Vol. 54, April 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: Urban Undersides
If you missed the third conversation in our Narrating Urban Lives series "Urban Undersides," featuring Alanna Osbourne, Irene Peano and Rodrigo Castriota in a conversation moderated by Michele Lancione and Wangui Kimari you can view the recording here.
| Featured Publication: Early Modern Atlantic Cities
| | The most recent publication in the Cambridge Elements in Global Urban History series is Early Modern Atlantic Cities by Mariana Dantas and Emma Hart, which traces the emergence of the Atlantic city as a site of contact, an agent of colonization, a central node in networks of exchange, and an arena of political contestation. It introduces Atlantic cities as agents of early modern globalization and explores the deep history of the urban-global connection.
The Element is free to download as an e-book until April 15.
| | | Related Network Spotlight
|  | Call for Bibliographer and Book Review Editor for Urban History
Urban History seeks to appoint a new bibliographer to compile our annual bibliography of publication in urban history and a new book reviews editor for publications on urban history before 1800. The expected start date is September 1, 2024.
This is an exciting opportunity to become involved with a world-leading journal for urban historical research. Urban History is published by Cambridge University Press and occupies a central place in historical scholarship, with an outstanding record of interdisciplinary contributions, and a broad-based and distinguished panel of referees and international advisors. Each issue features wide-ranging research articles covering social, economic, political and cultural aspects of the history of towns and cities and supplementary material including periodical reviews, thesis reviews and book reviews. We believe that book reviews are an essential service for the academic community and the coverage of our book reviews is global and chronologically diverse.
The bibliographer role involves the following tasks: searching for books, book chapters and journal articles published in the preceding calendar year, using online resources (journal websites, the Bibliography of British and Irish History and publishers’ websites); compiling a Microsoft Access database of all the entries, which is then sent to Cambridge University Press; and working with the production team at Cambridge University Press to check and proof-read copy edits before final production. For more information on how to apply, click here.
Book review editors are responsible for liaising with publishers to secure books for review; commissioning reviews from prospective reviewers; reviewing and editing reviews once they are submitted and liaising with the journal editors over publication. We aim to publish 10-15 reviews in each issue of the journal. We currently have two editors covering the medieval and early modern period (to 1800) and the modern era (post-1800) and are seeking to appoint a new colleague to cover the early modern period. For more information on how to apply, click here.
Application deadline: April 26, 2024
| | The Mexican Heartland: How Communities Shaped Capitalism, a Nation, and World History, 1500–2000
By John Tutino
(Princeton University Press, 2022)
The Mexican Heartland provides a new history of capitalism from the perspective of the landed communities surrounding Mexico City. In a sweeping analytical narrative spanning the sixteenth century to today, John Tutino challenges our basic assumptions about the forces that shaped global capitalism—setting families and communities at the center of histories that transformed the world. Despite invasion, disease, and depopulation, Mexico’s heartland communities held strong on the land, adapting to sustain and shape the dynamic silver capitalism so pivotal to Spain’s empire and world trade for centuries after 1550. The Mexican Heartland is the story of how landed communities and families around Mexico City sustained silver capitalism, challenged industrial capitalism—and now struggle under globalizing urban capitalism...[more]
| | |
The Oxford Handbook of the Modern Slum
Edited by Alan Mayne
(Oxford University Press, 2023)
The Oxford Handbook of the Modern Slum explores the history of the modern slum, connecting nineteenth-century iterations through multiple pathways to its contemporary existence. With chapters by more than twenty scholars, this Handbook brings an array of important and original perspectives and methodologies to bear on slums, real and imagined. Its analysis ranges across Europe, North America, Latin America, South Asia, Southeast Asia, Australia, and sub-Saharan Africa. The Handbook probes the impact of gender and race on urban social disadvantage and traces the development of private and state-sponsored intervention-as well as tourist interest-in urban poverty. It suggests that characterizations of slumland disequilibrium, dysfunctionality, and unsustainability should be offset by evidence of make-do enterprise, strategic determination, resilience, homeliness, and neighborliness...[more]
| | |  | | Cities in a Sunburnt Country: Water and the Making of Urban Australia
By Margaret Cook, Lionel Frost, Andrea Gaynor, Jenny Gregory, Ruth A. Morgan, Martin Shanahan, and Peter Spearritt
(Cambridge University Press, 2022)
As Australian cities face uncertain water futures, what insights can the history of Aboriginal and settler relationships with water yield? Residents have come to expect reliable, safe, and cheap water, but natural limits and the costs of maintaining and expanding water networks are at odds with forms and cultures of urban water use. Cities in a Sunburnt Country is the first comparative study of the provision, use, and social impact of water and water infrastructure in Australia's five largest cities. Drawing on environmental, urban, and economic history, this co-authored book challenges widely held assumptions, both in Australia and around the world, about water management, consumption, and sustainability. From the 'living water' of Aboriginal cultures to the rise of networked water infrastructure, the book invites us to take a long view of how water has shaped our cities, and how urban water systems and cultures might weather a warming world...[more]
| | | | Modernizing Urban Food Provisioning: The 1936 Shanghai Fish Market
By Zhengfeng Wang
Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (March 2024)
The Shanghai Fish Market (1936), initiated by Republican China’s Ministry of Industry, was briefly a linchpin for producers and distributors, facilitating state intervention in the supply chain of the treaty port city. The market’s modernist design by Su, Yang & Lei Architects departed from the Beaux-Arts-inspired practices often associated with Nationalist China’s self-presentation. Influenced by foreign precedents, it incorporated rationalized trading procedures into its spatial layout. This article examines the market’s construction, which was guided by fishery expertise and aimed to harness natural resources for societal and national benefits...[more]
| | | | Catchwater colonialism: reshaping Hong Kong’s hydrology, infrastructure, metabolism and landscape, 1937–1968
By Jack Greatrex and Florence Mok
Urban History (February 2024)
This article explores the development of hydrological infrastructure in colonial Hong Kong between the late 1930s and the late 1960s. Utilizing archival sources in Hong Kong and London, it shows how this infrastructure fundamentally reshaped Hong Kong’s geography. By way of concrete catchwaters and metal pipes, both ‘green’ and ‘urban’ Hong Kong became counter-intuitively interconnected. This interconnection created both unintended consequences and novel opportunities for colonial governance, driving forward natural conservation, state intervention into rural society and the development of new carceral institutions. Exploring these developments provides pivotal insight into the urban history of Hong Kong, with implications for global studies of historical urban political ecology...[more]
| | | | Call to Piety: The Role of Adhan in the Shaping Rumi Identity and Governmental Authority
By Hasan Baran Fırat
Journal of Urban History (March 2024)
This study aims to reveal the intricacies of individual acoustic communication systems that have operated in Istanbul for years, with a focus on the Muslim call to prayer, adhan. As adhan’s symbolic image, both in the minds of Christian and Muslim believers, changed over time any specific religious sound is met with ambivalent reactions. The Ottomans followed a nuanced strategy to control their sonic environment and adhan was one of the primary tools that they have had in hand. Specifically, the study delves into the various ways of reciting adhan as a tool used by the Ottoman government to redraw the social boundaries...[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 | | New Perspectives on Displaced Colonial Archives: Online Workshop
Online
September 11-12, 2024
Recent years have seen a proliferation of research about displaced colonial archives. Thanks to pioneering work by archive studies specialists, historians, and others, we have a deepening knowledge of the ways that declining empires sorted, destroyed, and removed archives during the twentieth century. This research has addressed profound concerns about how colonial – and decolonial – projects have shaped the world we live in. There is enormous potential for comparative and connected histories of the displacement of colonial archives within and between empires, including the Belgian, British, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, and Spanish empires. This online workshop seeks to facilitate inclusive discussion of new perspectives on displaced colonial archives...[more]
| | | | Workers’ struggles and capitalist strategies: Perspectives from Africa and South America in an age of ‘sustainability’
In person at Queen Mary University of London
June 17-18 2024
Through a range of events and workshops in recent years, the Centre on Labour, Sustainability and Global Production (CLaSP) has emphasized the need to combine perspectives on ecology and labour for a sustainability agenda that is transformative and not piecemeal and status-quoist. Building on this past work, the Centre’s end-of-year event in 2024 will focus on an open-ended analysis of struggles and strategies by the ‘labouring classes’ in the contexts of shifting capitalist strategies and varied ecological crises, from global heating to localised crop disease; in other words, it will focus on rethinking structures of capital from below...[more]
| | | Vienna International Summer School on New Social Housing
September 16-20, 2024
The Research Center for New Social Housing
The 7th Vienna International Summer School on New Social Housing cordially invites scholars, practitioners, and activists to explore the history of housing experiments against the current need for new solutions to social housing. In an era marked by housing shortages, new and changing demands and perplexing housing policies, we aim to delve into the revision of radical experiments, utopias and ideologies of housing that once strived for offering alternative perspectives and solutions. Through a historical lens, we aspire to reflect not only on the architectural, social, political, economic and/or ecological concepts underlying these experiments, but also their genesis, subsequent adaptations or decline over time. Furthermore, we aim to explore the emergent forms of living together that have risen from and within these experiments...[more]
| | | Calls for Papers & Proposals | CFP: Africana Annual Inaugural Issue
The Department of African & African-American Studies at the University of Kansas is excited to announce the publication of the inaugural issue of Africana Annual, an open source, peer reviewed journal of Global Black Studies. Please consider submitting articles, review essays to be included in the next issue. [more]
| CFP: African Urbanisms International Conference
Wits University
October 23-26, 2024
The Wits-TUB-UniLag Urban Lab's African Urbanisms conference will provide a space to explore the multiplicity of interlinked African urbanisms as a starting point to question the status quo of urban policies and planning paradigms, to seek transformative practices that present alternatives to “business as usual” urban development, and to imagine alternative urban futures. [more]
Submission deadline: April 21, 2024
| CFP: 40th Anniversary Special Edition of the Trotter Review: Race and the Environment in Boston and Beyond
Black communities in Boston and other urban spaces have been exposed to disproportionately high levels of toxic waste, unclean water, and air pollution. Such exposures bear directly on Black health. Statistics indicate that Black people in the U.S. have high rates of pollution-induced asthma, for instance, and are more frequently exposed to toxic chemicals. For this anniversary edition of the Trotter Review, we are seeking essays linking race, health, and the environment in Boston and other urban sites in the Northeast and Midwest. This includes essays examining how Black communities have responded to environmental challenges and worked to improve health and healthcare in inner-city spaces. Essays may cover any period from the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century...[more]
Submission deadline: June 30, 2024
| Call For Chapters: Protests Beyond Plaza: Strategies, Urban Morphologies and Everyday Spaces
We are seeking original chapters for an edited volume Protests Beyond Plaza: Strategies, Urban Morphologies and Everyday Spaces (ed. Kateryna Malaia and Nathan Hutson) to be published with Routledge in 2025. How do we read the history of an urban protest on an architectural scale? How do architectural and urban morphology shape the causes, development, and ultimate outcome of urban protests? The goal of this volume is to feature diverse geographies and movements. To date, we have secured contributions on protests in Hong Kong, Ukraine, South Korea, Lebanon, Iran, Belarus, and Colombia. We are therefore particularly interested in contributions on regions that are not yet featured in this volume’s geographic spread: North America, Africa, and Western Europe...[more]
Submission deadline: July 31, 2024
| CFP: Special issue of Global Nineteenth-Century Studies
In November 2022, the Society for Global Nineteenth-Century Studies held a two-day international symposium on “The Global / Oceanic / Nineteenth Century.” Intentionally broad in scope, the symposium sought to cross-map nineteenth-century studies with key currents of the blue humanities, the Black and circum-Atlantic, Indian Ocean studies, oceanic ecologies, post- and decolonialism, maritime globalization, and beyond. Building on and expanding out from this event, Global Nineteenth-Century Studies is pleased to invite submissions for a special issue on “The Global / Oceanic / Nineteenth Century.” We welcome essays that employ oceanic approaches to nineteenth-century culture, ecology, economics, history, and politics in a range of global contexts...[more]
Submission deadline: September 15, 2024 | Fellowships, Grants, & Awards |  | | 2024 Residence Grant at the Center for Urban History
The Center for Urban History, Lviv, Ukraine
The residence grants are offered to researchers of various fields in the humanities from different countries. We especially encourage historians, culture studies scholars, and anthropologists. We welcome applications for research that offer broad interpretations of urban history as a discipline at the intersection of various approaches of humanities and social sciences. The chronological and geographical frames of the proposed research are limited to the 19th and 20th-century history of East and Central Europe. Preference will be given to topics related to the Center’s research focuses, in particular, the urbanization of multiethnic cities, the experiences of citizens in times of radical change and war, issues of expertise and planning in cities, concepts and practices of heritage, commemoration and public space, urban infrastructures, digital and public history. [more]
Applications reviewed on a rolling basis
| | |  | | 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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