GUHP2 Berlin: Stretching the Limits of Global Urban History

Center for Metropolitan Studies, Technische Universität Berlin, Germany

July 10-11, 2025

Call for Panel and Paper Proposals

Deadline: October 18, 2024

Since GUHP’s founding in 2017, it has supported scholarship that stretches the boundaries of the field of urban history. Programming such as the Dream Conversations have encouraged investigations of cities as creations and creators of large-scale historical phenomena while also widening the diversity of voices active in the field. Recorded online events, available on our YouTube channel (GUHPVids), have engaged interested scholars worldwide in our discussions.

For our second in-person conference, we invite scholars to present work in English that further 'Stretches the Limits of Global Urban History.' Some of the questions we are interested in include, but are not limited to:

Geographically: How can global urban history elucidate or critique larger-scale spatial concepts such as “global,” “planetary,” “hinterlands,” and “world.” As incidents of war-time urbicide increase, how do we handle the dialectics of spatial creation and destruction? What new models of connectivity and integration can our field offer?

Temporally: What new temporal frameworks can global urban history explore and what can we gain analytically from them? How can global urban history rethink continuity, contingency, and disruption over time, including the longue duree?

Politically: How can global urban history help to explain inequalities of power, wealth, knowledge, and representation? How can it elucidate histories of race, ethnicity, patriarchy, feminism, gender, sexual liberation, and emotion?

Spatially: What new understandings of urban space and the built environment, urban planning and the natural environmental can global urban history offer? How can we rethink resource and energy frameworks in global urban history?

Methodologically: How do global urban historical epistemologies enhance or reinvent our engagement with the archives? What new cross-discipline collaborations can we pursue to make new interventions in urban studies?

Important Conference Details:

The conference committee welcomes submissions that include scholars at all career levels, including graduate students, and that address diversity. Submissions may address innovative approaches to urban history across geography and time periods.

Attendance: The conference will be limited to 150 participants. Presentations must be in English. This will be an in-person only event. For opportunities to join future GUHP online events, please refer to the GUHP Dream Conversations in Urban History series on our website.

Panel sessions vs. individual presentations: GUHP will consider both proposals for full sessions and for individual presentations. Sessions are limited to four presenters or three presenters and a discussant. The conference organizing committee welcomes creative session and presentation formats including roundtables, working sessions, and brainstorming sessions.

Travel grants: As part of its mission to support new voices in the field, GUHP will offer a limited number of travel grants to scholars working in low-resourced institutions who might otherwise be unable to participate in the conference. Qualifying individuals should indicate interest in applying to a travel grant on their proposal. GUHP will solicit applications in early 2025.

GUHP Emerging 2024-25: This year’s GUHP Emerging program is dedicated to helping conference participants develop and prepare for their presentation. The program seeks applications from scholars finishing their doctoral degree or within three years of its completion who submitted a proposal to the conference. More information about this year’s program and application process is available on our website.

GUHP membership: Membership in GUHP is not required to propose a panel or paper to the conference. If your proposal is accepted, you will be expected to join GUHP to register for the conference.

For further information: Please reach out to the Conference Program Committee at guhp@globalurbanhistory.org with questions and ideas.

The GUHP conference is committed to sustainability and carbon neutrality. The conference will offer vegetarian meals, recycle, and avoid single use plastic or printed materials. To the extent possible, we encourage all participants to chose transportation modes in keeping with the goal of carbon neutrality. To this end, the United Nations offers a carbon offset platform. 

 

Submissions Format and Deadline:

Submissions must include the information listed below. Panels are limited to four presenters or three presenters and a discussant.

For the overall panel:

1. Panel Title
2. Panel abstract (350-500 words)
3. Panel format (if different from a traditional conference panel)
   

For each presentation in a panel or for individual presentation proposals:

1. Presentation title
2. Presentation abstract (250 words max.)
3. Presenter’s name, professional title, affiliation, and email address
4. Presenter’s short bio (250 words max.)

For chairs and discussants (all panels must have a chair, who can double as a presenter OR a discussant; discussants are optional):

1. Name, professional title, affiliation, email address and
2. Short bio (250 words max.)

Deadline for submission: Please send your proposal as a single PDF document to guhp@globalurbanhistory.org by 24:00 UTC by Friday, October 18, 2024.