Vol. 56, June 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 Recordings
The Narrating Urban Lives series concluded on June 5 with "Critical Temporalities," a conversation featuring Dipesh Chakrabarty and Stefanos Geroulanos, moderated by Rosemary Wakeman! You can view the recording here.
If you missed "Worldmaking" on May 22, featuring Kaysha Corinealdi, Michael Goebel, and Prita Meier in a conversation moderated by Kenny Cupers, you can view the recording here.
You can view the recordings of all past conversations in this series on our YouTube channel here.
| Call for Editor: Urban History
| Urban History seeks to appoint an additional editor to join the current editorial team (Shane Ewen, Roey Sweet, Domenic Vitiello and Rosemary Wakeman) with expertise in modern global urban history.
This is an exciting opportunity to become involved with a world-leading journal for urban historical research. Urban History is published by Cambridge University Press and occupies a central place in historical scholarship, with an outstanding record of interdisciplinary contributions, and a broad-based and distinguished panel of referees and international advisors. Each issue features wide-ranging research articles covering social, economic, political and cultural aspects of the history of towns and cities and supplementary material including periodical reviews, thesis reviews and book reviews. Our growing submissions are becoming increasingly global and chronologically diverse and we seek to appoint an additional editor to reflect these developments and to further broaden our geographical range.
Read the full job listing here.
|  | | Global Queens: An Urban Mosaic
By Joseph Heathcott
(Fordham University Press, 2023)
Remade by decades of immigration, Queens, New York, has emerged as an emblematic space of social mixing and encounters across multiple lines of difference. With its expansive subdivisions, tangled highways, and centerless form, it is also New York’s most enigmatic borough. It can feel alternately like a big city, a tight-knit village, a featureless industrial zone, or a sprawling suburban community. Through more than 200 contemporary photographs, Joseph Heathcott captures this multifaceted borough and one of the most diverse places in the United States. Drawn from more than a decade of roaming around Queens and snapping photos, Heathcott conveys the juxtaposition of the ordinary and the extraordinary, the mundane and the surprising, and the staggering social diversity that best characterizes Queens. At the heart of the story are two separate but entwined histories: the rapid expansion of the borough’s built environment through the twentieth century, and the millions of people who have traveled from near and far to call Queens home....[more]
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Bedouin Bureaucrats: Mobility and Property in the Ottoman Empire
By Nora Elizabeth Barakat
(Stanford University Press, 2023)
In the late nineteenth century, the Ottoman government sought to fill landscapes they legally defined as "empty." Both land and people were incorporated into territorially bounded grids of administrative law. Bedouin Bureaucrats examines how tent-dwelling, seasonally migrating Bedouin engaged in these processes of Ottoman state transformation on local, imperial, and global scales. As the "tribe" became a category of Ottoman administration, Bedouin in the Syrian interior used this category both to gain political influence and to organize community resistance to maintain control over land. Narrating the lives of Bedouin individuals involved in Ottoman administration, Nora Elizabeth Barakat brings this population to the center of modern state-making, from their involvement in the pilgrimage administration in the eighteenth century and their performance of land registration and taxation as the Ottoman bureaucracy expanded in the nineteenth, to their eventual rejection of Ottoman attempts to reallocate the "empty land" they inhabited in the twentieth. She places the Syrian interior in a global context of imperial expansion into regions formerly deemed marginal, especially in relation to American and Russian empires...[more]
| | | | Building Little Saigon: Refugee Urbanism in American Cities and Suburbs
By Erica Allen-Kim
(University of Texas Press, 2024)
In the final days before the fall of Saigon in 1975, 125,000 Vietnamese who were evacuated or who made their own way out of the country resettled in the United States. Finding themselves in unfamiliar places yet still connected in exile, these refugees began building their own communities as memorials to a lost homeland. Known both officially and unofficially as Little Saigons, these built landscapes offer space for everyday activities as well as the staging of cultural heritage and political events. Building Little Saigon examines nearly fifty years of city building by Vietnamese Americans—who number over 2.2 million today. Author Erica Allen-Kim highlights architecture and planning ideas adapted by the Vietnamese communities who, in turn, have influenced planning policies and mainstream practices...[more] | | | | Water & Heritage for Sustainable Development
Edited by Carola Hein, Matteo D’Agostino, Carlien Donkor, and Zuzanna Sliwinska
Blue Papers (May 2024)
This issue is prefaced by Erik Orsenna from the IFGR and features a number of articles that take the lens of rivers to explore the multiple functions and values of rivers, the narratives that celebrate them and the conflicts that can arise from river restoration and water management programs. Other themes addressed in Blue Papers 5 analyze the delicate intersection of heritage, water and community identity and the challenges caused by mass tourism, climate change and current governance frameworks...[more]
| | | | Making the global turn matter: strategies and pathways
By Lynn Hollen Lees
Urban History (May 2024)
The survey examines the past, present and future of the urban history field in Britain, mixing memories and reflections. I trace the global turn of that field and the challenges it brings. One argument concerns the impact of a global scale on the methods and the explanatory frameworks used. A second concern is the role of economic history and economic frameworks of analysis in the writing of urban history, and I advocate their continued relevance...[more]
| | | | Electricity, Agency and Class in Lagos Colony, c.1860s–1914
By Adewumi Damilola Adebayo
Past & Present (February 2024)
European states gradually established colonial rule in Africa between the mid nineteenth century and the beginning of the First World War. Historians have assessed the infrastructure introduced during this period through the lens of colonial state-building and resource extraction. This article offers another perspective by reconstructing the early history of electrification in Lagos Colony, one of the first British colonies in West Africa, within the contexts of African agency (that is, knowledge and socio-political influence) and class. It argues that electricity was not a novelty to Africans when the government opened the first power station in 1898. The principles of electricity were already being taught in the classroom and through public lectures in the 1860s, and temporary exhibitions of electric light had been a feature of Lagos society since the 1880s...[more] | | |  | | Cities of the Eastern Mediterranean
The Metropole
The Metropole, the official blog of the Urban History Association, has put together a series of essays covering urban, political, and social transformation across seven cities of the Eastern Mediterranean for the month of May. Assistant editor Zeead Yaghi kicked things off with an overview of the month contextualizing the region and placing contributions in dialogue with Mediterranean urbanity: “For The Metropole’s theme month, our writers and contributors zoom into three structural forces, and their interplay, in their investigation of urbanity and daily life in Eastern Mediterranean cities, most notably: commercial capitalism, the (imperial, colonial, or postcolonial) state, and people and the political, social, and communal logics that shape their behaviors.”
Other essays in the series include "Urban Huts, Sickness, and Mobility: Finding Immigrants in Haifa and Jaffa in the 1930s and 1940s" by Lauren Banko, "The Jewish Quarter of Saïda: Intertwined Displacements and Memories of Absence in a Southern Lebanese City" by Molly Oringer, and "From the Railway to the Highway: The History of (Un)Free Movement in the Arab Mediterranean" by Ingy Higazi. Read all the articles here.
| Conferences, Workshops, and Events | | Festschrift Conference Panel Honoring the Legacy of Howard Spodek
San Francisco, California
June 27-29, 2024
The World History Association is proud to announce a Festschrift panel to honor the remarkable contributions of Howard Spodek, a distinguished figure in the study of Indian history, world history, urban studies, and a tireless advocate for Indian studies in the United States will be held at the WHA Annual Conference in San Francisco, California, June 27-29, 2024. As a former professor at Temple University and the Shrenik Lalbhai Professor at Ahmedabad University, Howard’s work, which stretched over five decades, has left an indelible mark on the academic world, particularly in understanding Gujarat's socio-political dynamics and urban development...[more]
| | | | Early Career Historians of Color: Two Mentoring and Workshop Programs
The Royal Historical Society
August-November, 2024
The Royal Historical Society is pleased to announce calls from early career historians of color for two mentoring and workshop programs running in the summer / autumn of 2024. These programs will provide support in the following two areas of early academic career development: applying for an academic job in History, and writing and publishing first academic articles in History. Applications to both programs are now open. Both programs include one-to-one mentoring (online) with an academic historian at a later career stage, and a concluding group workshop (online) for all participants in the program...[more]
| | |  | | Affect and Material Cultures of Weathering: Histories, Temporalities, and Spaces
Stavanger, Norway
December 10-11, 2024
This two-day workshop seeks to explore how people have historically understood and experienced climate and weather through material cultures of instruments to measure and quantify these larger phenomena, but also public and domestic spaces, everyday technologies, clothing, nutrition, and their own bodies. Who made environmental, urban, political and cultural decisions, and who faced the consequences? What set of affects has weather and the material world produced, and how could affects be deployed in understanding weathering? How do narrative, historical archive, film, photography, and art represent the affective elements of consciousness, values, meanings and relationships of climates, weathers, and material cultures in the past and the present? The workshop also invites participants to discuss how vastly different temporal and spatial scales, methodologies, sources, and styles of historical inquiry could be applied for the sorts of lessons that might be sought within current institutional arrangements and policy processes...[more]
| | | | Critical Global Histories: Methodological Reflections and Thematic Expansions
Linnaeus University, Växjö, Sweden
September 10-12, 2025
Under the overall theme of “Critical Global Histories” we aim to further discussion, self-reflection, and the exploration of new avenues in global history. Over the past decade, global history has expanded internally (quantitatively and thematically, as well as methodologically and theoretically) and has, in doing so, influenced many other fields of research in the humanities and social sciences. At the same time, the expansion has led to debate and criticism, not least within the field. Objections have been raised against global history’s alleged macro-historical emphasis, connectivity bias, Eurocentrism, Anglophone dominance, and lack of attention to gender perspectives and Indigenous methodologies. Global history has also been accused of being imbued with neo-imperial, teleological, globalizing, exoticizing and neoliberal leanings...[more]
| | | Calls for Papers & Proposals | Recruiting Book Reviewers: World History Bulletin
World History Bulletin, a biannual publication of the World History Association, is seeking book reviewers for upcoming issues of the journal. The following books are available for review:
- Political Economy of Contemporary African Popular Culture eds. Kealeboga Aiseng, Israel A. Fadipe, and Phillip Mpofu
- Emplaced Resistances in Occupied Palestine: Stories of a Village, Its People, and Their Land by Suzanne Hassan Hammad
- Decolonial Feminism in Abya Yala eds. Yuderkys Espinosa-Minosa, Maria Lugones, and Nelson Maldonado-Torres
- Contemporary Wars and Conflicts Over Land and Water in Africa by Carlson Anyangwe
- Gender and Sexuality in Ghanaian Societies eds. Martha Donkor and Amoaba Gooden
- Beyond Modernity: Contemporary Perspectives on Islam, Tradition and Power eds. Mohammed Moussa and Emi Goto
- Chinua Achebe and the Igbo-African World: Between Fiction, Fact, and Historical Representation eds. Chima J. Korieh and Ijeoma C. Nwajiaku
- Translatlantic Liverpool: Shades of the Black Atlantic by Mark Christian
For more details, click here.
| CFP: “Real Estate Development and the Built Environment:" A Conference at the Hagley Library
Wilmington, Delaware
November 1, 2024
Despite the central role that real estate development plays in the physical form and geography of buildings, cities, and suburbs in market economies, scholars have engaged in relatively little research on the inner workings of its figures and processes in relation to the built environment. Historical research is abundant on architects and landscape architects, urban planners, and public policy, as well as on ideas: theories about cities and suburbs and buildings, often evolved in universities, where the stuff of markets and profits is often beyond concern. “Real Estate Development and the Built Environment” will bring together in conversation scholars from these and related fields in the humanities and social sciences to explore the relationships between private, for-profit real estate and architecture, urbanism, and landscape design. We are interested in empirically based, conceptually rich papers that consider real estate and the developer/development firm as a generator of built environments, especially those that are ordinary or everyday rather than singular or exceptional...[more]
Submission deadline: June 15, 2024
| CFP: (Un)Freedom in Global Perspective. Actors – Perceptions – Agencies
University of Innsbruck
February 3-4, 2025
Volume 37 of the "Innsbrucker Historische Studien" and the preliminary workshop in Innsbruck address the perceptions, agency, and strategies of people who in research have been characterized as unfree, especially in connection with slavery, captivity, serfdom, and other forms of oppression. The aim of the workshop is to undertake a critical examination of the historical analysis of (un)freedoms, locating the topics within an open geographical framework (local, regional, global histories) and chronologically with a focus on the modern age (c. 1450–1920). The workshop encourages participants to submit contributions that overcome a dichotomous juxtaposition of freedom and unfreedom and a static idea of these concepts in order to facilitate a more nuanced understanding of different agencies...[more]
Submission deadline: June 20, 2024
| CFP: YILLIK: Annual of Istanbul Studies 6 (2024) and 7 (2025)
YILLIK: Annual of Istanbul Studies invites contributions for its sixth and seventh volumes to be published in December 2024 and December 2025. YILLIK is a peer-reviewed, open access, international academic journal featuring cutting-edge research on Istanbul’s past and present, published by the Istanbul Research Institute in print and online (via DergiPark). YILLIK is indexed by SCOPUS and the MLA International Bibliography. YILLIK: Annual of Istanbul Studies is accepting submissions of original research articles, opinion pieces and visual essays (Meclis), book and exhibition reviews in Turkish or English, by researchers working on any period of the city through the lens of history, history of art and architecture, archaeology, sociology, anthropology, geography, urban planning, urban studies, and other related disciplines in humanities or social sciences...[more]
Submission deadline: June 24, 2024
| CFP: 40th Anniversary Special Edition of the Trotter Review: Race and the Urban Environment
Black communities in urban spaces have been exposed to disproportionately high levels of toxic waste, unclean water, and air pollution. Such exposures bear directly on Black health. Statistics indicate that inner-city African Americans suffer disproportionately from pollution-induced asthma and exposure to toxic chemicals. For this anniversary edition of the Trotter Review, we seek essays linking race, health, and the urban environment. This includes essays examining how Black communities have responded to environmental challenges and worked to improve health and healthcare in inner-city spaces. Essays may cover any period from the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century...[more]
Submission deadline: September 30, 2024
| CFP: The Armenian Genocide: New Interpretations and Cross-Disciplinary Conversations
The American University of Paris
June 30 - July 2, 2025
The historical facts about the Armenian genocide are now well-established with a large community of scholars engaged in the field and a growing internationalization of its memory. Knowledge is based on solid historiography and a vast corpus of documentation. Despite the virulence of Turkish state-sponsored denialism, there is a broad consensus among scholars on the processes and mechanisms of the genocide. Although early research was largely conducted by descendants of victims and memory activists, from the 1980s on the field has gradually developed to become more professional and academic. Since the 2000s, there has been a significant increase of research studies and academic publications, a growing diversification of topics and approaches, and the discovery and translation of many new sources and testimonies. Nevertheless, the study of the Armenian genocide often remains confined to restricted circles of specialists and interdisciplinarity is rarely promoted...[more]
Submission deadline: September 30, 2024 | Fellowships, Grants, & Awards |  | | The Metropole Graduate Student Blogging Contest
The Urban History Association
The Metropole, the official blog of the Urban History Association, is looking for submissions for its Eighth Annual Graduate Student Blogging Contest. The contest exists to encourage and train graduate students to blog about history—as a way to teach beyond the classroom, market their scholarship, and promote the enduring value of the humanities. It also provides a great opportunity to highlight a slice of your research, whether elaboration on a class project or paper, a facet of a larger thesis or dissertation, or an interesting piece of urban history you picked up along the way and want to share with the world. The Metropole reaches thousands of readers a month; your work will be shared with the broader urban history community and reviewed by our judging panel of leading urban history scholars. Additionally, the contest winner will be recognized at the 2025 UHA conference in Los Angeles and receive an award of $150. [more]
Submission deadline: July 12, 2024
| | |  | | Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program 2025-26 Competition Awards to Sub-Saharan Africa and Canada
The Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program
Fulbright U.S. Scholar Awards give opportunities to U.S. citizens to teach, research and carry out professional projects around the world. Through Fulbright awards, participants advance their professional and academic interests, promote mutual understanding, and collaborate with partners around the world. At a time when we face many global challenges, international engagement is more important than ever. With that in mind, we wanted to bring specific Fulbright U.S. Scholar awards to your attention. The following opportunities are open in in the 2025-26 competition: Eswatini (All Disciplines), Guinea (All Disciplines), The Gambia (All Disciplines), Mozambique (All Disciplines), Canada (Postdoctoral Research Awards and Research Chairs in North American Studies). Note that what is listed above is just part of what Fulbright has to offer: over 400 awards are available in more than 130 countries, many open to all disciplines. You can find a complete list of opportunities in the list of open awards here.
Application deadline: September 16, 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
| | | | Martin Lynn Scholarship in African History
Royal Historical Society
The Royal Historical Society makes an annual Martin Lynn Scholarship award to assist a postgraduate researcher of African history. The Scholarship is worth £1,500. The Scholarship is open to members of the Royal Historical Society. [more ]
Application deadline: September 6, 2024
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