Vol. 52, February 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 our "Narrating Urban Lives," series:
Five virtual events which emerged out of GUHP's "Dream Conversations."
Save the dates below!
| Narrating Urban Lives Recording: City and Planet
If you missed the first conversation in our Narrating Urban Lives series "City and Planet," featuring Maria Kaika, Matthew Vitz, and Carl Nightingale, in a conversation moderated by Greet De Block and Wangui Kimari, you can view the recording here.
| Related Network Event Spotlight
|  | 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.
The IPHS’ Hong Kong forum grants a multidisciplinary opportunity for scholars to come together to discuss different aspects of the urban past. Planners, architects, urban historians, geographers, art and architectural historians, sociologists, as well as other scholars are welcome to present the latest research findings on various aspects of city development and planning. For postgraduate students, special sessions will be organized.
Deadline for submissions: February 19, 2024
|  | Society for American City and Regional Planning History
20th National Conference on Planning History
University of California, San Diego and Online
October 24-26, 2024
SACRPH cordially invites scholars and practitioners to present papers and talks on all aspects of urban, regional, and community planning history and their relationship to urban and metropolitan studies. The conference will be held in multiple formats, including: virtual presentations (ahead of the conference); in-person tours on Friday, October 25, 2024; and in-person presentations on Saturday, October 26. It will also include a keynote on Thursday night. All Saturday events will take place on the campus of the University of California, San Diego.
SACRPH is an interdisciplinary organization dedicated to promoting humanistic scholarship on the planning of metropolitan regions. SACRPH members include historians, practicing planners, geographers, environmentalists, architects, landscape designers, public policy makers, preservationists, community organizers, students, and scholars from across the world. SACRPH publishes a quarterly journal, The Journal of Planning History, hosts a biennial conference, and sponsors awards for research and publication in the field of planning history.
The Program Committee welcomes proposals for complete paper panel sessions (of three or four papers), as well as individual papers, roundtables, and workshops. We also encourage submissions that propose innovative formats and that engage questions of teaching and learning, digital information, and publishing. And we wish to support graduate students and early career researchers with mentoring workshops.
Deadline for submissions: March 15, 2024
Register Now
|
Making Space: Neighbors, Officials, and North African Migrants in the Suburbs of Paris and Lyon
By Melissa K. Byrnes
(University of Nebraska Press, 2024)
Since the 2005 urban protests in France, public debate has often centered on questions of how the country has managed its relationship with its North African citizens and residents. In Making Space Melissa K. Byrnes considers how four French suburbs near Paris and Lyon reacted to rapidly growing populations of North Africans, especially Algerians before, during, and after the Algerian War. In particular, Byrnes investigates what motivated local actors such as municipal officials, regional authorities, employers, and others to become involved in debates over migrants’ rights and welfare, and the wide variety of strategies community leaders developed in response to the migrants’ presence...[more]
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2020: One City, Seven People, and the Year Everything Changed
By Eric Klinenberg
(Penguin Random House, 2024)
2020 will go down alongside 1914, 1929, and 1968 as one of the most consequential years in history. This riveting and affecting book is the first attempt to capture the full human experience of that fateful time. At the heart of 2020 are seven vivid profiles of ordinary New Yorkers—including an elementary school principal, a bar manager, a subway custodian, and a local political aide—whose experiences illuminate how Americans, and people across the globe, reckoned with 2020. Through these poignant stories, we revisit our own moments of hope and fear, the profound tragedies and losses in our communities, the mutual aid networks that brought us together, and the social movements that hinted at the possibilities of a better world...[more]
| | |  | Multiracial Identities in Colonial French Africa: Race, Childhood, and Citizenship
By Rachel Jean-Baptiste
(Cambridge University Press, 2023)
Centered in West and West-Central African towns in the twentieth century years of French colonial rule -- Dakar and St. Louis, Senegal; Brazzaville, French Congo; and Libreville, Gabon -- Multiracial Identities in Colonial French Africa investigates the fluctuating identities of métis. Despite increasingly hardened visions of racial difference in colonial governance in French Africa after World War I, interracial sexual relationships persisted, resulting in the births of thousands of children. These children, mostly born to African women and European men, sparked significant debate in French society about the status of multiracial people, debates historians have termed 'the métis problem.' Drawing on extensive archival and oral history research in Gabon, Republic of Congo, Senegal, and France, Rachel Jean-Baptiste investigates the fluctuating identities of métis. Crucially, she centres claims by métis themselves to access French social and citizenship rights amidst the refusal by fathers to recognize their lineage, and in the context of changing African racial thought and practice...[more]
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After the Fall: The Legacy of Fascism in Rome's Architectural and Urban History
By Flavia Marcello
(Bloomsbury, 2024)
After the Fall explores the many traces of fascism that can be found in the architecture and urban form of Rome – from its buildings, monuments and piazze, to its street names and graffiti. It reveals how the legacy of this short period in history shaped - and continues to shape - Rome's contemporary cityscape in powerful ways, and examines what this can tell us about the persistence of troubling political and historical legacies in the built environment. Adding a new chapter to the architectural history of Rome, this fascinating history brings architecture, politics, and art together as living, contested experiences in a host of different locations around contemporary Rome... [more]
| | |  | Police and the Empire City: Race and the Origins of Modern Policing in New York
By Matthew Guariglia
(Duke University Press, 2023)
During the years between the Civil War and World War II, police in New York City struggled with how to control a diverse metropolis. In Police and the Empire City Matthew Guariglia tells the history of the New York Police Department to show how its origins were built upon and inseparably entwined with the history of race, ethnicity, and whiteness in the United States. Guariglia explores the New York City Police Department through its periods of experimentation and violence as police experts imported tactics from the US occupation of the Philippines and Cuba, devised modern bureaucratic techniques to better suppress Black communities, and infiltrated supposedly unknowable immigrant neighborhoods. Campaigns to remake the police department created an urban landscape where power, gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, crime, and bodies collided and provided a foundation for the supposedly color-blind, technocratic, federally backed, and surveillance-based policing of today...[more]
| | | The Urban Life of Workers in Post-Soviet Russia
By Alexandrina Vanke
(Manchester University Press, 2024)
Despite the intense processes of deindustrialisation around the world, the working class continues to play an important role in post-industrial societies. However, working-class people are often stigmatised, morally judged and depicted negatively in dominant discourses. This book challenges stereotypical representations of workers, building on research into the everyday worlds of working-class and ordinary people in Russia's post-industrial cities. The urban life of workers in post-Soviet Russia is centred on the stories of local communities engaged in the everyday struggles that occur in deindustrialising settings under neoliberal neo-authoritarianism...[more]
| | | | Indebted Mobilities: Indian Youth, Migration, and the Internationalizing University
By Susan Thomas
(University of Chicago Press, 2024)
As states have reduced funding to public universities, many of those institutions have turned to overseas students as a vital, alternative source of revenue. Students from India have especially been seen as among the most desirable populations, as they’re typically fluent in English and overwhelmingly enroll in professional fields deemed critical to the knowledge economy. The large numbers of these youth migrating for their education tend to be viewed as a shining example of the value of the contemporary global university and how it enables ambitious people to secure opportunities not available to them...[more]
| | |  | | The Global Rise of the British Property Development Sector, 1945–1975
By Alistair Kefford
Past & Present (January 2024)
In the three decades after 1945 the British property development sector exploded in size and began operating on a worldwide scale. The largest property companies in the world were British in this era and they built office blocks, shopping centres and hotels in cities all over the world. These overseas property developments overlapped firmly with the pre-existing political and economic geographies of empire, and their speculative transnational financing was made possible by allying with London’s financial sector and the world of ‘gentlemanly capitalism’. This article surveys the rise, financialization, and imperially inflected internationalization of the British property development sector in this period, showing how property companies capitalized upon post-war Britain’s developer-friendly urban renewal order, internationalist financial sector, and inherited imperial advantages even as many of the formal political structures of empire were being dismantled...[more]
| | |  | | Business as Usual? Bazars and Communalism in Colonial Delhi, 1913–32
By Anish Vanaik
South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies (January 2024)
This paper uncovers a hitherto unnoticed pattern of communal segregation among establishments located in some of Delhi’s most important bazars. It demonstrates that this pattern, emerging between 1913 and 1932, was driven by structural features of the ways in which Delhi’s trade and retail interacted with communal violence in the 1920s. Those features include the dislocating effects of communal violence on bazars. More strident political activity by merchants, however, was important fuel to this fire. Merchants did not, also, restrict themselves to repeating communal tropes developed elsewhere. Their self-organisation gave shape to a conception of ‘Hindu’ and ‘Muslim’ trades. Rather than see a communal ‘pre-Partition’ in the 1930s, this evidence suggests that communal segregation was already well on the rise in the 1920s. Business as usual, then, was a source of deepening communal antagonisms rather than, as is sometimes assumed, a source of everyday bonhomie...[more]
| | | | REESOURCES: Rethinking Eastern Europe
By The Center for Urban History
The Educational Platform of the Center for Urban History offers resources that aim to decentralize the curriculum of Eastern Europe by diversifying primary materials, challenging established grand narratives, and creating new approaches to teaching and learning about this region. The main section consists of the collection of primary sources relevant to the teaching of Eastern Europe. They appear in their original language — Ukrainian, Polish, Russian, or Yiddish — and in English translations. The platform also includes prepared modules, syllabi, and six online courses prepared by the Center for Urban History of East-Central Europe. The educational platform is connected with other resources of the Center for Urban History, such as Lviv Interactive and Urban Media Archive. [more]
| Conferences, Workshops, and Events | | Professor Hakim Adi Lecture: Affirming the History of African and Caribbean People in Britain
Newman Red Lecture Theatre, Stocker Road Exeter EX4 4QD
March 7, 2024
In this lecture Hakim Adi reflects on how affirming the history of African and Caribbean people enhances the study of the history of Britain and why a struggle against Eurocentrism in all its forms is still so important in HE and beyond. [more]
| | | | Modern European History Workshop at Cambridge
Hybrid
Lent Term: 25 January - 7 March, 2024
The Modern European History (MEH) Workshop is a friendly space where graduate students can present their research and share ideas and thoughts with their peers. Our definition of ‘Modern European’ is broad in time and space, and we welcome papers on themes including the political, cultural, economic, intellectual, social, and military history of Europe from the mid-1800s to the present. We are also keen to see paper proposals on methodological topics and comparative or transnational histories. [more]
| | | Cambridge History of Global Migrations Vol. II Hybrid Book Launch
February 29, 2024, 4-5:30 PM (CST)
University of Maryland, College Park: Berlin Room, 2110
The editors Donna Gabaccia (University of Toronto) and Marcelo Borges (Dickinson College) discuss their framing of global migration history and major themes characterizing post-1800 world history. Contributing authors will discuss their articles: Cindy Hahamovitch (University of Georgia) "Contract Labor"; Peter Spiro (Temple University) "Citizenship"; and Jeffrey Pilcher (University of Toronto) "Foodways" Co-editor Madeline Y. Hsu (University of Maryland) will chair. To register online, please email globalmigration@umd.edu. [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: 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: Eurasian Zones of Contact: The Russian and Qing Empires
Dublin, Ireland
May 17, 2024
This one day workshop, held at University College Dublin, develops international collaboration on zones of contact between the Russian Empire (1721-1917) and the Qing Empire (1636/1644-1912). These zones are, on the one hand, geographically defined borderlands in Central, Inner, and East Asia, and, on the other hand, cultural, intellectual, political, and economic spaces wherein people from these two empires (and beyond) met and interacted. The workshop seeks to generate conversation about local and regional entanglements, networks, and exchanges across these vast Eurasian territories. While conventional histories of the two empires have treated them as two separate political entities, the workshop aims to adopt transregional and transnational approaches to overcome the narrow and traditional idea of territory – and in doing so, to propose alternative spatial, economic, and cultural histories of the region that contribute to attempts to de-nationalise and de-territorialise the historiography. [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
| CFP: 4th International Conference of the Indian Association for South Asian Studies (IASAS) on Subalterns in South Asia
Odisha, India
21-22 June, 2024
We are accepting abstracts for the Indian Association for South Asian Studies (IASAS) International Conference, which will take place at Kalinga Institute of Industrial Technology, Bhubaneswar, Odisha from June 21-22, 2024. Researchers and scholars from across the disciplines will participate in this two-day conference that will be concentrating on South Asian studies. The central theme for the above is 'Subalterns in South Asia.' IASAS 2024 conference welcomes panels and papers in English or in Hindi on any theme of South Asian Studies employing interdisciplinary and theoretical perspectives inspired from History, Philosophy, Political Science, Anthropology, Ethnography, Sociology, Psychology etc. Hence, the conference aim is to bring historians and social scientists into conversation with each other. We encourage submissions from research students, early career scholars, faculty members, and independent social scientists whose research falls under the spectrum of South Asian Studies. The conference hopes to generate new perspectives by exploring new as well as alternative and evolving research ideas and methods. [more]
Submission deadline: April 15, 2024
| Fellowships, Grants, & Awards |  | | 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
| | |  | | MHS Short-Term Fellowships
The Massachusetts Historical Society
The Massachusetts Historical Society will sponsor dozens of research fellowships for the 2024-2025 academic year, ranging from short-term support to long-term residency. The MHS collections primarily consist of manuscripts, as well as books, pamphlets, maps, newspapers, graphics, photographs, works of art, and historical artifacts. In addition to receiving funding, MHS Research Fellows become part of a scholarly community that includes other current fellows, MHS staff, Boston-area scholars, and former fellows. They have the opportunity to present their own research, attend seminars, and join MHS staff and other fellows for weekly coffees. Most MHS Short-term Fellowships carry a stipend of $3,000 to support a minimum of four weeks of research in the Society’s collections. One application automatically puts you into consideration for any applicable short-term fellowships. Graduate students, faculty, and independent researchers are welcome to apply. We will offer more than twenty short-term fellowships in the coming year...[more]
Application deadline: March 1, 2024
| | | Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition Fellowships
The Gilder Lehrman Center
The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition (GLC), part of the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale University, invites applications for its 2024-2025 Fellowship Program. The Center seeks to promote a better understanding of all aspects of the institution of slavery from the earliest times to the present. We welcome proposals that will utilize the special collections of the Yale University Libraries or other research collections of the New England area, and explicitly engage issues of historical slavery, contemporary forced labor, resistance, abolition, and their legacies. Scholars from all disciplines, both established and younger scholars, are encouraged to apply... [more]
Application deadline: March 1, 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
| | | | GHI Fellowships at the Horner Library
German Society of Pennsylvania and the German Historical Institute
Together with the German Society of Pennsylvania, the German Historical Institute will sponsor two to four fellowships of up to four weeks for research at the Joseph Horner Memorial Library in Philadelphia between June 1 and July 15, 2024. The fellowship will be awarded to PhD and M.A. students and advanced scholars without restrictions in research fields or geographical provenance for research using materials at the Horner Library. The "GHI Fellowship at the Horner Library" will provide a travel subsidy and an allowance of $1,000 to $3,500 depending on the length of the stay and the qualifications of the fellows. Opportunities to research at other special collections in Philadelphia may be available...[more]
Application deadline: March 15th, 2024
| | |  | | Ivan Karp Doctoral Research Awards
Centre for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape and the Laney Graduate School of Emory University
The African Critical Inquiry Programme is pleased to announce the 2024 Ivan Karp Doctoral Research Awards to support African doctoral students in the humanities and humanistic social sciences who are enrolled at South African universities and conducting dissertation research on relevant topics. The African Critical Inquiry Programme (ACIP) seeks to advance inquiry and debate about the roles and practice of public culture, public cultural institutions and public scholarship in shaping identities and society in Africa. The Ivan Karp Doctoral Research Awards are open to African postgraduate students (regardless of citizenship) in the humanities and humanistic social sciences. Applicants must be currently registered in a Ph.D. programme in a South African university and be working on topics related to ACIP’s focus...[more]
Application deadline: May 1, 2024
| | | | The Maggs Scholarship
The Institute of English Studies at the School of Advanced Study, University of London
The Institute of English Studies (IES) at the School of Advanced Study (SAS) will award a funded studentship for one place on its MA/MRes History of the Book programme 2024/25. The award covers fees in full at the Home/EU rate. The studentship is funded by Maggs Bros. Ltd., one of the world’s largest and oldest antiquarian booksellers. The Maggs Scholarship seeks especially to support an excellent student who wishes to study on the MA in the History of the Book, but whose circumstances might make it difficult to access the programme. Preference will be given to applicants who are residents of the United Kingdom with an ethnic minority background. Scholarship recipients will also be invited for an internship at Maggs Bros. Ltd. as part of the internship scheme pre-existing for the History of the Book programme...[more]
Application deadline: June 30th, 2024
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