Vol. 60, November 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 Recordings
The Narrating Urban Lives series concluded on June 5 with "Critical Temporalities," a conversation featuring Dipesh Chakrabarty and Stefanos Geroulanos, moderated by Rosemary Wakeman! You can view the recording here.
If you missed "Worldmaking" on May 22, featuring Kaysha Corinealdi, Michael Goebel, and Prita Meier in a conversation moderated by Kenny Cupers, you can view the recording here.
You can view the recordings of all past conversations in this series on our YouTube channel here.
| Member Spotlight: "Urban History and Earth Time" | "Urban History in Earth Time" is a recorded and expanded version of Carl Nightingale's lecture at the meeting of the European Association for Urban History in Ostrava, Czechia on Sept 5, 2024. It addresses themes from GUHP's Dream Conversations on "Cities and the Anthropocene" and the discussion on "City and Planet" from last February. This version of the lecture is divided into six short video episodes. It can be found on the YouTube channel Exploring Earthopolis.
|  | | Chile Underground: The Santiago Metro and the Struggle for a Rational City
By Andra B. Chastain
(Yale University Press, 2024)
The Santiago Metro, the largest urban infrastructure project in Chile’s history, was designed in the 1960s in response to rapid urban growth. Despite the upheavals of Salvador Allende’s democratic socialism (1970–1973) and Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship (1973–1990), the project survived and is now the largest metro system in South America. What explains its success? How did its meaning shift under democracy and dictatorship? What does its history reveal about struggles for a more just city? Drawing on Chilean and French archives, Andra B. Chastain demonstrates that Chilean-French relations and French financing were crucial to the project’s survival during the Cold War. The Metro’s history also illuminates the contested process of implementing neoliberalism and the unexpected continuities of state planning and visions for a rational city that persisted despite free-market reforms. Most important, this story shows that the Metro came to symbolize the nation and became a critical site where planners, workers, and urban residents contested Chile’s path to modernity...[more]
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Informal Metropolis: Life on the Edge of Mexico City, 1940–1976
By David Yee
(University of Nebraska Press, 2024)
In the 1940s, as Mexican families trekked north to the United States in search of a better life, tens of millions also left their towns and villages for Mexico’s major cities. In Mexico City migrant families excluded from new housing programs began to settle on a dried-out lake bed near the airport, eventually transforming its dusty plains into an informal city of more than one million people. In Informal Metropolis David Yee uncovers how this former lake bed grew into the world’s largest shantytown—Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl—and rethinks the relationship between urban space and inequality in twentieth-century Mexico. By chronicling the residents’ struggles to build their own homes and gain land rights in the face of extreme adversity, Yee presents a hidden history of land fraud, political corruption, and legal impunity underlying the rise of Mexico City’s informal settlements. When urban social movements erupted across Mexico in the 1970s, Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl’s residents organized to demand land, water, and humane living conditions. Though guided by demands for basic needs, these movements would ultimately achieve a more lasting significance as a precursor to a new urban citizenry in Mexico...[more]
| | |  | | Disaster Response by Ceauşescu’s Communist Regime in Romania
By Karin Steinbrueck
(Routledge, 2024)
This book contains the first comprehensive history using extensive primary sources to trace the 1977 earthquake disaster response by the Ceauşescu communist regime, contextualizing its contribution to the public risk that remains in Romania's capital Bucharest. It traces a history of one authoritarian government’s disaster response linking its decisions and ultimate inactions to contemporary public risk. The book begins with a stand-alone chapter to introduce readers to twentieth-century Communist Romania and contextualize the Ceauşescu regime’s response. It provides insights into how Radio Free Europe filled the information vacuum, how the political police, the Securitate, worked as first responders, and how scientific experts debated the best course of action. It examines how the regime requested specific foreign assistance and activated its Securitate abroad to encourage such, prioritized restoration of the economy, and "encouraged" domestic cash and labor contributions in the name of recovery. The book examines how the disaster response abruptly ended, leaving thousands of structurally unsafe buildings. It explains the contemporary seismic risk and post-communist mitigation efforts to reduce it...[more]
| | |  | | Density and Differentiation: Cities in Global Social History
By Michael Goebel
The Historical Journal (October 2024)
The present article examines the particular role that cities have played, and should play, in global social history. It notes that many of the historiographical discussions that in the past years have addressed the reach and limits of the bourgeoisie and the middle class as a globalized social formation have implicitly focused on cities. It also notes that these discussions have often not been very forthcoming in explicitly acknowledging this urban focus. From this starting point, the present article ponders the implications and ramifications of making this focus more explicit. What do we conclude from the observation that the ‘global bourgeoisie’ or the ‘global middle class’, inasmuch as they existed at all, were quintessentially urban formations? And what do these conclusions, conversely, entail for the field of urban history? Highlighting density and differentiation as key traits of the urban form, the article ultimately argues for greater attention to the spatiality and to the built environment of class formation in global history...[more]
| | | | Cosmopolitan underworld: opiate refinement in inter-war Istanbul
By Daniel-Joseph MacArthur-Seal
Urban History (May 2024)
The Turkish government’s suppression of private heroin factories and its monopolization of opium exports brought the state into conflict with a large numbers of Istanbul residents who sought to profit from the lucrative trade in opiates. Sites of clandestine drug production spread across the urban and suburban landscape, inspiring public alarm and new policing measures. The article examines the human networks behind these production sites, investigating how they utilized the diversity of their members and contacts in the search for profit and the evasion of the state, and how this diversity was interpreted in press and public debate...[more]
| | |  | | Through Violence to Eternal Kingdom: Revolutionary Avengers, Suburban Violence, and the Crisis of Imperial Governance in post-1905 Russian Poland
By Antoni Porayski-Pomsta
Journal of Social History (September 2024)
This article studies the case of a notorious criminal group, the Revolutionary Avengers (Rewolucjoniści Mściciele), to explore the “theatre of violence” in fin-de-siècle Russian Poland. First, it considers the reactions to the group’s activities and how they exposed the absence of state monopoly on violence, as well as the imperial bureaucracy’s slipping control over the means of communication following the October Manifesto and the abolition of censorship. Second, the group’s story is analyzed as representative of the post-revolutionary emergence of large numbers of men accustomed to, fluent in, and profoundly changed by violence, yet excluded from party structures. The article argues that the small-scale, anti-elite and anti-governmental violence perpetrated by the Avengers was a form of self-assertion, an attempt to live with dignity after the revolutionary promise had failed. Third, the article spatializes the Avengers’ activities within the industrial suburbs of Russian Poland. Although the urban outskirts were not the only places where the group operated, they were fundamental to their actions...[more] | | |  | | Cities of the Eastern Mediterranean
The Metropole
The Metropole, the official blog of the Urban History Association, has put together a series of essays covering urban, political, and social transformation across seven cities of the Eastern Mediterranean for the month of May. Assistant editor Zeead Yaghi kicked things off with an overview of the month contextualizing the region and placing contributions in dialogue with Mediterranean urbanity: “For The Metropole’s theme month, our writers and contributors zoom into three structural forces, and their interplay, in their investigation of urbanity and daily life in Eastern Mediterranean cities, most notably: commercial capitalism, the (imperial, colonial, or postcolonial) state, and people and the political, social, and communal logics that shape their behaviors.”
Other essays in the series include "Urban Huts, Sickness, and Mobility: Finding Immigrants in Haifa and Jaffa in the 1930s and 1940s" by Lauren Banko, "The Jewish Quarter of Saïda: Intertwined Displacements and Memories of Absence in a Southern Lebanese City" by Molly Oringer, and "From the Railway to the Highway: The History of (Un)Free Movement in the Arab Mediterranean" by Ingy Higazi. Read all the articles here.
| Conferences, Workshops, and Events |  | Ademide Adelusi-Adeluyi: "Lagos Life: Streets, Maps, History" (Carl Schlettwein Lecture 2024)
Centre for African Studies
22 November 2024, 4:15 pm
Urban questions have taken on a new urgency in Africa, as cities like Lagos continue to grow faster and more intensely, seemingly every day. Most often, engagement with these cities is framed in terms of their problems: too crowded, too disorganized, too frenetic. But how should we understand the ways the past shaped and produced this present? “Lagos Life” explores the histories of Lagos’s streets as markers of the moments of placemaking, identity, freedom, and displacement in the nineteenth century. It begins with the premise that Lagos’s streets offer important clues and cues to the ways to ask, analyze and frame the historical and contemporary narratives of the city. Much like the ways that court transcripts and letters can be read and analyzed to yield insights about the past, street names in Lagos bear witness to the ways that the city’s pasts intertwine...[more]
| | |  | Hagley History Hangout Podcast: New York City’s Urban Heat Island, 1860-2020 with Kara Schlichting
Excessive heat has presented a problem for public health officials in New York City since the mid-nineteenth century building boom that covered the island of Manhattan in bricks, concrete, and other heat-storing materials. Prior to that, however, Americans had noticed that cities were warmer than their surrounding countryside as early as the 1790s. The phenomenon now known as the “urban heat island” has shaped the bodily experiences and collective destinies of millions. In her latest research, Dr. Kara Schlichting, associate professor at the City University of New York, uncovers the complex relationship between the evolving built environment of the city, the macro-climatic conditions prevailing globally, and the socially-differentiated lived experiences of heat had by city residents. By digging into Hagley collections, including trade catalogs and the Willis Carrier collection, Schlichting is able to tell a history that links multiple scales of time and space, an act of scholarly imagination that allows us to assess the technological and political systems that shape the climate we all must live with...[more]
| | |  | Narrative Matters 2025: Disparate Narrative Worlds: Crisis, Conflict, and the Possibility of Hope
The American University of Paris and Université Paris Cité
13-16 May 2025
Disparate narrative worlds are not only a feature of the political landscape but are also embedded in aspects of daily life where social divisions and patterns of affiliation generate divergent realms of meaning. We can thus speak about disparate narrative worlds between generations, developmental stages, social roles and classes, religions, ethnicities, races, neurotypes, and persons. We also find worlds of men and women, young and old, the able and disabled as well as doctors and patients, teachers and students, and more. The question of the construction of disparate narrative worlds is only part of this conference’s scope. In addition, we are very interested in contributions oriented toward bridging divides in order to arrive at novel alliances and solidarities that can more effectively address the myriad challenges that confront our shared world. How can we connect narrative worlds to create, more or less, common spaces? Narrative Matters 2025, the 12th biennial conference, is co-organized by the George and Irina Schaeffer Center for the Study of Genocide, Human Rights and Conflict Prevention at The American University of Paris and the Paris Center for Narrative Matters at Université Paris Cité...[more]
| | |  | International Summer School Towards Inclusive Global Histories
Växjö, Sweden
7-9 September 2025
The summer school will focus on three novel research fields within global history: Global Diplomacy, gender, and environmental questions. By framing approaches that emphasize different voices and alternative archives in terms of “global histories” in the plural, we aim to promote the inclusion of a broad range of voices, perspectives, and orientations within the field, while forcefully rejecting the possibility of insisting on a single, dominating story or grand narrative of global history. The summer school will offer plenary sessions by leading experts in the field and allow for hands-on methodological conversations among all participating scholars. Early career scholars will be encouraged to reflect on key methodological questions along the lines of the summer school themes with scholars from around the world. We invite contributions consisting of projects based on original research and empirically grounded PhD thesis work in progress. We encourage theoretical, methodological, ethical, and historiographical reflections on how to make global history more inclusive. Although the main language of the summer school will be English, individual presentations and panels in other languages can be accommodated...[more]
| | | Calls for Papers & Proposals | “Urban Metamorphoses: Understanding the Dynamics and Diversity of South Asian Cities”
Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, India
27 February- 1 March 2025
In this conference, we aim to gather the multifaceted perspectives on the city-space, which is rapidly growing and reflecting the changing impulse of the region loosely termed South Asia, in relation to the Global South and the world. Simultaneously, the conference also seeks to push the boundaries of traditional scholarship to re-imagine the evolving urban space and the stories they tell by invoking diverse conceptual and artistic apparatuses. It explores the urban heritage and its representation not merely through a collection of “built edifices” but through people and their vernacular traditions, religion, eclectic cultural exchanges, the evolution of foodways, literary conventions, political movements, folk and demotic forms of art and entertainment that define a city’s identity across time. Here, the “urban phenomenon” equally engages with chequered histories of movement and displacement, desires and aspirations of social mobility, as well as the variegated conversations, food and friendship that foster new synergies across the cities in the global South and North...[more]
Submission deadline: December 5, 2024
| Call for paper for panel: "Contours of Connections, Systematic dilemmas and cultural divisions (mutations) among African Diasporic Groups"
European Conference on African Studies (ECAS 2025), Prague
June 25-28, 2025
This panel explores the intricate web of connections, systemic challenges, and evolving cultural identities within African diasporic communities. By examining historical and contemporary contexts, we aim to uncover the multifaceted relationships that bind these groups together while also highlighting the systemic dilemmas they face. The discussion will delve into the cultural mutations that arise from migration, globalisation, and intergenerational shifts, offering insights into how these dynamics shape identity, community cohesion, and socio-political engagement. How are Africans in the diaspora blending elements from their ancestral cultures with those of their new environments, creating unique hybrid identities from the perspectives of language, fashion, music, and culinary traditions? How has the global exchange of ideas and cultural practices led to the adoption of new cultural elements and the transformation of existing ones? For example, African diasporic music genres like Afrobeat have gained international popularity and influenced global music trends. Does the shared experiences and identities of Africans in the diaspora strengthen community bonds, or do the differences in cultural adaptation and identity cause friction within diasporic communities?...[more]
Submission deadline: December 15, 2024
| CFP: "Global Approaches to the Holocaust" - Regional Institute on the Holocaust and Jewish Civilization
Omaha, Nebraska
April 3-5, 2025
The Holocaust Educational Foundation of Northwestern University (HEFNU) and the Sam and Frances Fried Holocaust and Genocide Academy at the University of Nebraska at Omaha are pleased to announce the Spring 2025 Regional Institute on “Global Approaches to the Holocaust,” which will take place on April 3-5, 2025 in Omaha, Nebraska. Scholars continue to challenge the idea that the Holocaust was an exclusively European project. Recent research exploring the history, memory and representation of the Holocaust has focused on countries in Asia, Africa, North and South America, the Middle East and Australia. The Omaha Regional Institute asks how does our understanding of the Holocaust change when we shift focus from a primarily European perspective and adopt a more global approach? What new insights are gained from exploring the impact of the Holocaust from outside Europe? How do countries that were not directly impacted by Nazi policies of occupation and extermination remember the Holocaust? What consequences does a global approach to the Holocaust entail?...[more]
Submission deadline: December 15, 2024
| CFP: Urban History Association Conference 2025
Los Angeles, California
October 9-12, 2025
The Urban History Association invites submissions for its 11th Biennial Conference in Los Angeles, California on October 9 - 12, 2025. The Conference Program Committee seeks proposals for papers, panels, roundtables, posters, workshops, retrospectives, lightning rounds, professional development opportunities, and many other kinds of sessions on any aspect of urban, suburban, and metropolitan history in the United States and globally. The conference theme, Metropolitan Majorities, reflects trends across the world: the ongoing population growth of cities and their metropolitan areas; the rising ethnoracial and cultural diversity of urban and suburban places; the increasing concentration of economic activities; and the contentious politics that have accompanied these changes....[more]
Submission deadline: February 1, 2025 | Fellowships, Grants, & Awards | | Bodleian Visiting Fellowships in Special Collections
University of Oxford
Bodleian Visiting Fellowships in Special Collections are awarded to promote research based on archival, manuscript and printed books collections of the Bodleian Libraries. Researchers external to the University of Oxford are invited to pursue their own research projects requiring use of these collections. Visiting Fellows may be invited during their visits to present their work in progress formally or informally within the University or in the Bodleian Libraries and should consider publication of their findings in the Bodleian Library Record. Fellowships include the African Studies Visiting Fellowship, Ann Ball Bodley Visiting Fellowship in Women’s History, Bahari Visiting Fellowship in the Persian Arts of the Book, Byrne-Bussey Marconi Visiting Fellowship in the History of Science, Technology and Communication, and others...[more]
Application deadline: November 29, 2024
| | | | Friends of Princeton University Library Research Grants
Princeton University Library
Each year, the Friends of the Princeton University Library offer short-term Library Research Grants to promote scholarly use of the Princeton University Library special and distinct collections. Applications will be considered for scholarly use of archives, manuscripts, rare books, and other rare and unique holdings in Special Collections, including Mudd Library; as well as rare books in Marquand Library of Art and Archaeology, and in the East Asian Library (Gest Collection). These grants, which have a value of up to $6,000 plus transportation costs, are meant to help defray expenses incurred in traveling to and residing in Princeton during the tenure of the grant. The length of the grant will depend on the applicant’s research proposal but is ordinarily between two and four weeks...[more]
Application deadline: January 15, 2025
| | | | BHC Kaufman Fellowship Application Deadline
Business History Conference
The Henry Kaufman Financial History Fellowship Program supports research by emerging scholars in financial history, broadly conceived. Fellowships include monetary awards as well as support from the BHC community of scholars, which for decades has prioritized engagement with graduate students and early career researchers. The program is endowed by a generous gift from renowned economist Dr. Henry Kaufman (Henry & Elaine Kaufman Foundation, Inc). The program offers three kinds of awards: Research fellowships, Dissertation fellowships, and Post-Doctoral fellowships. To be eligible, applicants must be enrolled in or graduates of an accredited doctoral program....[more]
Application deadline: March 1, 2025 | | | |