Vol. 55, May 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: Our Urban Planet in Theory and History
| | The most recent publication in the Cambridge Elements in Global Urban History series is Our Urban Planet in Theory and History by Carl Nightingale, which offers seven propositions toward a theory of 'Our Urban Planet' useful to global urban historians. Nightingale argues that historians have much to offer to theorists particularly those involved in debates over planetary urbanization theory and the Anthropocene.
The video abstract can be viewed here and the Element can be read here.
| | | | Translating Faith: Ethiopian Pilgrims in Renaissance Rome
By Samantha Kelly
(Harvard University Press, 2024)
A revealing account of the lives and work of Ethiopian Orthodox pilgrims in sixteenth-century Rome, examining how this African diasporic community navigated the challenges of religious pluralism in the capital of Latin Christianity. Translating Faith is the first book-length study of this community in nearly a century. Drawing on Gǝʿǝz and European-language sources, Samantha Kelly documents how pilgrims maintained Ethiopian Orthodox practices while adapting to a society increasingly committed to Catholic conformity. Focusing especially on the pilgrims’ scholarly collaborations, Kelly shows how they came to produce and share Ethiopian knowledge—as well as how Latin Christian assumptions and priorities transformed that knowledge in unexpected ways...[more]
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In the Land of the Patriarchs: Design and Contestation in West Bank Settlements
By Noam Shoked
(University of Texas Press, 2023)
In the Land of the Patriarchs is an on-the-ground account of the design and evolution of West Bank settlements. Noam Shoked shows how settlements have been shaped not only by the decisions of military generals, high-profile politicians, and prominent architects but also by a wide range of actors, including real estate developers, environmental consultants, amateur archeologists, and Israelis who felt unserved by the country's housing system. The patterns of design and construction they have inspired reflect competing worldviews and aesthetic visions, as well as everyday practices not typically associated with the politics of the Israeli occupation. Revealing the pragmatic choices and contingent circumstances that drive what appears to be a deliberately ideological landscape, Shoked demonstrates how unpredictable the transformation of political passion into brick and mortar can be...[more]
| | | | America's Urban History
By Lisa Krissoff Boehm and Steven H. Corey
(Routledge, 2023)
In this second edition, America’s Urban History now includes contemporary analysis of race, immigration, and cities under the Trump administration and has been fully updated with new scholarship on early urbanization, mass incarceration and cities, the Great Society, the diversification of the suburbs, and environmental justice. This book is an accessible overview of the history of American cities, including Indigenous settlements, colonial America, the American West, the postwar metropolis, and the present-day landscape of suburban sprawl and an urbanized population...[more]
| | |  | | ‘Normalizing Informality’ in Local–Transnational Spaces: Contraband, Conflict and Street Trade in Eastern Ethiopia
By Engida Esayas Dube and Alison Brown
Journal of Asian and African Studies (February 2024)
Informality arguably remains the main source of employment and income for most participants in the cities of the Global South. It is rampant in cities along national borders and transport routes. This paper discusses the ‘normality of informality’, exploring the nexus between contraband, conflict and informal cross-border trade in a local–transnational space, drawing from Dire Dawa in eastern Ethiopia. Since its establishment in 1902, the city has become a major hub of commerce, industry, transportation, and cross-border trade. Combining the literature on the informal economy and cross-border trade and drawing on evidence from eastern Ethiopia, this study explores how trade is deeply embedded in local–transnational interactions through partnerships between state and non-state actors...[more]
| | | | ‘A firm foundation for future understanding, respect and friendship’: the ideals and reality of post-war town twinning, 1945–2020
By Tosh Warwick
Urban History (October 2024)
Formalized in the 1970s through the Middlesbrough–Oberhausen Town Twinning partnership (Partnerschaft Oberhausen–Middlesbrough), the connection between the two post-industrial towns dates back further to informal connections in the early 1950s and an age of reconciliation between the two nations. This article explores the origins, mechanisms, benefits and challenges of town twinning by drawing upon a rich body of empirical evidence from local authority records, press coverage, interviews and community reminiscence. The study provides the first academic analysis of the changes, challenges, continuities and continued relevance of town twinning in one of Britain’s leading pro-Brexit areas...[more]
| | |  | | Entertainment, Chinese Culture, and Late Colonialism in Hong Kong
By Allan T.F. Pang
The Historical Journal (August 2023)
This article argues that the late colonial government of Hong Kong shaped and reconstructed Chinese performances and festivities to secure public support, creating Chinese culture that was sui generis and historically produced. The disturbances of the 1960s prompted local officials to improve state–society communication and legitimize their rule. They utilized Hong Kong people's identification with Chinese culture to formulate their policies. Unlike colonial officials in other former British territories, those in Hong Kong went beyond British culture and focused on cultural elements that the people preferred. This cultural perspective, which has been underexplored, shows that late colonialism in Hong Kong not only made the colony's decolonization differ from other cases but also created diversified Chinese culture that was independent of the mainland China's and Taiwan's political discourses...[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 |  | | 2024 Global History Student Conference
Berlin, Germany
June 7-9, 2024
We are extremely pleased to announce the Global History Student Conference will return in 2024, open to public audience! The conference will be held from June 7-9, 2024, in Berlin, at the Friedrich-Meinecke-Institut of the Freie Universität. 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]
| | |  | | Postcolonial, Decolonial, Postimperial, Deimperial
In person at the University of Rijeka, Croatia and online
May 15-21 2024
By gathering at the intersection of multiple imperial semi-peripheries we aim to decenter and recenter questions surrounding imperialism, colonialism, and their conjunctions. Our research group, “REVENANT-Revivals of Empire: Nostalgia, Amnesia, Tribulation," is the sponsor and organizer of the conference. REVENANT’s purview encompasses the collective memories and ongoing legacies of three empires, the Habsburg, the Ottoman and the Romanov; in this context, the fraught question of the coloniality of these empires—and, hence, the post- and decoloniality of their successor states and societies—is central. Accordingly, one aim of the conference is to open conceptual avenues of debate and collaboration between scholars of largely land-based empires such as those that orient REVENANT and students of overseas settler empires, with particular interest in how concepts of post-coloniality and decoloniality apply, and apply differently, to each of them...[more]
| | | Workshop: (Un)Freedom in Global Perspective. Actors – Perceptions – Agencies
February 3-4, 2025
University of Innsbruck
Volume 37 of the "Innsbrucker Historische Studien" and the preliminary workshop in Innsbruck address the perceptions, agency, and strategies of people who in research have been characterized as unfree, especially in connection with slavery, captivity, serfdom, and other forms of oppression. The aim of the workshop is to undertake a critical examination of the historical analysis of (un)freedoms, locating the topics within an open geographical framework (local, regional, global histories) and chronologically with a focus on the modern age (c. 1450–1920). The workshop encourages participants to submit contributions that overcome a dichotomous juxtaposition of freedom and unfreedom and a static idea of these concepts in order to facilitate a more nuanced understanding of different agencies...[more]
| | |  | Course: Water Systems Design: Learning from the Past for Resilient Water Futures
May 29, 2024
TUDelft: Online
We developed this course recognizing the imperative to assist professionals across various sectors, particularly government officials and sustainability practitioners involved in water management, in addressing the challenges presented by climate change. It has become increasingly evident that our current approaches to water management may not be adequate, especially concerning ensuring drinking water supply, managing irrigation, and mitigating the risks of floods and droughts. These challenges require a serious re-evaluation of our strategies. The unique aspect of the course lies in its focus on learning from both the successes and failures of the past and applying this knowledge innovatively to design resilient water systems for the future. Through the analysis of past interventions, successful and unsuccessful alike, we aim to extract valuable lessons that can inform conventional water management practices. Participants in the course will be empowered to apply historical insights to their own water systems...[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: Special issue of Business History: "Globalisation, varieties of economic nationalism and big business: innovation, opportunities and long-term strategy, 1870-2022"
The special issue for the academic journal Business History intends investigating how trade restrictions and economic nationalism affected business and international business strategy. It looks at the experience of big enterprises and multinational firms based or operating in Europe, Asia, Latin America, and the United States during the mentioned epochs of slower globalisation. Particular attention will inevitably be granted to the inter-war era because it was the period when the most extreme varieties of economic nationalism, and with it, trade and financial restrictions took place. The special issue intends however to cover a longer time span and to consider other periods in which slower integration did not result in deglobalisation as in the 1930s and economic as well as industrial growth continued to be marked by forms of economic nationalism. [more]
Submission deadline: May 31, 2024
| CFP: Entangled trajectories: Global connections and legacies of Europe’s ‘Age of Civil Wars’ (1917-1949)
Thessaloniki, Greece
October 18-19, 2024
The UCD Centre for War Studies and the School of History and Archaeology at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki invite proposals for a conference to take place in Thessaloniki on 18/19 October 2024. This workshop explores the global connections and legacies of civil wars in the twentieth century. It aims to provide a comparative and relational analysis of European and non-European civil wars, by bringing together scholars from different disciplines, academic backgrounds, and continents. [more]
Submission deadline: June 1, 2024
| CFP: Yearbook of Women's History: Women and Ports. Re-evaluating a Gendered Space
In the 43rd edition of the Yearbook of Women’s History, with guest editor Irene Jacobs (Maritiem Museum Rotterdam), we want to question this stereotypical image by focusing on women who worked and lived in the port, who arrived or sailed from there, and the gendered constructions that shaped this environment. The volume wants to emphasize that women were and are active participants in all sections of the maritime industry on shore. From the repairing of nets, the selling of fish, making navigational instruments, housing sailors or keeping inns, to the maintaining of communities while the men were away at sea: women were key players in maritime societies. This new volume aims to travel to many ports around the world to investigate the role women have played in ports from economic, political, social, and cultural perspectives. In doing so, the volume will help scholars gain the broadest possible insight into the actions and influences of women in the port areas and the influence of the port on women from ancient times to the present. [more]
Submission deadline: June 1, 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
| Call for Chapters and Symposium: From Glory… to Grave?: “Dead Cities” throughout Time and Space
Dead cities, ghost towns, zombie neighborhoods—death has structured how we relate to and understand historic and contemporary urban environments across cultural contexts. Deployed readily across disciplines and discursive traditions since at least the middle of the 19th century, the condition of urban deadness has resonated widely. What constitutes the “death” of “urban” spaces and the “urbanity” of “dead” spaces? How is this death recorded, represented, and experienced by urban residents? In what ways do dead cities continue to live in physical ruins, memories, and stories in a variety of media, and continue to shape urban environments today? How do dead cities matter for the development of new and future cities? [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
| | | | The Urban History Association Awards
The Urban History Association
The Urban History Association is accepting nominations for the Lynn Hollen Lees Book Prize for Best Book in European Urban History, the Joe William Trotter, Jr. Book Prize for Best First Book in Urban History, the UHA Award for Best Book in Urban History (excluding the U.S., Canada, and Europe), the Michael Katz Award for Best Dissertation in Urban History, and more! [more]
Application deadline: May 14th, 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
| | | | Martin Lynn Scholarship in African History
Royal Historical Society
The Royal Historical Society makes an annual Martin Lynn Scholarship award to assist a postgraduate researcher of African history. The Scholarship is worth £1,500. The Scholarship is open to members of the Royal Historical Society. [more ]
Application deadline: September 6, 2024
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