Vol. 57, July 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.
| GUHP2 Berlin: Stretching the Limits of Global Urban History
Center for Metropolitan Studies, Technische Universität Berlin, Germany
July 10-11, 2025 | Call for Panel and Paper Proposals
Deadline: October 18, 2024
Since GUHP’s founding in 2017, it has supported scholarship that stretches the boundaries of the field of urban history. Programming such as the Dream Conversations have encouraged investigations of cities as creations and creators of large-scale historical phenomena while also widening the diversity of voices active in the field. Recorded online events, available on our YouTube channel GUHPVids, have engaged interested scholars worldwide in our discussions.
For our second in-person conference, we invite scholars to present work in English that further 'Stretches the Limits of Global Urban History' geographically, temporally, politically, spatially, and methodologically.
The conference committee welcomes submissions that include scholars at all career levels, including graduate students, and that address diversity. Submissions may address innovative approaches to urban history across geography and time periods.
For further information please see our website, and please reach out to the Conference Program Committee at guhp@globalurbanhistory.org with questions and ideas.
| 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.
| | Camps: A Global History of Mass Confinement
By Aidan Forth
(University of Toronto Press, 2024)
The concentration of terrorists, political suspects, ethnic minorities, prisoners of war, enemy aliens, and other potentially “dangerous” populations spans the modern era. From Konzentrationslager in colonial Africa to strategic villages in Southeast Asia, from slave plantations in America to Uyghur sweatshops in Xinjiang, and from civilian internment in World War II to extraordinary rendition at Guantanamo Bay, mass detention is as diverse as it is ubiquitous. Camps offers a short but compelling guide to the varied manifestations of concentration camps in the last two centuries, while tracing provocative transnational connections with related institutions such as workhouses, migrant detention centers, and residential schools...[more]
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The Fragmentary City: Migration, Modernity, and Difference in the Urban Landscape of Doha, Qatar
By Andrew M. Gardner
(Cornell University Press, 2024)
In Qatar and elsewhere on the Arabian Peninsula, nearly nine out of every ten residents are foreign noncitizens. Many of these foreigners reside in the cities that have arisen in Qatar and neighboring states. The book provides an overview of the gulf migration system with its diverse migrant experiences. Gardner focuses on the ways that demography and global mobility have shaped the city of Doha and the urban characteristics of the Arabian Peninsula in general. Building on those migrant experiences, the book turns to the spatial politics of the modern Arabian city, exploring who is placed where in the city and how this social landscape came into historical existence...[more]
| | | | DIY Urbanism in Africa: Politics and Practice
By Stephen Marr and Patience Mususa
(Bloomsbury Publishing, 2023)
Protracted economic crises, accelerating inequalities, and increased resource scarcity present significant challenges for the majority of Africa's urban population. Limited state capacity and widespread infrastructure deficiencies common in cities across the continent often require residents to draw on their own resources, knowledge, and expertise to resolve these life and livelihood dilemmas. DIY Urbanism in Africa investigates these practices. It develops a theoretical framework through which to analyze them, and it presents a series of case studies to demonstrate how residents invent new DIY tactics and strategies in response to security, place-making, or economic problems...[more] | | | | From Books to Airplanes: The Materiality of Global and Urban Entanglements
By Mariana Dantas and Carl Nightingale
Journal of Urban History (May 2024)
The articles in this special section employ histories of cities to examine the relationship between human ambitions and the transformation of space, the development of power discrepancies, and unequal access to material and natural resources. They also reveal the relevance of this quintessential human creation to global dynamics on our planet by unveiling the complex and often messy intersection between urban trajectories, local, imperial, or national histories and longue durée global developments. More than a case study, each article delves into the details of the materiality of the urban history they examine to explain how cities exist in the world, or in Richard Harris’s words, “how cities matter” to our shared planetary past and present...[more]
| | | | Merchants’ agents and the process of bottom-up harmonization between European towns, fourteenth to sixteenth centuries
By Ulla Kypta
Urban History (May 2024)
Since merchants typically traded between towns, they had to cross legal boundaries on a regular basis. This article discusses one of the instruments they used in order to deal with the challenges of legal pluralism, namely the instalment of proxies. The proxy had to be recognized as a legitimate representative of another merchant and, for that purpose, he carried with him a procuration letter. These letters look remarkably similar considering that they were drafted in different towns across Europe...[more]
| | | | Spatial Frameworks of Comparison: Planning Western India’s Free Ports and Free Trade Zones, 1830s–1980s
By Megan Maruschke
Global Intellectual History (December 2023)
Ports offer key vantage points from which to write a global history, as their trade connects people, goods, and capital to far reaching parts of the world. Instead of focusing on trade connections, this article proposes studying the spatial frameworks of comparison in free port and free zone planning. Using reports from ports, ministries, and chambers of commerce, this article analyses these shifting frameworks for comparison in Bombay’s port planning from the 1830s to the 1980s. Port planners, merchants, and ministry experts placed these ports and zones within shifting spatial frameworks, which determined which zones or ports could and could not be compared...[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 | | 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]
| | |  | | Economy & Society Winter School 2024
IIT Bombay
December 9-21, 2024
The New Political Economy Initiative at IIT Bombay along with IIM Kozhikode aims to nudge sociology and social science scholarship in India and the Global South to study how the material aspects and economic facets of life are produced and reproduced through social and political processes and be attentive to the mutual embeddedness and symbiotic relationships between markets, states, societies, and cultures. Research that explores how social networks contribute to shape, and are shaped by the accumulation of capital, in both formal and informal economic settings, is relatively scarce. Similarly, there is a lack of academic studies that examine how shifts in institutions shape and influence the context and results of economic actions. One of the reasons for this absence is the lack of courses/papers/modules in economic sociology in most undergraduate and master’s programmes in the country. We have found a similar trend in other countries in the Global South. The Economy & Society Winter School aims to make up for this absence and in the process incubate a scholarly community in the Global South locales to take these new approaches to the study of economy and society more formally in their own research and work...[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 | CFP: Archiving, Memory and Method from the Global South
The College of Humanities and Social Sciences (CHUSS) invites scholars, archivists, and community practitioners to a conference on the relationship between archiving, memory and method from the Global South. Through a grant from the Mellon Foundation, CHUSS is concluding a three-year project that has studied the intersection of archives with communities, institutions and academia. This international conference will be both a culmination of the project and an opportunity to widen the community of scholars and practitioners working in the field. We seek presentations on the dynamics of archival practice, knowledge and power from the Global South...[more]
Submission deadline: July 15, 2024
| CFP: Endgame of Empires: Post-Imperial Transitions, Incomplete Transformations and Imperial Legacies
“Endgame of Empires” aims to explore from a global perspective the collapse of the Ottoman and Romanov empires and the reconfiguration of their imperial politics in new settings across the Middle East and Eurasia. Whereas national and nationalist histories framed this transition as a clean break from the imperial past in the inevitable rise of nation-states as “natural” units of modern international order, “Endgame of Empires” seeks to underline that post-imperial transitions were as messy as earlier imperial forms of statecraft and the legacies of multi-ethnic pre-war societies lingered and assumed new forms...[more]
Submission deadline: August 30, 2024
| CFP: #AAIHS2025: 10th Anniversary Conference
For its tenth anniversary annual conference, the African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS) invites individual and panel proposals that grapple with the history of slavery and its afterlives in the United States and throughout the broader African diaspora. Ongoing social, political, and cultural developments demand continued preservation, dissemination, and engagement with the experiences and ideas of African Americans and others across the African diaspora. By grappling with the theme of “Slavery and Its Afterlives,” AAIHS encourages conference participants to reflect on how histories of African and African-descended peoples from slavery to the present continue to shape and haunt our present and futures in familiar and new ways...[more]
Submission deadline: September 6, 2024
| CFP: Special Issue of The Journal of Colorism Studies: "Exploring the Psychological, Emotional, Physical and Social Impact of Global Colorism"
The Journal of Colorism Studies (JOCS) is accepting submissions for a themed issue titled “Exploring the Psychological, Emotional, Physical and Social Impact of Global Colorism.” The theme is aligned with the second Ronald E. Hall Conference on Colorism scheduled for August 22, 2024 and August 23, 2024...[more]
Submission deadline: September 15, 2024
| CFP: Special Issue of Urban Planning: "Public Urban Cultures of Care"
In this thematic issue, we aim to develop further the concept of “caring communities” and to establish “urban cultures of care” by connecting different strands of already existing discourses. We invite articles from various fields related to urban studies that contribute novel conceptual ideas, insightful case studies, and critical perspectives. We particularly encourage young researchers and authors with a practice-based perspective on urban cultures of care to join this issue...[more]
Submission deadline: September 15, 2024
| CFP: Jewish Urban Landscapes in Mid-20th Century Europe
The University of Amsterdam (UvA), the Netherlands Institute at Athens (NIA), and the Workshop on the Study of the Jews in Greece (WSJG) are pleased to announce a two-day conference on ‘Jewish Urban Landscapes in Mid-20th Century Europe’, to be held in Athens, Greece on 4-5 February 2025. The conference, with keynote lectures by Professor Michael Meng (Clemson University) and Professor Bart Wallet (University of Amsterdam), aims to shed light on what happened to Jewish sites and quarters in urban environments throughout the whole of Europe between 1930 and 1970, facilitating a knowledge exchange between scholars researching case studies across borders...[more]
Submission deadline: September 23, 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
| | |  | | PhD Scholarship in the Project “The Polish facets of the Chinese city of Harbin”
The German-Polish Science Foundation
The project “The Polish Facets of the Chinese City of Harbin”, funded by the German-Polish Science Foundation, will award a scholarship for a dissertation project in the field of history (Eastern European history) from September 1, 2024. The research project analyzes the complex status of Harbin's Poles as part of the Russian imperial project in northeastern China at the beginning of the twentieth century. Harbin, founded in 1898 as a colonial city of the Russian Empire in northeast China, quickly developed into a multicultural center in Manchuria. The Polish diaspora community in Harbin played an important role in the economic, cultural and social life of the city. The ambivalent status of the Harbin Poles as colonizers and colonized makes them a fascinating object of research. In addition, it offers insights into the peculiarities of Polish historiography on Russian imperialism in Northeast Asia. [more]
Application deadline: July 12, 2024
| | | | Funded studentship: Cumbria and Transatlantic Slavery, 1700-1833
Keele University
This full time, three-year PhD studentship, starting in September 2024, is fully funded by the Economic & Social Sciences Research Council CASE studentship scheme (ESRC NWSSDTP), together with Keele University and Cumbria Archives. This project will provide the first comprehensive study examining Cumbria’s relationship to the transatlantic slave trade. It is groundbreaking in not only its geographic scope, but its methodological use of individual lived experiences to bring together previously discrete historiographies on Cumbria and the Americas, with a focus on Virginia...[more]
Application deadline: July 26, 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
| | |  | | 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
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