Vol. 40, February 2023
WE'RE BACK!
GUHP is resuming regular publication of Noteworthy in Global Urban History. Have you published something new in Global Urban History? Are you hosting a conference, workshop, or event? We'd like our members to know!
Email us with the details
Need to catch up on your Global Urban History?
The restructured GUHP website lists upcoming events, links to videos of past events, and a new Noteworthy in Global Urban History archive, filled with useful bibliographic details.
GUHP is a member-supported organization.
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Upcoming GUHP Virtual Events
Dream Conversation in Global Urban History: Cities, Empires, and (Dis)Contents
March 3, 2023, 14:00-15:30 UTC
- Geert Castryck: “The dissociation between imperialism and colonialism in the 1920s: a snapshot of the urban area of Kigoma-Ujiji”
- Cyrus Schayegh: “The Making of an Aerocity: US empire and Urban Transformation in Beirut, 1945-1955”
April 6, 2023, 12:00-13:30 UTC
- Sohini Chattopadhyay: “The urban in the history and sociology of science”
- Umit Firat Acikgoz: “The Problem of Continuity”
May 4, 2023, 11:00-13:15 UTC
- Dries Lyna: “Institutional(ized) Inequality? Access to Justice in Cities across VOC Asia”
- Mohd Aquil: Medical panics and the restructuring of urban spaces in Colonial North India
- Taoyu Yang: “Multi-Imperial Entanglements and Spatial Configuration in Treaty-Port Tianjin, 1860s-1940s”
|  | | Related Network Event Spotlight
European Association for Urban History (EAUH) Online Symposium on Exchanges: European Cities and the Wider Urban World, September 23, 2023
The EAUH will hold a one-day online symposium focusing on cultural and material exchanges between urban Europe and the wider urban world, extending across all historical periods. Our aim is to contribute to the larger global urban history currently being written by helping to situate European cities, not solely as the locus of post/colonial power but also as sites of exchange.
Exchange might include one or more of the following:
- Movements of people and goods
- Trade flows and relationships
- Cultural exchange: foods, street naming, statuary, etc.
- Transformation of technologies e.g. sanitation, across urban settings
- Architecture and planning: collaborations and influences
- The export and import of ideas between urban spaces
Above all, we are looking for presentations that stimulate new thinking about the relationship of urban Europe with other parts of the world. The conference committee welcomes proposals (max 300 words) from scholars at all career levels, including graduate students, and that address diversity.
Deadline for Submission: 1 April 2023
Notification of Acceptance: June 2023
Submit proposals and inquiries to Simon Gunn or Rosemary Wakeman
| | The Great Plague Scare of 1720: Disaster and Diplomacy in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World
by Cindy Ermus
(Cambridge University Press, 2023)
From 1720 to 1722, the French region of Provence and surrounding areas experienced one of the last major epidemics of plague to strike Western Europe. In this transnational study, Cindy Ermus focuses on the social, commercial, and diplomatic impact of the epidemic beyond French borders, examining reactions to this public health crisis from Italy to Great Britain to Spain and the overseas colonies. [more] | | | | Epidemic Cities
by Antonio Carbone
(Cambridge University Press, 2022)
Epidemic Cities provides an overview of the history of epidemics through a particular focus on a range of cities in different regions of the world. After an introduction concerning the history of the relationship between medicine, epidemics, and cities, the book focuses on the history of three epidemic diseases and how they affected Paris, Buenos Aires, Hong Kong, Bombay, and Baltimore. [more] | | | | The Modern City In Asia
by Kristin Stapleton
(Cambridge University Press, 2022)
Kristin Stapleton analyzes how concepts and practices associated with the 'modern city' were received, transformed, and contested in Asia over the past 150 years. In recent decades, cities have continued to play a central role in economic and cultural affairs in Asia, but the concept of the modern city has evolved. Asian ideas about urban governance and visions of future cities are significantly shaping that evolution. [more] | | | | Urban Infrastructure: Historical and Social Dimensions of an Interconnected World
Edited by Joseph Heathcott, Jonathan Soffer, & Rae Zimmerman
(University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022)
Urban Infrastructures creates space for an encounter between historians, humanists, and social scientists who seek new methodological approaches to the history of urban infrastructure. It draws on recent work across history, anthropology, science and technology studies, geography, resilience/sustainability, and other disciplines to explore the social effects of infrastructure. [more] | | | | After Suburbia: Urbanization in the Twenty-First Century
by Roger Neil and Fulong Wu
(University of Toronto Press, 2022)
Based on cutting-edge conceptual thought and steeped in richly detailed empirical work conducted over the past decade, After Suburbia draws on research from Asia, Africa, Australia, Europe, and the Americas to showcase comprehensive global scholarship on the urban periphery. Contributors explicitly reject the traditional centre-periphery dichotomy and the prioritization of epistemologies that favour the Global North, especially North American cases, over other experiences. [more] | | | | Panama in Black: Afro-Caribbean World Making in the Twentieth Century
by Kaysha Corinealdi
(Duke University Press, 2022)
Kaysha Corinealdi traces the multigenerational activism of Afro-Caribbean Panamanians as they forged diasporic communities in Panama and the United States throughout the twentieth century. Corinealdi presents the Panamanian isthmus as a crucial site in the making of an Afro-diasporic world that linked cities and towns like Colón, Kingston, Panamá City, Brooklyn, Bridgetown, and La Boca. [more] | | | | Empire and Catastrophe: Decolonization and Environmental Disaster in North Africa and Mediterranean France since 1954
by Spencer D. Segalla
(University of Nebraska Press, 2021)
Empire and Catastrophe examines natural and anthropogenic disasters during the years of decolonization in Algeria, Morocco, and France and explores how environmental catastrophes both shaped and were shaped by struggles over the dissolution of France's empire in North Africa. [more][New Books Network interview with author] | | | | A Diaspora Moment: Writing Global History Through Palestinian-West German Ties
by Joseph Ben Prestel
American Historical Review, September 2022
While the West German Left had been a staunch supporter of Israel until 1967, ties between Palestinians and the country’s radical Left flourished after the Six-Day War. At the same time, a Palestine solidarity movement emerged in the Federal Republic. Since the late 1970s, these ties weakened again, and critical questions about Palestinian politics multiplied. How can historians explain these ebbs and flows of pro-Palestinian activism? [more] | | | | Special Issue: 50 Years of Canadian Urban History
The Urban History Review – Revue d’histoire urbaine, September 2022
In 1972, a group of scholars referring to themselves as “urbanologists” and excited about the interpretive possibilities of studying the history of Canada’s cities, set out, somewhat cautiously, to create “something more than a newsletter, but something less than a learned journal.” This special issue features a roundtable on the state of Canadian urban history 50 years on. [more] | | | | Special Issue: Comparative Methods for Global Urban Studies
Urban Studies, June 2022
The articles in the volume each bring forward innovative approaches to comparative methods which support wider conceptualisations of urban processes and urban experiences. The articles in this volume consider a wide range of urban contexts and collectively move beyond geopolitically imprecise propositions of ‘southern’ urbanism to embrace the wider comparative agenda of thinking with both the diversity and the profound interconnectedness of the urban globally. The articles contribute to decentring urban studies, opening conceptualisation to a range of different contexts and differently positioned writers. [more]
| | | Related Networks and Events
| Workshops, Conferences, and Trainings | | Urban History Group Conference: Recovery and the City, University of Warwick, March 30-31, 2023
The main theme at this year’s conference is the notion of recovery in the developing scholarship on urban history across all time periods. How, for example, do cities and those who live, work and govern there remember, and recover from, episodes and events that disrupt or reshape the economies, networks, cultures, societies and processes that characterise urban space and life? Furthermore, how might historians interrogate the notion of recovery, and related concepts such as renaissance and growth, decline and decay, to uncover the inherent assumptions, biases and limitations that lie at the heart of historical periodisation? [more] | | | | Atlas Obscura Course: Reading the Urban Landscape, Virtual, March 2023
Living in a city doesn’t mean living apart from the natural world. The urban environment is full of secret (and not-so-secret) ecologies of its own, with opportunities to connect to nature in surprising and enriching ways. In this three-part intensive led by Annie Novak, learn how to explore the astonishing ecosystems tucked away in the concrete jungle using skills drawn from botany, ecology, phenology, and more. From the densely urban to the sprawling suburban, learn to read and build relationships with the plants, animals, and ecologies in your backyard or at the bus stop. [more] | | | | NYASA 46th Annual Conference: Decolonizing Global Hegemonies in Africa and the African Diaspora, Calabar, Nigeria, June 28-July 1, 2023
This conference, jointly organized by the New York African Studies Association (NYASA) and the University of Calabar, Nigeria aims to create dialogues and encourage exchanges between scholars, teachers, students, and community members, around the question of global hegemonies in Africa and the African diaspora, and the various ways in which their influence has been and continues to be addressed and combatted.[more] | | | | International Urban Symposium 2023 Field Training School, Urban Research: Theory and Methods, Montecatini Terme, Italy, July 21-27, 2023
Applications due March 20, 2023
This 7-day Field Training School (21-27 July) is aimed at postgraduate students and postdoctoral scholars who are interested in research in urban settings and in empirically-grounded analysis.The primary aim is to train students in the ‘art’ of conducting ethnographic fieldwork and develop the link between ethnographically-based analysis and social theory. The School offers an interactive learning environment and opportunities to discuss the rationale and practices of traditional and new research methods and mainstream debates. [more] | | | CFP: Urban History Association Conference, Reparations & the Right to the City, Pittsburgh, October 26-29
Deadline for proposals: February 20, 2023
The Urban History Association Conference Program Committee seeks submissions for roundtables, sessions, and panels on all aspects of domestic and global metropolitan, urban, and suburban history. Our goal is to convene and curate a robust, innovative, and generative conference to set and reset the role and mission of Urban history at present and into the future. Drawing on the global calls for reparations, restoration, and the rights to the city for all, this conference aims to bring together a wide-ranging collection of practitioners, scholars, activists, community organizers, policymakers, and leading voices on the history and contemporary realities of the urban experience across the globe. [more]
| CFP: Workshop on Radio, community, power: domination and emancipation in segregated contexts, Paris, June 2023
Deadline for proposals: February 27, 2023
This workshop will gather researchers working on radio in segregated contexts. The study of radio has been particularly dynamic in diverse cultural areas. In Europe, projects such as Popkult60 in Germany and Luxembourg, or the GRER (Groupe de Recherches et d’Études sur la Radio) in France, have been carrying up-to-date research over the role of radio in European history. Africa has also been investigated by recent scholarship over the role of broadcasting in late colonialism and independence. In the United States, sound studies have renewed the history of radio by focusing on the sonic dimensions or racial domination. Be it radios for racial minorities in the United States, or public radios controlled by colonizing powers in Africa, they both experienced strong backfires around the 1960s with intense politicization. It would be desirable and fruitful to investigate the struggle for the control over the airwaves in different situations characterized by racial domination and/or unequal repartition of power according to ethnic status. [more]
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CFP: Workshops on Nineteenth-Century Empires, Singapore, June 19-22, 2023
Accepting proposals on a waitlist basis until March 1, 2023
The Society for Global Nineteenth-Century Studies is pleased to invite participation in six workshops to be held at its World Congress in Singapore. Led by scholars in literature, history, media studies, and art history, these workshops provide opportunities for graduate students, early career researchers, and established scholars to formally or informally discuss their work in a small-group setting. In some cases, workshops are also intended to facilitate collaboration on prospective edited collections or special issues of a journal. [more]
| CFP: UPF Journal of World History Thematic Issue on "Decolonising World History: New Voices, New Values, New Methodologies"
Deadline for proposals: March 1, 2023
By reflecting on colonialism and its consequences, we can deepen our understanding of ourselves and current societies. This issue aims to contribute to the historiographical debates on colonisation and decolonisation, and their impacts on (post)colonial and (post)imperial territories, cultures, and mindsets. [more] | CFP: European Association for Urban History (EAUH) Conference, Cities at the Boundaries, Ostrava, Czech Republic, September 4-7, 2024
Deadline for proposals: March 15, 2023
EAUH invites scholars to discuss both the boundaries of social and economic development related to cities and urban agglomeration, as well as a wide array of topics related to cities which lay on geographic-, state-, as well as other borders. The EAUH 2024 specifically welcomes all topics related to the environmental problems and sustainable development of cities, such as post-industrial transformation, modernization of public infrastructure, and social housing. [more] | CFP: Panelists, Of Streets and Streeters: New Horizons in African Urban Space Politics, The 7th Annual Lagos Studies Association Conference, Lagos, June 2023
Deadline for proposals: April 1, 2023
This panel seeks new ways of (re)conceptualizing African streets beyond their conventional framing as significant sites of political and economic power. It moves beyond the commonplace argument that the street is a microcosm of the broader state power that rewards, punishes, and distributes resources based on primordial, among other sentiments. It is interested in engaging with the African street from its practical, physical, and metaphoric dimensions, in time perspective, and within overlapping variables of class, race, gender, and ethnicity, among other dynamics. In intellectualizing the African street, the panel asks for innovative epistemological framings that center previously unknown actors and ideas or rethink existing ones. To participate, send a 250-word abstract and short bio to Bankole Wright by April 1.
| CFP: World History Bulletin Spring 2023 Issue on "Food and World History"
Deadline for proposals: May 5, 2023
World History Bulletin is seeking quality research essays, lesson plans, and classroom activities for inclusion in its upcoming Spring 2023 issue, “Food and World History.” [more] | |