Vol. 66, May 2025
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.
| GUHP2 Berlin Conference Registration NOW OPEN
Registration for our upcoming conference, "GUHP2 Berlin: Stretching the Limits of Global Urban History," is now open! You can view our preliminary conference program here. Registration fees will go up by $50 across the board on Monday, May 19th, so we encourage you to register soon!
Register Here
Note that in order to register you may need to Join or Renew your membership to GUHP.
For those wishing to book a room near the conference venue in Berlin well in advance, here is a good link to start your research.
| GUHP has a new website!
We are proud to announce the launch of our new website, built entirely in-house! We hope you'll find the site much easier to navigate ... and a lot easier on the eye. The new navigation pages are attached to the robust back-office functions that GUHP has depended on for communications and event management since our launch eight years ago.
Check out the website
| Please note:
"Authors Meets Editors," an event scheduled for Thursday May 15th has been POSTPONED.
Please keep an eye out for announcements of a new date for this event.
| | The Jews of Edirne: The End of Ottoman Europe and the Arrival of Borders
By Jacob Daniels
(Stanford University Press, 2025)
At the turn of the twentieth century, the city of Edirne was a bustling center linking Istanbul to Ottoman Europe. It was also the capital of Edirne Province—among the most religiously diverse regions of the Ottoman Empire. But by 1923, the city had become a Turkish border town, and the province had lost much of its non-Muslim population. With this book, Jacob Daniels explores how one of the world's largest Sephardi communities dealt with the encroachment of modern borders. Using Ladino, French, English, and Turkish sources, Daniels offers a new take on the ways in which ethno-religious minorities experienced the transition "from empire to nation-state." Rather than tracing a linear path, Edirne Jews zigzagged between the Ottoman Empire and three nation-states—without moving a mile...[more]
| | | | Reimagining the More-Than-Human City: Stories from Singapore
By Jamie Wang
(MIT Press, 2024)
An exploration of the multifaceted urban environmental issues in Singapore through a more-than-human lens, calling for new ways to think of and story cities. As climate change accelerates and urbanization intensifies, our need for more sustainable and livable cities has never been more urgent. Yet, the imaginary of a flourishing urban ecofuture is often driven by a specific version of sustainability that is tied to both high-tech futurism and persistent economic growth. What kinds of sustainable futures are we calling forth, and at what and whose expense? In Reimagining the More-Than-Human City, Jamie Wang attempts to answer these questions by critically examining the sociocultural, political, ethical, and affective facets of human-environment dynamics in the urban nexus, with a geographic focus on Singapore...[more]
| | |  | | In the Global Vanguard: Agrarian Development and the Making of Modern Taiwan
By James Lin
(University of California Press, 2025)
In just half a century, Taiwan transformed from an agricultural colony into an economic power, spurred by efforts of the authoritarian Republic of China government in land reform, farmers associations, and improved crop varieties. Yet overlooked is how Taiwan brought these practices to the developing world. In the Global Vanguard elucidates the history and impact of the “Taiwan model” of agrarian development by incorporating how Taiwanese experts took the country’s agrarian success and exported it throughout rural communities across Africa and Southeast Asia. Driven by the global Cold War and challenges to the Republic of China’s legitimacy, Taiwanese agricultural technicians and scientists shared their practices, which they claimed were better suited for poor, tropical societies in the developing world. These development missions, James Lin argues, were projected in Taiwan as proof of the ruling government’s modernity and technical prowess and were crucial to how the state sought to hold onto its contested position in the international system and its rule by martial law at home...[more] | | |  | | A Mutual Project: Architecture and the Imperial Foundations of American Missionaries in Nineteenth-Century Beirut
By Yasmina El Chami
Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (December 2024)
This article focuses on the construction of the Syrian Protestant College from its foundation in 1863 to the beginning of the twentieth century and resituates American missionaries as covert imperial actors in nineteenth-century Beirut. It examines the close relationship between the missionaries’ increasingly imperial ambitions and their architectural establishment in the city, as evidenced by the private correspondence of the college’s founders. Here, architecture was neither a simple projection of “American” or evangelical culture nor a materialization of direct colonial control. Rather, architecture was tasked with multiple evolving roles as the missionary project grew more secure. This article traces the development of the college and its campus through three phases to illustrate how architecture and the missionaries’ imperial ambitions became mutually constitutive over time. In elucidating the nineteenth-century imperial foundations of the Syrian Protestant College it reconsiders both the nature of American imperialism in the Middle East and the central role of architecture in its construction...[more]
| | |  | | Growing the Game of Golf in Colonial Kuala Lumpur: Elites and Privatized Urban Planning in Southeast Asia, 1893-1957
By Brett M. Bennett
Journal of Urban History (April 2025)
Golf courses played an important, yet understudied role, in urban colonial town planning in Southeast Asia during the first half of the twentieth century. This article explores the establishment and growth of the Selangor Golf Club, the pre-eminent golf club in Kuala Lumpur during the colonial period of British rule. Club members lobbied and worked for the Selangor and Federated Malay States governments to expand the physical size of the course and to influence regulations about the activities allowed at the club. The article argues that the close relationship between the colonial government and the Selangor Golf Club privatized the benefits of urban planning and stunted the development of municipal golf in Kuala Lumpur. The article concludes by arguing that the history of golf in Kuala Lumpur offers the first explanation about why public golf never became an important feature of municipal governance in colonial or post-colonial Southeast Asia...[more]
| | |  | | Tokyo in Tashkent: The Afro-Asian Writers Association and Japanese Cold War Dissent
By Christopher L. Hill
Past & Present (November 2024)
In October 1958, seven Japanese writers attended the first great cultural event of the Bandung era, the week-long Afro-Asian Writers Conference held in Tashkent, the capital of Soviet Uzbekistan. The ‘literary Bandung’ resulted in the creation of the Afro-Asian Writers Association (AAWA), a source of growing interest among historians of anti-colonialism for the institutions it founded to support a literary culture unmediated by London, Paris or New York, and thereby advance political solidarity among colonized and newly independent countries in the so-called Third World. The participation of writers from Japan, a former empire aligned with the United States, has no place in the historiography of post-war Japan, the Cold War or decolonization. Japanese participants and observers used the conference and the AAWA as a means of dissent equally unfamiliar in received narratives. They argued that commitment to the decolonization of Asia and Africa offered a means to resist amnesia about Japan’s colonialist history and obstruct its role in the American empire. The work of Japanese writers in Tashkent and after reveals a broader genealogy of Afro-Asianism and anti-colonial internationalism and opportunities for dissent made possible by crossing between post-imperial and postcolonial worlds in the Bandung era...[more] | | |  | | Transimperial History Lecture Series
Hybrid in-person and online
The Transimperial History Lecture Series (THLS) is a hybrid lecture format organized on a regular basis by the Centre for Transimperial History at Leipzig University, in cooperation with international partners. The series focuses on scholarly exchange in the field of transimperial history at the intersection of global history, imperial history, and postcolonial theory. Rather than examining empires in isolation, transimperial history emphasizes their mutual entanglements and shared dynamics. Aimed at an academic audience – including PhD candidates, postdoctoral researchers, and senior scholars – the series provides a forum to discuss current research from global and comparative perspectives, while contributing to the methodological and theoretical development of the field. All lectures take place on Wednesdays, from 5:15 – 6:45 pm at Room 5.55, Strohsackpassage, Nikolaistraße 6-10, Leipzig. External guests are warmly invited to participate; all sessions are hybrid and can be accessed online...[more]
| | |  | | Wretched Waters: Making Modernity and the Southern North Sea
UCL, London
May 28, 2025
This talk by Dr Sam Grinsell will explore what it means to put particular sites at the heart of global histories of the environment. Histories of modernity have often centred the nation or the empire. When they have turned to transnational matters these have often been studied at oceanic or global scales. This project, instead, starts from a smaller transnational body of water: the southern North Sea, and its Dutch, English and Flemish coasts. It traces how histories of slavery, docks, fishing, migration and infrastructure reshaped the southern North Sea in the long nineteenth century, and the marks left behind in the cities and landscapes of the region today. This talk will explore what it means to put particular sites at the heart of global histories of the environment, and argue for a more transdisciplinary approach to history that can think simultaneously about processes of making historical space and contemporary experience of space. This will focus on three key moments in North Sea history: the creation of urban docklands in the early nineteenth century, the industrialisation of sea fishing in the mid nineteenth century, and migration from Europe to North America around the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Contemporary images of North Sea landscapes will frame the historical discussion...[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 |
Special Issue: Artificial Intelligence and the Sustainability of African Cities
Urban Planning
Urban Planning welcomes articles for the thematic issue "Artificial Intelligence and the Sustainability of African Cities", edited by Catarina Fontes (Technical University of Munich), Mennatullah Hendawy (Technical University of Munich), and Sónia Semedo (University of Cabo Verde). Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly shaping the trajectories of cities worldwide. In Africa, rapid urbanization presents both challenges and opportunities for the adoption of AI to address current issues and needs. AI has the potential to make African cities more sustainable and to support urban development with applications spanning across all types of urban infrastructure and public services delivery. This includes, for instance, transportation, water supply and distribution, sanitation and waste management, energy and telecommunications, security and housing, healthcare, food systems, education, cultural activities, and community engagement. However, the global adoption of AI is also impacting African cities by creating significant pressure on local economies, political systems, and natural and cultural landscapes, namely through the increasing demand for resources and data. Therefore, cities are facing critical challenges when it comes to balancing the dual goals of leveraging AI for sustainability and ensuring that AI systems themselves are sustainable, equitable, and culturally appropriate...[more]
Submission deadline: June 15, 2025
|
Call for Reviewers
World History Bulletin
World History Bulletin, a biannual publication of the World History Association, is seeking book reviewers for upcoming issues of the journal. The following books are available for review:
- Slaves in Paris: Hidden Lives and Fugitive Histories by Miranda Spieler
- The Disinherited: The Politics of Christian Conversion in Colonial India by Mou Banerjee
- Empire, Incorporated: The Corporations that Built British Colonialism by Philip J. Stern
- A Calculated Restraint: What Allied Leaders Said About the Holocaust by Richard Breitman
- Hubris: The American Origins of Russia's War Against Ukraine by Jonathan Haslam
- Crucibles of Power: Smolensk Under Stalinist and Nazi Rule by Michael David-Fo
To request a book to review, email Joseph M. Snyder, editor-in-chief of World History Bulletin, at bulletin@thewha.org. Please include the title of the book you would like to review as well as your CV. World History Bulletin features short-form essays (roughly 1,500–6,000 words in length). It is a forum devoted to raising interesting questions, stimulating lively debate, and engaging with all aspects of world historical scholarship including pedagogy, research, and theory...[more]
Submission deadline: June 30, 2025
| Special Issue: The Roots and Routes of Black Power
The Journal of African American History
The Journal of African American History is planning a 2026 special issue titled “The Roots and Routes of Black Power.” During the past few decades, the field has proliferated with scholars fundamentally reshaping the temporal, leader- ship, and ideological bounds of the movement and its key players. Students and newcomers to the traditional Black Power period (1960s–1980s) now have a wealth of books, articles, archival repositories, and digital sites to help them understand the period and its impact like never before. However, as the field has matured, it has shifted shape and in some instances splintered, leaving lingering questions about the current and future states of the field...[more]
Submission deadline: July 1, 2025
|
Special Issue: “Mobile cultures and the Anthropocene”
The Journal of Transport History
Research on mobility has shown considerable interest in promoting an interdisciplinary approach to history in order to renew knowledge of transport. Among the issues brought to light by these perspectives, the question of the environment is central. Because transport affects the territories we inhabit, because it reflects the way societies are nurtured by technology, the mobilisation of history and its long-term perspectives shed light on the footprints our mobility patterns have left on the Earth. Their material impact, which is reflected in the interweaving of the technical, social and entrepreneurial infrastructures they have constituted over the long term; the change in representations - of movement, space and ways of life - that they have initiated...[more]
Submission deadline: July 15, 2025 | Fellowships, Grants, & Awards |  | | Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Postdoctoral Fellowships
The University of Warwick (UK)
The European Commission recently opened its 2025 call for the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Postdoctoral Fellowships. This prestigious and well-funded fellowship offers eligible candidates (<8 years post-PhD) the possibility to pursue their own research project and to benefit from a tailored training programme. The call includes two types of fellowships:
1- European Postdoctoral Fellowships, open to researchers of any nationality to carry out a personalised project in the European Union (EU) or countries associated to Horizon Europe for up to 24 months
2- Global Postdoctoral Fellowships, open to EU and Horizon Europe associated countries nationals or long-term residents wishing to work with organisations in third countries for a period of 12 to 24 months, before returning to Europe for 12 months
The Department of History of the University of Warwick has hosted a number of MSCA Fellows over the years and is once again willing to support applications to the scheme. Our university is committed to interdisciplinary research and provides early-career researchers with excellent working conditions. Within the Department of History, our research centres offer a congenial and supportive atmosphere.This is a competitive scheme, but the Department now has a dedicated support system in place for supervisors and prospective fellows. In 2024, every one of our 4 applications was successful.
I am particularly interested in bringing global urban historians to Warwick. If this is of interest to you or to one of your colleagues, do not hesitate to contact me by email (p.purseigle@warwick.ac.uk). I would also be happy to make introductions to other Warwick historians you might be keen to work with....[more]
Application deadline: September 10, 2025 | | | |