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Global Urban History Project

Date: 11/2/2020
Subject: Noteworthy in Global Urban History
From: Global Urban History Project



Vol. 25, November 2020.
 
Have you published something new in Global Urban History? 
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Books
A Hygienic City-Nation. Space, Community and Everyday Life in Colonial Calcutta
by Nabaparna Ghosh, Babson College, USA.
(Cambridge University Press, 2020)
 

Calcutta, the centre of British imperial power in India, figures in scholarship as the locus of colonialism and the hotbed of anti-colonial nationalist movements. This book is the first academic work that examines everyday urban formations in the colonial city that informed the broad global forces of imperialism, nationalism, and urbanism, and were, in turn, shaped by them. Drawing on previously unexplored archives of the Calcutta Improvement Trust and neighbourhood clubs, the author uncovers hidden stories of the city at the everyday level of neighbourhoods or paras, where kinship-like ties, caste, religion, and ethnicity constituted new urban modernity. [more]


Articles
"Letters of the Labouring Poor: The Art of Letter Writing in Colonial India"
by Arun Kumar, University of Nottingham, UK.
Past & Present, February 2020.
 

This article examines the emergence of mass letter-writing in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century colonial north India, a region marked by the growth of an unprecedented labour mobility, postal expansion, vernacular print, and workers' literacy. It narrates how workers' and their family members' abilities and failures to read and write letters shaped their experiences of the emerging transnational labour mobility and explains how the letter-writing by the subaltern produced new sociabilities and anxieties that both colonial and indigenous elites feared and attempted to discipline and control through letter-writing manuals.  [Access article here]



Featured On The Blog
The Archive Box #1 - Calcutta Pulp Fiction
 

The Archive Box is a series featuring global urban historians reflecting on their archival experience, and on the practical and theoretical challenges they faced while working with a variety of archives in different cities across the world.

 

From small libraries in Kolkata to the British Library in London, through police records and pulp fiction published in late nineteenth-century colonial Calcutta, Anindita Ghosh reflects on her journey through archives, on the tension between formal and vernacular archives, and on the crucial importance of the latter for writing the urban histories of ordinary people. [Access article here] 



Teaching Resources
GAHTC
Global Architectural History Teaching Collaborative
 
At a time of rapid technological change and professional specialization, one can easily forget that the most important mission of schools and universities is to offer inspiring and horizon-expanding teaching to the next generation. Survey courses play a particularly important role as they open the world to students and help give them critical purchase on their own landscapes and lives. A good survey course balances breadth with depth, but in an ever-expanding world that balance can be lost, meaning that the problem is not just how to teach students, but how to prepare teachers. The GAHTC’s mission is to provide cross-disciplinary, teacher-to-teacher exchanges of ideas and material, in order to energize and promote the teaching of all periods of global architectural history, especially at the survey level.
[more]

Related Networks and Events
"Black Monuments Matter" - A Virtual Exhibition of Sub-Saharan Architecture
Aga Khan Centre, October 2020 - March 2021

The Aga Khan University Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations and the Zamani Project at the University of Cape Town are pleased to present the online exhibition “Black Monuments Matter”.
 

Black Monuments Matter recognises and highlights African contributions to world history by exhibiting World Heritage Monuments and architectural treasures from Sub-Saharan Africa.  

[Click here to see the exhibition]

Princeton-Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities
Call for Fellows, 2021 - 2022

 
The Princeton-Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities is an interdisciplinary program that combines the efforts of a diverse group of faculty, programs, and schools to develop a dynamic understanding of urban issues past, present, and future. [more]
"City as Bricolage: Alternative Understandings of the Urban"
ACLA 2021 Conference - Call for Papers

  
The papers could be on any aspect of the urban not limited to space-time configurations, being and belonging in the city, claiming the city, building and making of the city, boundaries of the city etc. We also welcome de-colonial ways of looking at the city, at uncovering urban histories which might have been forgotten or erased by the emergence of post-colonial nation states. Contributors are requested to send in 250 word abstracts to fit the broad theme and a brief biography of the author. Papers are to be sent to yaminkrishn@gmail.com and meiyen104@gmail.com. [more]
"The Future of Architecture and Urbanism in the Post-Covid Age"
Epidemic Urbanism Initiative - Call for Papers

  
The Epidemic Urbanism Initiative (EUI) seeks papers that explore the present and future implications of the COVID-19 global pandemic. Papers will address how urban and rural communities are experiencing or responding to COVID-19, how governments have envisioned or imposed interventions and their impact on urban communities, the ways in which communities are responding to or resisting such interventions, among other topics. Deadline: November 27, 2020. [more]

Erratum
 
In the recent announcement of the Participants in GUHP's inaugural Mentorship Program, the institution at which Halimat Somotan received her PhD was listed incorrectly. Dr. Somotan received her degree from Columbia University. The complete and accurate list of participants can be found here.