposium on Phanariot material culture to be held in Istanbul on 29–30 June 2024. As part of an overarching three-year research program entitled “Phanariot Materialities,” scientifically led by Namık Günay Erkal, Firuzan Melike Sümertaş, and Haris Theodorelis-Rigas, the symposium will focus on the material and social history of the Phanariots, the Greek-Orthodox Christian notables of Ottoman Istanbul. It aims at facilitating interdisciplinary discussion on Phanariot material culture, with a particular focus on residential architecture, urbanism, family and households, communalities, neighborhoods, domesticity, etiquette, and performativity. In this light, Phanar may be approached not only as an urban neighborhood or ecclesiastical center but also as the heart of a spatial network extending far beyond Istanbul and even beyond the former Ottoman territories...[more]
Submission deadline: January 30, 2024
| CFP: 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: 20th Biennial Conference: The (High Density) Metropolis and Region in Planning HIstory
Hong Kong and Online
June 28, 2024 (Virtual) and July 2-5, 2024 (in-person)
The 20th IPHS Biennial Conference is to be held on 2-5 July 2024 in Hong Kong. As Asia’s World City, Hong Kong offers a unique entry point to variant narratives of planning in the past, and against this backdrop core themes of the conference will be port city developments, colonial urban planning, postcolonial planning dynamics, new towns, regions and regional planning in history, cities and the natural environment, and city planning in high-density urban contexts...[more]
Submission deadline: February 19, 2024
| CFP: International Conference: From Shtetl to Post-Jewish Town
POLIN Museum, Warsaw
September 8-10, 2024
While the historical shtetl has been studied extensively, the post-Jewish town, as a historical phenomenon and evolving site of contested memory, has received less attention. After the Holocaust, the many towns where Jewish communities had lived for centuries and where they had created a distinctive way of life became places without Jews. We want to explore this process of transforming shtetls into post-Jewish space…[more]
Submission deadline: February 29, 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 |  | | Digital Humanism Fellowship
Institute for Human Sciences
The fellowship aims to bring eminent scholars from a wide range of academic fields to the Institute and allow them to pursue cutting-edge research on all aspects of the networked society. Each semester, a Senior Visiting Fellow spends a one-month fellowship at the IWM. Additionally, two Junior Visiting Fellows come to the Institute each semester, carry out their own research projects, and enjoy the possibility of an intensified collaboration and discussion with the Senior Visiting Fellow. Candidates for Junior Visiting Fellowships are expected to pursue research on digitalization’s intersection with societal, economic, and geopolitical dimensions, as well as other relevant research foci from the humanities and social sciences. Two fellows will be invited to spend a period of three consecutive months at the Institute in autumn 2024. Generally, fellowships start on the first day of the month and end on the last day of the month…[more]
Application deadline: February 4th, 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
| | | | NEH-Hagley Fellowship
Hagley Library, Wilmington, Delaware
2024-2025
The NEH-Hagley Fellowship on Business, Culture, and Society supports residencies at the Hagley Library in Wilmington, Delaware for junior and senior scholars whose projects make use of Hagley’s substantial research collections. Scholars must have completed all requirements for their doctoral degrees by the February 15 application deadline. In accordance with NEH requirements, these fellowships are restricted to United States citizens or to foreign nationals who have been living in the United States for at least three years. These fellowships are made possible by support from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Fellowships may be four to twelve months in length and will provide a monthly stipend of $5,000 and complimentary lodging in housing on Hagley’s property...[more]
Application deadline: February 15, 2024
| | |  | | Diamonstein-Spielvogel Fellowship Program
The New York Public Library
The New York Public Library is pleased to offer the Diamonstein-Spielvogel Fellowship Program to support advanced research at the Library's flagship Stephen A. Schwarzman Building. Fellowships are open to Ph.D. candidates, post-doctoral scholars, and independent researchers with projects that would significantly benefit from research conducted onsite at the Schwarzman Building. Projects requiring access to original materials including manuscripts, archives, books, photographs, prints, maps, newspapers, and journals will be given preference, but all worthy projects will be considered. Applicants studying the humanities as well as those working in the visual, auditory/performing, and literary arts are welcome to apply. Projects focused on science, technology, psychology, public policy, education, and other areas are also eligible, but only if the proposed project is centered on humanities-related methodologies...[more]
Application deadline: February 19, 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
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