Vol. 53, March 2024
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.
| Narrating Urban Lives
Join us for our "Narrating Urban Lives," series:
Five virtual events which emerged out of GUHP's "Dream Conversations."
Save the dates below!
| Narrating Urban Lives Recording: Archival Futures
If you missed the second conversation in our Narrating Urban Lives series "Archival Futures," featuring Bhavani Raman, Ritajyoti Bandyopadhyay, and Yahia Shawkat in a conversation moderated by Anwesha Ghosh, you can view the recording here.
| Featured Publication: Making Cities Socialist
| | The most recent publication in the Cambridge Elements in Global Urban History series is Making Cities Socialist by Katherine Zubovich, which explores the history of urban planning, city building, and city life in the socialist world. It follows the global trajectories of architects, planners, and ideas about socialist urbanism developed during the twentieth century, while also highlighting features of everyday life in socialist cities.
| | | Related Network Event Spotlight
|  | Society for American City and Regional Planning History
20th National Conference on Planning History
University of California, San Diego and Online
October 24-26, 2024
SACRPH cordially invites scholars and practitioners to present papers and talks on all aspects of urban, regional, and community planning history and their relationship to urban and metropolitan studies. The conference will be held in multiple formats, including: virtual presentations (ahead of the conference); in-person tours on Friday, October 25, 2024; and in-person presentations on Saturday, October 26. It will also include a keynote on Thursday night. All Saturday events will take place on the campus of the University of California, San Diego.
SACRPH is an interdisciplinary organization dedicated to promoting humanistic scholarship on the planning of metropolitan regions. SACRPH members include historians, practicing planners, geographers, environmentalists, architects, landscape designers, public policy makers, preservationists, community organizers, students, and scholars from across the world. SACRPH publishes a quarterly journal, The Journal of Planning History, hosts a biennial conference, and sponsors awards for research and publication in the field of planning history.
The Program Committee welcomes proposals for complete paper panel sessions (of three or four papers), as well as individual papers, roundtables, and workshops. We also encourage submissions that propose innovative formats and that engage questions of teaching and learning, digital information, and publishing. And we wish to support graduate students and early career researchers with mentoring workshops.
Deadline for submissions: March 15, 2024
Register Now
| | History of Urban Form of India
By Pratyush Shankar
(Oxford University Press, 2024)
India, like many other developing countries today, is undergoing massive urbanization. The imagination of the future form of Indian cities in terms of urban planning and design is most urgent. A study of the key historical moments in the country from the point of view of urban development, thus, becomes all the more important. This book presents a comprehensive account of the historical spatial development of Indian cities since time immemorial. With case studies from the time cities originated in the Indian subcontinent (3000 B.C in Indus valley) and hand-drawn illustrations of these cities till the ones in recent times, the author discusses the last two hundred years of urban development in India with emphasis on the overall structure of the city, its nature of public places, institutions, and housing...[more]
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Empire of Refugees: North Caucasian Muslims and the Late Ottoman State
By Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky
(Stanford University Press, 2024)
Empire of Refugees reframes late Ottoman history through mass displacement and reveals the origins of refugee resettlement in the modern Middle East. Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky offers a historiographical corrective: the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire created a refugee regime, predating refugee systems set up by the League of Nations and the United Nations. Grounded in archival research in over twenty public and private archives across ten countries, this book contests the boundaries typically assumed between forced and voluntary migration, and refugees and immigrants, rewriting the history of Muslim migration in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries...[more]
| | | | The Urban Ecologies of Divided Cities
Edited by Amira Osman, John Nagle, and Sabyasachi Tripathi
(Springer, 2023)
A city exists in collections of social structures which mutually form a society. A divided city implies divided social structures and, in consequence, a divided society. The papers compiled in this book present many case studies of divided cities, discussing the different causes of divisions and their effects on societies. Some of the causes can be linked to conflicts, wars, colonialism, or legislative political systems. In response to the serious challenges resulting from these divisions, the book aims to provide opportunities for new approaches and possibilities for new interventions and solutions, making it significant to urban planners, architects, and policymakers...[more]
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Politics of the Periphery: Governing Global Suburbia
Edited by Pierre Hamel
(University of Toronto Press, 2024)
This collection, edited by Pierre Hamel, examines the empirical aspects of collective action and planning in eight urban regions around the world – across North America, Europe, Asia, and Africa – and reveals the impacts and consequences of various structures of suburban governance. The case studies feature a diverse range of local actors facing both the specificity of their respective milieus and the broader context of extended urbanization as metropolitan regions cope with new territorial challenges.The book focuses on suburbanization processes that characterize most of these post-metropolitan regions and questions whether it is possible to improve suburban governance in the face of growing uncertainties arising from structural and subjective transformations. Paying close attention to the relationship between the local and the global, Politics of the Periphery challenges the planning processes of evolving metropolitan regions...[more]
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Pax Economica: Left-Wing Visions of a Free Trade World
By Marc-William Palen
(Princeton University Press, 2024)
Today, free trade is often associated with right-wing free marketeers. In Pax Economica, historian Marc-William Palen shows that free trade and globalisation in fact have roots in nineteenth-century left-wing politics. In this counterhistory of an idea, Palen explores how, beginning in the 1840s, left-wing globalists became the leaders of the peace and anti-imperialist movements of their age. By the early twentieth century, an unlikely alliance of liberal radicals, socialist internationalists, feminists, and Christians envisioned free trade as essential for a prosperous and peaceful world order. Of course, this vision was at odds with the era’s strong predilections for nationalism, protectionism, geopolitical conflict, and colonial expansion...[more]
| | | Empire of Rags and Bones: Waste and War in Nazi Germany
By Anne Berg
(Oxford University Press, 2024)
Paper, bottles, metal scrap, kitchen garbage, rubber, hair, fat, rags, and bones--the Nazi empire demanded its population obsessively collect anything that could be reused or recycled. Entrepreneurs, policy makers, and ordinary citizens conjured up countless schemes to squeeze value from waste or invent new purposes for defunct or spent material, no matter the cost to people or the environment. Historicizing the much-championed ideal of zero waste, Anne Berg shows that the management of waste was central to the politics of war and to the genesis of genocide in the Nazi Germany. Destruction and recycling were part of an overarching strategy to redress raw material shortages, procure lebensraum, and cleanse the continent of Jews and others considered undesirable...[more]
| | | | Venice: The Remarkable History of the Lagoon City
By Dennis Romano
(Oxford University Press, 2024)
A sweeping and comprehensive history of Venice -- from its formation in the early Middle Ages to the present day -- that traces its evolution as a city, city-state, regional power, and overseas empire. This comprehensive account reveals the adaptations to its geographic setting that have been a constant feature of living on water from Venice's origins to the present. It examines the lives of the women and men, noble and common, rich and poor, Christian, Jew, and Muslim, who built not only the city but also its vast empire that stretched from Northern Italy to the eastern Mediterranean. It details the urban transformations that Venice underwent in response to environmental vulnerability, industrialization, and mass tourism...[more]
| | | | Special Issue: Princely cities in South Asia, c. 1850–1950: themes and perspectives
Urban History (February 2024)
Taken together, the essays in this Special Issue seek to compare and contrast princely and colonial India even as they simultaneously highlight the importance of cross-border connections for the development of urbanism in both contexts. They also examine how specific practices were conceived as ‘traditional’ and consider the role played by such ideas in shaping forms of princely urbanism in the modern period. In this regard, this Special Issue also points to the need for greater dialogue between scholars of the princely modern and those who study early modern and medieval urbanism. We hope that this foray will stimulate further research to tease out the links between the modern and earlier iterations of urbanism in princely spaces in order to illuminate processes of long-term change...[more]
| | |  | | Writing the Liberal City: literature and the contested experience of economic change. Bogotá 1849–1870
By Constanza Castro Benavides
Textual Practice (December 2023)
Costumbrista literature has been repeatedly analysed as a strategy as well as an expression of the process of nation formation in nineteenth-century Latin America. However, it is also a powerful lens for exploring and interpreting the urban visions of literate elites during the turbulent period of liberal reforms and expansion of a capitalist market economy. Largely dismissed as picturesque and inconsequential, in its apparent simplicity, Costumbrismo casts light on how liberal and conservative elites attempted to capture the daily effects of the market economy, and express their anxieties about the increasing commodification of everyday life, the growing obsession with money, and the changes in their own experience of time. As I argue here, Costumbrista literature helped place the new economic order in the local imagination. But it was also a contested ground where writers shaped partisan distinctions and, in the process, established themselves as political elites...[more]
| | | | Socialism goes global: Differentiated urbanization and socialist actors in the postcolonial South
By Sun Zhijian
Political Geography (February 2024)
In recent years, scholars have devoted increased attention to articulations of global socialism in the developing world. This scholarship, in turn, has challenged Western-based narratives of postcolonial urbanization as the product of (post)colonial networks and global capitalism and has shed new light on the engagements of professionals and institutions from European/Soviet-bloc socialist countries — including the Soviet Union, East Germany, Bulgaria, Romania, Poland and Yugoslavia — with the socialist South. This body of scholarship reveals that urban histories in the decolonizing South cannot be fully understood without noticing the multi-directional global exchanges among socialist actors...[more]
| | | | Theoria Speaks Back: Thinking the Political from the Perspective of the Global South (An Interview with Lawrence Hamilton)
By Lawrence Hamilton and Laurence Piper
Theoria (December 2023)
In this interview, the previous editor-in-chief of Theoria, Lawrence Hamilton, describes the evolution of Theoria to become a journal with more Southern political theory scholars and ideas, and how this was inspired by the limitations of Northern theory alone in understanding real world political problems in South Africa especially. He traces the evolution of this thought in becoming a more ‘decolonial’ type thinker through his own work, and how this intersected with Theoria's focus, with specific reference to special issues of the journal including ‘Freedom and Power’ in 2013, ‘Empire and Economics’ in 2016 and a series of African-focussed editions in 2018, 2019 and 2021...[more]
| | | | REESOURCES: Rethinking Eastern Europe
By The Center for Urban History
The Educational Platform of the Center for Urban History offers resources that aim to decentralize the curriculum of Eastern Europe by diversifying primary materials, challenging established grand narratives, and creating new approaches to teaching and learning about this region. The main section consists of the collection of primary sources relevant to the teaching of Eastern Europe. They appear in their original language — Ukrainian, Polish, Russian, or Yiddish — and in English translations. The platform also includes prepared modules, syllabi, and six online courses prepared by the Center for Urban History of East-Central Europe. The educational platform is connected with other resources of the Center for Urban History, such as Lviv Interactive and Urban Media Archive. [more]
| Conferences, Workshops, and Events |  | | European History Research Centre at the University of Warwick Workshop: "Urban resilience in the era of the First World War, 1914-1939"
In person and on Zoom
March 19, 2024
This workshop is organised as part of an international collaborative project entitled “Rebuilding European Lives, 1914-1939. Domestic and urban reconstruction after the First World War” that investigates the reconstitution of urban communities in Europe in the aftermath of the First World War. Based on a longitudinal study of communities laid to waste by military operations, it will reveal some of the critical implications of the prosecution of “total war” in Europe. This workshop will bring together historians of western, central, and eastern Europe. Confirmed participants include: Eva Tamara Asboth (Austrian Academy of Sciences), Robert Dale (University of Newcastle), Sofia Dyak (Lviv Center for Urban History of East Central Europe), Claire Morelon (University of Manchester), Nel de Mûelenaere (VU Brussels), and Kamil Ruszała (Jagiellonian University).
For further information and to discuss potential in-person or on-line attendance, please contact Pierre Purseigle (p.purseigle@warwick.ac.uk).
| | | | Lecture by Okşan Bayülgen "Twisting in the Wind: The Politics of Tepid Transitions to Renewable Energy in Turkey”
In person and on Zoom
March 25, 2024
Why have some countries been slow to shift away from fossil fuels? Okşan Bayülgen answers this question by looking at the case study of energy policies in Turkey over the past two decades. She demonstrates that energy transitions are neither inevitable nor linear and that they are often initiated if and only when promoting renewables is in the interests of governing elites and stall when political dividends associated with energy rents change. This timely topic will be of interest to scholars, policymakers, energy investors, and anyone interested in environmental studies. [more]
| | | Lecture series: Architectural History & Theory Seminar, University of Edinburgh
January 30-April 2, 2024
Edinburgh, Scotland and Online
Each year the History of Architecture and Built Environment (HABE) research group in ESALA welcomes guest speakers and colleagues to present an evening seminar on their research. The events are a fantastic opportunity to hear about the latest research in the fields from researchers working in the UK, Europe and beyond. These events are free and open to all. This academic year, the AH&T Seminar Series will run as live hybrid events. [more]
| | | Workshop and Special Issue: Cold War Internationalisms of/in the Decolonizing World
June 5-6, 2024
Geneva Graduate Institute
The Global Sixties: An Interdisciplinary Journal invites submissions for a workshop and an ensuing special thematic issue on Internationalism of the Decolonizing World in the Cold War. In recent decades, Cold War historiography has paid growing attention to the autonomy and agency of the players beyond the US-Soviet dichotomy. "Cold War Internationalisms of/in the Decolonizing World" advances this recentering of the narrative by focusing on decolonizing or newly independent states, along with related actors, as the makers and breakers of the Cold War world order. This special issue thus seeks to reframe the Cold War from the standpoint of Latin American, Middle Eastern, African, or Asian actors – where the US and Soviet Union appear not as the protagonists but as the dependent variables of decolonial world-making. [more]
| | | Calls for Papers & Proposals | CFP: Africana Annual Inaugural Issue
The Department of African & African-American Studies at the University of Kansas is excited to announce the publication of the inaugural issue of Africana Annual, an open source, peer reviewed journal of Global Black Studies. Please consider submitting articles, review essays to be included in the next issue. [more]
| CFP: Architectural Humanities Research Association 21st International Conference
Norwich University of the Arts, UK
21-23 November, 2024
Body Matters aims to investigate notions of Body in contemporary architectural discourses. Always a fundamental in architecture, the body needs to be reconsidered on its own terms, as a creative, material and philosophical concern. Beyond historical materialism and phenomenological approaches in architecture, recent new materialism thought has proposed a cross-disciplinary endeavour to confront long-held assumptions about the relationship between humans, nonhumans and the world. [more]
Submission deadline: March 22, 2024
| CFP: Romance, Revolution and Reform Issue 7: Labor in the Long Nineteenth Century
The study of labour in the long nineteenth century has enjoyed a rich critical history, guided by the twentieth century’s New Left focus on class formation and experience, and extended by recent scholarship which has diversified traditional and non-traditional categorisations of ‘labour’. This issue of the Journal seeks to question the thinking by which we identify forms of labour in the first place: who, both in the nineteenth century and now, is allowed to decide what counts as labour? Which voices of the long nineteenth century emerge if we diversify our definition(s) of labour? And, how can the scholarship of labour – or the labour of scholarship – help us navigate the nature, purpose, and value of labour in a mid- and post-Covid era? [more]
Submission deadline: April 6, 2024
| CFP: 4th International Conference of the Indian Association for South Asian Studies (IASAS) on Subalterns in South Asia
Odisha, India
21-22 June, 2024
We are accepting abstracts for the Indian Association for South Asian Studies (IASAS) International Conference, which will take place at Kalinga Institute of Industrial Technology, Bhubaneswar, Odisha from June 21-22, 2024. Researchers and scholars from across the disciplines will participate in this two-day conference that will be concentrating on South Asian studies. The central theme for the above is 'Subalterns in South Asia.' IASAS 2024 conference welcomes panels and papers in English or in Hindi on any theme of South Asian Studies employing interdisciplinary and theoretical perspectives inspired from History, Philosophy, Political Science, Anthropology, Ethnography, Sociology, Psychology etc. Hence, the conference aim is to bring historians and social scientists into conversation with each other. We encourage submissions from research students, early career scholars, faculty members, and independent social scientists whose research falls under the spectrum of South Asian Studies. The conference hopes to generate new perspectives by exploring new as well as alternative and evolving research ideas and methods. [more]
Submission deadline: April 15, 2024
| CFP: Within and Beyond Empires: People, Objects, and Ideas (16th-19th Centuries)
University of Turin, Italy
September 26-27, 2024
Increasing attention to Global History, Connected History, and Entangled History has given colonial and imperial studies new life in recent years. These developments shifted the focus on exploring the connections between different regions across historical periods and helped enrich contemporary historiography with sources, ideas, and actors often overlooked by the traditional narrative. Organised by the Global History of Empires PhD Programme, this interdisciplinary conference may serve as a forum for PhD and early career scholars of different provenances and academic backgrounds. [more]
Submission deadline: April 20, 2024
| CFP: African Urbanisms International Conference
Wits University
October 23-26, 2024
The Wits-TUB-UniLag Urban Lab's African Urbanisms conference will provide a space to explore the multiplicity of interlinked African urbanisms as a starting point to question the status quo of urban policies and planning paradigms, to seek transformative practices that present alternatives to “business as usual” urban development, and to imagine alternative urban futures. [more]
Submission deadline: April 21, 2024
| Fellowships, Grants, & Awards | | GHI Fellowships at the Horner Library
German Society of Pennsylvania and the German Historical Institute
Together with the German Society of Pennsylvania, the German Historical Institute will sponsor two to four fellowships of up to four weeks for research at the Joseph Horner Memorial Library in Philadelphia between June 1 and July 15, 2024. The fellowship will be awarded to PhD and M.A. students and advanced scholars without restrictions in research fields or geographical provenance for research using materials at the Horner Library. The "GHI Fellowship at the Horner Library" will provide a travel subsidy and an allowance of $1,000 to $3,500 depending on the length of the stay and the qualifications of the fellows. Opportunities to research at other special collections in Philadelphia may be available...[more]
Application deadline: March 15th, 2024
| | | | 2024 UK Latin American Historians Book Prize
UK Latin American Historians
The UK Latin American Historians’ network (UKLAH) will be awarding a prize to the best book published by a member of UKLAH. Books should relate to Latin American history broadly defined, in English, Spanish, or Portuguese and have been published in 2022 or 2023, whether online or in print. The winning author will receive a cash prize. [more]
Application deadline: March 31, 2024
| | |  | | Ivan Karp Doctoral Research Awards
Centre for Humanities Research at the University of the Western Cape and the Laney Graduate School of Emory University
The African Critical Inquiry Programme is pleased to announce the 2024 Ivan Karp Doctoral Research Awards to support African doctoral students in the humanities and humanistic social sciences who are enrolled at South African universities and conducting dissertation research on relevant topics. The African Critical Inquiry Programme (ACIP) seeks to advance inquiry and debate about the roles and practice of public culture, public cultural institutions and public scholarship in shaping identities and society in Africa. The Ivan Karp Doctoral Research Awards are open to African postgraduate students (regardless of citizenship) in the humanities and humanistic social sciences. Applicants must be currently registered in a Ph.D. programme in a South African university and be working on topics related to ACIP’s focus...[more]
Application deadline: May 1, 2024
| | | | The Maggs Scholarship
The Institute of English Studies at the School of Advanced Study, University of London
The Institute of English Studies (IES) at the School of Advanced Study (SAS) will award a funded studentship for one place on its MA/MRes History of the Book programme 2024/25. The award covers fees in full at the Home/EU rate. The studentship is funded by Maggs Bros. Ltd., one of the world’s largest and oldest antiquarian booksellers. The Maggs Scholarship seeks especially to support an excellent student who wishes to study on the MA in the History of the Book, but whose circumstances might make it difficult to access the programme. Preference will be given to applicants who are residents of the United Kingdom with an ethnic minority background. Scholarship recipients will also be invited for an internship at Maggs Bros. Ltd. as part of the internship scheme pre-existing for the History of the Book programme...[more]
Application deadline: June 30th, 2024
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