Vol. 67, June 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.
| Join us for the 2024-25 GUHP Emerging Symposia
June 12 and June 19 from 11am - 3:30pm UTC
At two virtual events this year's cohort of GUHP Emerging scholars will present drafts of their GUHP2 Berlin presentations.
Who should join us?
Anyone who will be at the conference and wants to get a foreshadowing of the riches to come.
Anyone who has to miss the conference but would like a taste nonetheless.
Anyone who would like to help mentor these promising young scholars or join their growing professional networks.
See the symposia schedule here
and please register for June 12 and June 19 in order to get the Zoom link.
Note: Like many other GUHP events, this is an online event featuring scholars based in time zones stretching from the Atlantic coast of the Americas to the Pacific Coast of Asia. Please use a time converter to confirm your local time - apologies if this is very early or very late where you live!
| 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
|  | | Lineages of the Global City: Occult Modernism and the Spiritualization of Democracy
By Shiben Banerji
(University of Texas Press, 2025)
War, revolution, genocide, rebellion, slump. The economic and political turmoil of the early twentieth century seemed destined to rip asunder the ties that bound colonizers and the colonized to one another. The upheaval represented an opportunity, and not just to nationalists who imagined new homelands or to socialists who dreamed of international brotherhood. For modernists in the orbit of various occultisms, the crisis of empire also represented an opportunity to reveal humanity's fundamental unity and common fate. Lineages of the Global City recounts a continuous, if also contentious, transnational exchange among modernists and occultists across the Americas, Europe, South Asia, and Australia between 1905 and 1949. At stake were the feelings and affect of a new global subject who would perceive themselves as belonging to humanity as a unified whole, and the urban environment that would foster their subjectivity. The interventions in this debate, which drew in the period's most renowned modernists, took the form of a succession of plans for cities, suburbs, and communes, as well as experiments in building, drawing, printmaking, filmmaking, and writing. Weaving together postcolonial, feminist, and Marxist insight on subject formation, Shiben Banerji advances a new way of understanding modernist urban space as the design of subjective effects...[more]
| | |  | | The Work of Empire: War, Occupation, and the Making of American Colonialism in Cuba and the Philippines
By Justin F. Jackson
(University of North Carolina Press, 2025)
In 1898, on the eve of the Spanish-American War, the US Army seemed minuscule and ill-equipped for global conflict. Yet over the next fifteen years, its soldiers defeated Spain and pacified nationalist insurgencies in both Cuba and the Philippines. Despite their lack of experience in colonial administration, American troops also ruled and transformed the daily lives of the 8 million people who inhabited these tropical islands. How was this relatively small and inexperienced army able to wage wars in Cuba and the Philippines and occupy them? American soldiers depended on tens of thousands of Cubans and Filipinos, both for military operations and civil government. Whether compelled to labor for free or voluntarily working for wages, Cubans and Filipinos, suspended between civilian and soldier status, enabled the making of a new US overseas empire by interpreting, guiding, building, selling sex, and many other kinds of work for American troops. In The Work of Empire, Justin Jackson reveals how their labor forged the politics, economics, and culture of American colonialism in Cuba and the Philippines and left an enduring imprint on these islands and the US Army itself. Jackson offers new ways to understand the rise of American military might and how it influenced a globalizing imperial world...[more]
| | |  | | Cuba's Cosmopolitan Enclaves: Imperialism and Internationalism in Eastern Sugar Towns
By Frances Pearce Sullivan
(University Press of Florida, 2025)
This book explores how a region in Cuba that was widely known as a site of labor subjugation became a hub of international solidarity in the 1920s and 1930s. In the early twentieth century, United States agricultural companies like the United Fruit Company established sugar export operations in Cuba’s Oriente Province, creating a zone of economic imperialism. These early multinational corporations recruited Afro-Caribbean laborers from surrounding islands, aiming to create closed, self-sufficient plantation complexes. However, as Frances Peace Sullivan shows in Cuba’s Cosmopolitan Enclaves, the influx of foreign capital led to the development of diverse, vibrant communities in these company towns. Drawing on archival sources in Cuba, the US, Russia, and the UK, Sullivan demonstrates how immigrant workers joined local Cubans in movements for radical transnational solidarity. In the interwar years, northeastern Cuba became a center of Garveyite Pan-Africanism, global communism, and antifascist support for Republican Spain. In 1933, the region attracted the world’s attention when workers seized sugar mills in a revolutionary strike...[more] | | |  | | Rain and the colonial streetscape: reading for water in Freetown’s newspaper archive
By Milo Gough
Urban History (May 2025)
Situated on the tip of a mountainous peninsula jutting out into the Atlantic Ocean off the west coast of Africa, the city of Freetown, Sierra Leone, receives an extraordinarily high rainfall, heavily concentrated in the few months of the rainy season. Working from this extreme wetness and inspired by recent work in the oceanic humanities, this article reads Freetown’s colonial era newspaper archive for water. It argues that the heavy rain of the West African Monsoon was an important agent in shaping the decaying streetscape of the city, and a broader imaginary of decline, at the turn of the twentieth century. Using vivid descriptions of wetness, nature and disease, African editors, correspondents and letter-writers evoked a sodden modernity to push the colonial government to maintain and improve the city’s street infrastructure and at once to forge an elite urban public in opposition to migrants from the urban hinterland...[more]
| | |  | | “The Cité Is Yours”: Colonial Modernization and Dakar’s Postcolonial Suburban Dream
By Gregory Valdespino
Journal of Urban History (July 2025)
This article explains the postcolonial endurance of colonial modernization plans by examining the history and memory of Dakar’s postwar SICAP suburbs. In 1950, Senegal’s French colonial regime made the Société Immobilière du Cap-Vert (SICAP) which built thousands of homes on the edges of Dakar, primarily for African salaried workers. French leaders claimed SICAP houses would help “modernize” the city and its inhabitants. After independence, Senegalese leaders and dwellers used these “modern” suburbs to create new urban landscapes, new families, and in theory, a new modern African nation. However, SICAP’s preference for salaried workers meant it failed to serve the vast majority of Dakar’s population. This article argues that Senegalese planners and urbanites alike embraced these kinds of modernizing programs, despite their inequalities and colonial ideologies, because they gave aspirational middle-class urbanites access to the status associated with globally circulating visions of prosperous postwar suburbs...[more]
| | |  | | Navigating futures past: colonialism, nationalism, and the making of post-Ottoman order in Kilis, 1919–1926
By Ramazan Hakkı Öztan
Contemporary Levant (December 2024)
In the early 1920s, Kilis was a mid-size town situated in the north of the Ottoman province of Aleppo. The border introduced in October 1921 between Turkey and French Syria passed right to the south of Kilis, leaving the landowning elites who lived in the city detached from their lands located in Syria. This article reconstructs the complex episodes that unfolded both before and after the introduction of this border, as the territorial future of Kilis’ agricultural hinterland intimately shaped how the town’s landed notables interacted with the coming of colonial rule to the region and the ensuing resistance efforts. In tracing these post-war developments in Kilis, this study is an attempt to come to terms with the complex ways in which historical actors operated in a world that was increasingly defined by the uncertainties of the future, and hopes to show how historians could best approach such key moments while navigating the study of futures past. As we will see, the immediate post-war years in Kilis not only led old problems to flare up with greater intensity, but also quickly resulted in the consolidation of new discursive positions in line with the emerging post-Ottoman order across the region...[more] | | |  | | The Crossroad City: Relations and exchanges, intersections and crossing points in urban realities
The XII AISU Congress
Palermo, September 10-13, 2025
Cities have exerted an irresistible force of attraction since antiquity and over the centuries, and still do today, representing themselves as places of aggregation, of exchange, sometimes of permanent settlement but frequently also of passage. In many respects and from different points of view, the city appears on many occasions to be a real crossroad, a place where cultures, religions, power groups and institutions meet but also clash, a theatre of markets and trade, a temporary landing place in the context of broader and more dynamic migratory processes, a place where urban design ideas and realisations are debated and technical confrontations are held; sometimes it is the urban form itself that materialises the concept of crossroads, in foundation or refoundation projects, material or symbolic, of the built environment. The 12th AISU Congress intends to produce investigations and promote debates on the city as a crossroad, in the material but also metaphorical meaning of the term, with a multi-scalar and multi-disciplinary approach and from the multiple points of view that contribute to define urban history studies...[more]
| | |  | | The Urban Commons: Rights and Citizenship in the City from the Medieval to the Modern
University of Leicester
4-5 September 2025
Ideas of the urban commons have been important in cities throughout history. Examining their importance questions the extent to which the city a site of freedom and free expression, yet also reveals the ways that places, behaviours, and protest are policed. Furthermore, how have attitudes towards urban commons changed over time and in different places? Medieval and early modern townspeople, for example, habitually contested the regulation of common spaces such as marketplaces, while also invoking the idea of the ‘commons’, and the ‘commonweal’ in all kinds of debates around power and control. The Chartists famously exerted their right to collect and protest on sites such as Kennington Common and St Peter’s Field. Since the 1950s, the development of shopping precincts has created new types of private space, and increasingly policed appropriate behaviours in the city. What these examples reveal is that ideas of who has a right to the city, what can be done, and who can do it, constantly shift in different periods and in differing geographic locations. In exploring the idea of the urban commons, the conference also asks participants to consider issues of ownership of, and participation in the urban past. In so doing, it takes inspiration from the vitality of the impact agenda which has led to much new co-produced urban research and local history projects...[more]
| | | Calls for Papers & Proposals |
Call for Participants: 100th Issue History Workshop Journal
History Workshop Journal
Have you ever used any History Workshop Journal articles in your teaching practice? We’d love to hear from you for the 100th issue of HWJ! Please send us an email at hwoeditors@historyworkshop.org...[more]
Submission deadline: June 30, 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
| CFP: Reforming Religion, Morality and Society in Afro-Eurasia: Intellectual and Cultural Traditions in Motion in the Global Eighteenth Century
Early Career Seminar of the International Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies
Trier (Germany)
17-20 June 2026
Eighteenth-century studies were long based implicitly or explicitly on the premise that contacts between European, African, and Asian cultures had no significant intellectual and cultural impact before the modern Age of Imperialism. In the historiography of the European Enlightenment, the interaction with non-European thought in the course of early-modern European colonial expansion has long had a place, but was above all understood - as in the “shock of discovery” thesis - as the trigger of a process that undermined European certainties. In the second half of the twentieth century, scholars emphasized othering processes rather than circulations, receptions, and translations. In recent decades, however, scholarship has gained a much better understanding of the profound impact that contacts across religious borders had on thought and culture before modern European imperialism in Afro-Eurasia. Three scholarly developments have been particularly significant: first, placing eighteenth-century phenomena in the longue durée of Christian erudition has shown the roots in knowledge-making of many reorientations once associated with secularization. Second, emphasizing the mobility of people and objects, in particular manuscript books, has revealed the groundedness of new perceptions in material circulations. Third, taking seriously as intellectuals all participants in global interactions has revealed a world not divided between thinkers and their informants or intermediaries but rather one in which knowledge was co-produced cross-culturally by a variety of agents.The Early Career Seminar aims to contribute to this renewal by understanding cultural and intellectual change as a response to the increasing connectivities in the early modern world...[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 | | Martin Lynn Scholarship in African History
The 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. Thanks to the generosity of the family of the late Martin Lynn, the RHS has established an annual award in his memory. Martin Lynn was Professor of African History in the Queen’s University, Belfast, the first scholar to hold a chair in African history in Ireland...[more]
Application deadline: September 5, 2025
| | | | Submissions Open for Emerging Scholars Award, Article Prize, and BIPOC Scholars Prize
Nineteenth Century Studies Association
The Nineteenth-Century Studies Association (NCSA) is accepting nominations for three awards: the 2026 NCSA Emerging Scholars Award, the 2026 NCSA Article Prize, and the 2026 BIPOC Scholars Award...[more]
Application deadline: July 1, 2025
| | | | Dries Lyna receives Gerda Henkel Stiftung grant
The Gerda Henkel Stiftung has awarded 253.000 euros in funding to Dries Lyna, assistant professor in social and economic history and researcher at RICH. With this grant, Dries Lyna will investigate how social support networks were shaped from below within highly asymmetrical colonial societies. The grant allows Dries Lyna to start up a new project for three postdoctoral researchers entitled "Economies of Trust? A New Digital Infrastructure on the Urban Poor in the Cape Colony", together with Eva Marie Lehner (University of Bonn) and Wouter Ryckbosch (Vrije Universiteit Brussel/Ghent University)...[more] | | | | No social networks defined for this website | |