Vol. 45, July 2023
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.
| GUHP Essay Prizes for Emerging Scholars
Up to three GUHP Essay Prizes will be awarded annually to early-career scholars for unpublished essays associated with graduate and post-graduate work in the field of Global Urban History. Eligible applicants should be GUHP members and can include graduate students, post-graduate scholars not in a tenure-track position, or early career scholars in the first three years of a tenure track position at the time of submission. Scholars who work at institutions in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia are especially encouraged to apply, as are scholars who work on periods before 1850.
Essays must be no longer than 8,000 words in English inclusive of citations, be based on original research, contain full citations to archival and relevant secondary sources, and engage with critical themes in global urban history. Essay topics can include studies of cities as creations and creators of larger-scale historical phenomena of all kinds - from empires and capitalism to global cultural communities and ecosystems; of connective, cross-border, ocean-, river- or borderland urban history; of comparative or connective urban histories; of urban environmental history; and/or studies that in general expand historical research to cities and urban regions that are underrepresented in the current urban historical literature.[more]
Application deadline: September 29, 2023 | Related Network Event Spotlight |  | | EAUH Online Symposium
Exchanges: European Cities and the Wider Urban World
September 6, 2023
A special academic event hosted by the Centre for Urban History, University of Antwerp
Convenors: Simon Gunn and Rosemary Wakeman
This one-day symposium focuses on cultural and material exchanges between urban Europe and the wider urban world. Our aim is to contribute to debates in global urban history by helping to situate European cities not solely as the locus of post/colonial power but also as sites of exchange. The symposium brings together early and senior researchers in a broad-ranging discussion and new thinking about urban Europe and other parts of the world. Event is free but registration is required.
Schedule
9.00-10:00 CET Start of Zoom meeting, have a coffee at home
10.00-10.15 CET Symposium opening
⁃ A warm welcome by the EAUH & CSG – Ilja Van Damme & Greet De Block (Centre for Urban History – Urban Studies Institute, University of Antwerp)
⁃ Opening remarks – Simon Gunn (University of Leicester) and Rosemary Wakeman (Fordham University)
10.15-11.00 CET Debating Exchanges 1
Astrid Swenson (University of Bayreuth) – Exchanges, adaptations and contestations in urban conservation across Europe and the Mediterranean
11.00-11.15 CET Coffee break
11.15-12.15 CET Exchanges Session 1: Regulating Modernities
⁃ Katherine Vyhmeister (University of Edinburgh) – From a European notion to a local phenomenon: Tracing the role of police in the production of local public works in late colonial Chile
⁃ David Schley (Hong Kong Baptist University/University of East Anglia) – Gendarmes, Bobbies, and Cops: The NYPD Looks to Europe
⁃ Nicole Davis (University of Melbourne) – ‘One of the Sights of the Colony’: Australia’s Nineteenth-century Arcades, Modernity, Consumer Culture, and Local/Global Connections’
2.15-1.00 CET Debating Exchanges 2
Marion Pluskota (Leiden University) – ‘Souvenir d’Amsterdam’: World exhibitions and migration of sex workers in the late 19th century
1.00-1.45 CET Lunch break
1.45-2.00 CET EAUH2024
Andrea Pokludova (University of Ostrava) – Presenting EAUH 2024, Cities at the Boundaries
2.00-2.45 CET Debating Exchanges 3
Michael Goebel (Free University, Berlin) – The Unmaking of Black Monserrat: Race, European Immigration, and Real Estate in Nineteenth-Century Buenos Aires
2.45-3.45 CET Exchanges Sessions 2: Urban Ideas
⁃ Eliane Schmid (University of Luxembourg) – (Re-)Building Marseille's Port and Parks: Socio-Spatial Differentiations, Public Policies, and Migration (1945-1973)
⁃ Fikriye Karaman (Samsun University, Turkey) – Ottoman Travellers’ Views of Education in European Cities in the Nineteenth Century
⁃ Kristian Taketomo (University of Pennsylvania) – Lost in Translation: The City in International Statistics
3.45-4.00 CET Coffee break
4.00-4.45 CET Conference Keynote Lecture
Peter Stabel (University of Antwerp) – The Blessings and Curses of Comparative History: Writing an Urban History of Medieval Europe and the Islamic World
4.30-4.45 CET Concluding remarks – Simon Gunn and Rosemary Wakeman
|  | Police and the Empire City: Race and the Origins of Modern Policing in New York
By Matthew Guariglia
Duke University Press, 2023
In Police and the Empire City Matthew Guariglia explores the New York City Police Department through its periods of experimentation and violence as police experts import tactics from the US occupation of the Philippines and Cuba, devise modern bureaucratic techniques to better suppress Black communities, and infiltrate supposedly unknowable immigrant neighborhoods. Innovations ranging from recruiting Chinese, Italian, or German police to form “ethnic squads,” the use of deportation and federal immigration restrictions to control local crime—even the introduction of fingerprinting—were motivated by attempts to govern a multiracial city. Campaigns to remake the police department created an urban landscape where power, gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, crime, and bodies collided and provided a foundation for the supposedly “colorblind,” technocratic, federally backed, and surveillance-based policing of today.[more]
| | | Colonial Ports, Global Trade, and the Roots of the American Revolution (1700-1776)
By Jeremy Land
Brill, 2023
This book takes a long-run view of the global maritime trade of Boston, New York, and Philadelphia from 1700 to American Independence in 1776. Land argues that the three cities developed large, global networks of maritime commerce and exchange that created tension between merchants and the British Empire which sought to enforce mercantilist policies to constrain American trade to within the British Empire. Colonial merchants created and then expanded their mercantile networks well beyond the confines of the British Empire. This trans-imperial trade (often considered smuggling by British authorities) formed the roots of what became known as the American Revolution.[more]
| | | | Representing Freetown: Photographs, maps and postcards in the urban cartography of colonial Sierra Leone
By Milo Gough
Journal of Historical Geography
July 2023
This article traces the development of the colonial cartography of Freetown, Sierra Leone across the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The historiography of colonial cartography has centred the surveyor and the map in the capture and control of land. This article, instead, describes colonial cartography in the accretion of a variety of forms of spatial representation created by diverse intermediaries in the colonial project. [more]
| | | | The Chaouch of Marseille: Metropolitan Intermediaries and Colonial Control, 1928–1945
By Danielle Beacon
French Politics, Culture & Society
March 2023
In 1928, the French government created a bureau in Marseille to both control and help North African migrants, an organization eventually called the Bureau des Affaires Musulmanes Nord-Africaines (BAMNA). Throughout the BAMNA's many name changes and structural reorganizations over the years, Mohamed Ben Hadj remained constant as the bureau's only North African employee. This article traces Ben Hadj's career within the BAMNA, using his professional trajectory to explore the mechanisms and disfunction of colonial governance in the metropole.[more]
| | | Conferences, Workshops, and Events | |
Listening In: Conversations on Architectures, Cities, and Landscapes, 1700-1900
ETH Zurich, September 13-15, 2023
Who do we listen to when we write histories of architectures, cities, and landscapes? How many women authors can we find among our sources? How many of them are cited by those whose research we read? We argue that women and other marginalised groups have always been part of conversations on architectures, cities, and landscapes - but we have not had the space to listen to them. This conference is an invitation to reconstruct such conversations, real, imagined, and metaphorical ones, taking place in the 18th and 19th centuries, in any region, in order to diversify the ways we write histories. Taking the art of conversation, integral as both practice and form to the period in Western thought, and repurposing it to dismantle the exclusivity of historiography, this conference calls for contributions which bring women into dialogue with others.[more]
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2024 African Critical Inquiry Programme Workshop: Multispecies Stories from a Southern City
University of Cape Town, 2023-24
The African Critical Inquiry Programme (ACIP) is pleased to announce that the 2024 ACIP Workshop will be Multispecies Stories from a Southern City. The project was proposed by organisers Shari Daya and Pippin Anderson, both in the Department of Environmental and Geographical Science at University of Cape Town. It will take place in a series of gatherings across different sites in Cape Town, South Africa in 2023-2024. Information about applying to organize the 2025 ACIP workshop and for the 2024 Ivan Karp Doctoral Research Awards will be available in November 2023.[more]
| | | Calls for Papers & Proposals | CFP: Resistance to Slavery in Africa: Past and Present
SOAS
London, October 23-24, 2023
The aim of the symposium is to re-explore the very idea and concept of resistance to slavery in a cross-regional comparative perspective. Debates about collective forms of resistance to slavery in Africa appear to have faded in the face of a focus on individual agency and everyday resistance. By depicting especially complex individualised trajectories of agency within the ‘kinship continuum’, research has tended to lose sight of resistance and the fundamental oppressive and violent nature of slavery. We aim to highlight the complex relations between the individual and the collective in their response to the institution of slavery - whether as social system, form of labour, or mode of production.[more]
Application Deadline: July 17, 2023
| CFP: Networking Events
Marmara Urban Forum
Istanbul,October 4-7, 2023
Networking Events pave the way for various organizations to share their knowledge and experience, create the grounds for intersectional dialogue and develop multi-stakeholder collaborations on specific themes. Representatives from different sectors working on similar issues come together in events with high-level interaction among participants.[more]
Application Deadline: July 31, 2023
| CFP: Archives of Revolution
John Carter Brown Library
Providence, June 20-22, 2024
Creating, exploring, promoting, preserving and most of all critically engaging with the nature and process of archives and archiving helps us to understand the past that we’re making. As archivists, literary scholars, librarians, historians, and more, we all interact with and help shape the past through its material and textual remains. Sharing more about the process of making archives of revolution, of using them, and of their changing nature in the twenty-first century, prompts new conversations about the past. It is also a way of engaging scholars, archivists, and the public in a civil conversation about who owns it, has owned it, and who shapes it.[more]
Application Deadline: August 15, 2023
| CFP: Conjunctions of Archives and Public Spheres: Embodied Histories, Memory and Multi-Media Archives in and from Africa
University of Basel, October 19-20, 2023
Embodied histories have found their way into western (colonial) archives as fragments, usually by means of audio-visual media of all sorts (acoustic, image, and film documents). This conference organised by the Centre for African Studies of the University of Basel and the Basler Afrika Bibliographien on behalf of the Swiss Society for African Studies focuses on Africa-related multi-media archives (and not only audio-visual collections).[more]
Application Deadline: August 15, 2023
| CFP: Colonialism and Development
Yearbook for the History of Global Development
The historical understanding of the multifaceted trajectories of development – as a set of contested discourses, as multiple institutional complexes and as a heterogenous repertoire of policies and practices – has evolved significantly in the past few years. We now have a rich literature that engages with the diverse contexts, dynamics and problems of development and its intersection with other major historical phenomena of the twentieth century, such as the institutionalization of international organizations, the intensification of urbanization and industrialization, the widening of globalizing dynamics and global integration, decolonization, and the emergence of the ‘Cold War’ and the ´Third World’. This volume aims to register many of these historiographical achievements specifically as they relate to colonialism offering a critical overview of existing scholarship and documenting its variety and richness, while also probing existing chronologies (e.g., the colonial/postcolonial) and geographies of development.[more]
Submission Deadline: August 30, 2023
| CFP: African Urban Echoes
The Flute
African urban space anthology The Flute is looking for submissions highlighting the tales of African cities. The anthology is looking to publish works in the genre of poetry and photography focusing on African urban spaces such as Lagos, Accra, Kinshasa, Lonligwe, Durban, Marrakesh, Nairobi, Ouagadougou, Dakar, Luanda, Yaounde, and more.[more]
Submission deadline: September 1, 2023
| CFP: Modern Infrastructural Histories and the Global South panel
World Congress of Environmental History
Oulu, Finland, August 19-23, 2024
How can viewing the history of infrastructure from the Global South change our thinking about the making of modern environments? This panel aims to bring together scholars to discuss the diverse histories of modern infrastructure in the Global South, from the plantation to the internet cable. This panel is part of the work towards a proposed new handbook for the global history of modern infrastructure. The organisers invite contributions from scholars at all career stages working on any aspect of the history of infrastructure in the Global South from the 1700s to the present.[more]
Submission deadline: September 18, 2023
| CFP: Cities at the Boundaries, Sixteenth Conference of the European Urban History Association
Ostrava, Czech Republic, September 4-7, 2024
European Association for Urban History 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]
Submission deadline: September 30, 2023
| CFP: Borders, Infrastructures, and Placed in the Modern City (Session M11)
Sixteenth Conference of the European Urban History Association
Ostrava, Czech Republic, September 4-7, 2024
This session explores the urban dimension of infrastructural development over the last two-hundred and fifty years, both in terms of how infrastructures have transformed cities and how urban dynamics have shaped infrastructure. This brings together histories of matter, energy and people to produce entangled histories of cities as environments.We welcome scholars working on these themes from across the world and at all career stages, in order to compare and explore the impact of the movements of goods and commodities on space across a wide variiety of urban contexts across the modern period. We would be delighted to receive proposals from scholars working with new sources or pioneering approaches, working in environmental humanities, digital history, social history, histories of technology and infrastructure and beyond.[more]
Submission deadline: September 30, 2023
| Fellowships, Grants, & Awards | | Cities in Historical Perspective Grants
Albert Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest
The Albert Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest at Villanova University is pleased to announce a new funding opportunity to support public-facing historical projects related to the theme of “Cities in Historical Perspective.” The Center will fund up to five projects that creatively illustrate how historical study can further public understanding of cities in the present moment by creatively engaging with the broad range of questions, concerns, policies and practices raised by the study of the role of cities in history, and how historical study can further public understanding of the present moment.[more]
Application deadline: September 3, 2023
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