Vol. 57, August 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
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.
| Call for applications: GUHP Emerging Scholars 2024-25 | Eligibility: Applicants to GUHP2 Berlin who are graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and independent scholars, adjunct faculty or tenure track faculty up to three years past their doctoral degree.
Why apply: Successful applicants will receive individual feedback on their conference proposal from a senior member of GUHP and will be invited to rehearse their presentation in a private online event in advance of the conference. In addition, they will be honored alongside other GUHP Emerging Scholars attendees at a special ceremony in Berlin.
Application: In addition to applying for participation in the conference - either as a panel member or as an individual presenter - applicants should submit a short cover letter declaring their interest in this program. The cover letter should include the name and contact information of the PhD advisor or another scholar who knows the work well.
Deadline: Applications are due to guhp@globalurbanhistory.org by the conference application deadline of Friday October 18 at 24:00 UTC.
| GUHP2 Berlin Panel CFP: Everyday Technologies and Port Cities in Colonial and Postcolonial Asia
We are excited to announce a call for papers for our proposed Global Urban History panel at GUHP2 Berlin: Stretching the Limits of Global Urban History. Why did certain technologies become integral to everyday life in port cities, which served as crucial nodes in maritime routes, migratory paths, trade networks, and supply chains that shaped global connections? Existing studies on urbanization during the 19th and 20th centuries have emphasized the role of infrastructure—such as water supply, roads, electrification, real estate, land reclamations, and dockyards—in constructing and reinforcing colonial states, imperial control, and territorial agendas. This panel aims to explore the small, medium, and decentralized technologies that were invented, appropriated, adapted, or re-imagined in port cities of colonial and postcolonial Asia. We suggest that situating the history of technology in port cities offer a rich material account of “global urban history”, extending beyond the metropole-colony dynamic...[more]
Submission deadline: September 15, 2024 | 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.
| | Capitalism in the Colonies: African Merchants in Lagos, 1851–1931
By A.G. Hopkins
(Princeton University Press, 2024)
In Capitalism in the Colonies, A. G. Hopkins provides the first substantial assessment of the fortunes of African entrepreneurs under colonial rule. Examining the lives and careers of 100 merchants in Lagos, Nigeria, between 1850 and 1931, Hopkins challenges conventional views of the contribution made by indigenous entrepreneurs to the long-run economic development of Nigeria. He argues that African merchants in Lagos not only survived, but were also responsible for key innovations in trade, construction, farming, and finance that are essential for understanding the development of Nigeria’s economy...[more]
| | |
Vocabularies for an Urbanising Planet: Theory Building through Comparison
Edited by Christian Schmid and Monika Streule
(Birkhäuser, 2023)
The speed, scale and scope of urbanisation have increased dramatically in recent decades. To decipher the rapidly changing urban territories across the planet, we need a radical shift in the analytical perspective on urbanisation. In this book, a transdisciplinary international research team presents an expanded vocabulary of urbanisation processes through a comparison of Tokyo, Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Dongguan, Kolkata, Istanbul, Lagos, Paris, Mexico City and Los Angeles. Based on a novel cartography and on detailed ethnographic and historical explorations, this book systematically analyses the diversity of responses to urgent contemporary urban challenges. It proposes a series of new concepts that allow us to assess the practical consequences of different urban strategies in everyday life...[more]
| | |  | | Renewing Destruction: Wind Energy Development, Conflict and Resistance in a Latin American Context
By Alexander A. Dunlap
(Rowman & Littlefield, 2019)
Renewing Destruction examines how wind energy projects impact people and their environments. Wind energy development, in Mexico and most countries, fall into a ‘roll out’ neoliberal strategy that is justified by climate change mitigation programs that are continuing a process of land and wind resources grabbing for profit. The result has been an exaggeration of pre-existing problems in communities around land, income-inequality, local politics and, contrary to public relations stories, is devastating traditional livelihoods and socio-ecological relationships. Exacerbating pre-existing social and material problems in surrounding towns, wind energy development is placing greater stress on semi-subsistence communities, marginalizing Indigenous traditions and indirectly resulting in the displacement and migration of people into urban centers...[more]
| | |  | | The Conception of the Urban, 1800-1875
By Parker Daly Everett
Journal of Urban History (May 2024)
Many writers in northwestern Europe circa 1800 to 1875 attempted to grasp the dual dynamic of industrialization and urbanization. They contributed to a genre that we would now recognize as urban sociology. They attempted to grasp new social phenomena and to develop categories adequate for them. The writers who contributed to this body of literature mediated their experience through psychological, social, and cultural understandings, but they nonetheless partially grasped their world. In so doing, they developed historically specific categories. Their writing simultaneously recognized and misrecognized their world; it both affirmed the new dynamics of capitalism and urbanization and criticized them, pointing to a different and better world beyond them. This analysis will draw out of this body of literature avant lettre foundational ideas of sociology and social theory including ones more fully developed later by Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, Ferdinand Tӧnnies, and Georg Simmel...[more]
| | | | International zones in global urban history
By Anna Ross
Urban History (May 2024)
This survey introduces the reader to the history of international zones. It argues that they offer striking insights into peacekeeping during the transition from a world of formal empires to one dominated by sovereign states. While the study of international zones is not new, there has been little examination of internationalization in practice. The survey suggests some of the benefits of adopting this approach and findings it might unearth...[more]
| | |  | | The Blockade in the Era of the World Wars
By Alan Kramer, Samuël Kruizinga, Elisabeth Piller and Jonas Scherner
The International History Review Special Issue (August 2024)
How did blockades shape the course, outcome and aftermath of the world wars? In both wars, belligerents sought to blockade their enemies, cutting them off from vital resources such as food, oil, information and capital to hasten their defeat. They thus impacted societies the world over, testing their resilience and vulnerability. They produced new forms of violence and humanitarian care, prompted innovation and learning, and had integrative and disintegrative effects on wartime societies, alliances and the world order. The special issue on “The Blockade in the Era of the World Wars” challenges orthodoxies that have been in place for decades, and stake out the ground for new research. It brings together experts from different historical disciplines and geographical specialisations to produce a nuanced, research-driven transnational and international history of the era of the blockade...[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 |  | | New Perspectives on Displaced Colonial Archives: Online Workshop
Co-organisers: Tim Livsey (Northumbria University, UK) and Shohei Sato (Waseda University, Japan)
11-12 September, 2024
There is enormous potential for comparative and connected histories of the displacement of colonial archives within and between empires, including the Belgian, British, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, and Spanish empires. While some parts of displaced colonial archives have now been quite intensively studied, much of this material remains under-used by researchers. We urgently need to know more about resistance to the removal of records, including efforts to contest and recover displaced archives. The strong recent interest in histories of knowledge and ignorance promises new theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of displaced colonial archives. We also need to consider how new research about these archives might reinvigorate our broader understandings of how colonial empires ended, and the incompleteness of these endings. This online workshop seeks to facilitate inclusive discussion of new perspectives on displaced colonial archives...[more]
| | |  | Book Launch: The World We Want: The New York Herald Tribune World Youth Forum & the Cold War Teenager
Sydney, New York, London
20 September-11 October 2024
What happens when you handpick 30 smart, articulate teenagers from across the globe and bring them to New York for 3 months during the Cold War? They lived with American families, attended American schools, and participated in forums in person and on television, discussing Middle East conflicts, South African apartheid, the Vietnam war, American civil rights, and women’s place around the world. The Herald Tribune World Youth Forum was both an idealistic attempt to create a better, more peaceful postwar world and an exercise in Cold War soft power diplomacy. Using over 200 oral history interviews, archives and memorabilia scattered across the globe, and the fabulous surviving footage of the 1950s televised debates (now viral on YouTube), award-winning historian Catherine Bishop brings to life the story of the Forum and its impact on young delegates.
Celebrate the book launch at events and talks in three cities...[more]
| | |  | Narrative Matters 2025: Disparate Narrative Worlds: Crisis, Conflict, and the Possibility of Hope
The American University of Paris and Université Paris Cité
13-16 May 2025
Disparate narrative worlds are not only a feature of the political landscape but are also embedded in aspects of daily life where social divisions and patterns of affiliation generate divergent realms of meaning. We can thus speak about disparate narrative worlds between generations, developmental stages, social roles and classes, religions, ethnicities, races, neurotypes, and persons. We also find worlds of men and women, young and old, the able and disabled as well as doctors and patients, teachers and students, and more. The question of the construction of disparate narrative worlds is only part of this conference’s scope. In addition, we are very interested in contributions oriented toward bridging divides in order to arrive at novel alliances and solidarities that can more effectively address the myriad challenges that confront our shared world. How can we connect narrative worlds to create, more or less, common spaces? Narrative Matters 2025, the 12th biennial conference, is co-organized by the George and Irina Schaeffer Center for the Study of Genocide, Human Rights and Conflict Prevention at The American University of Paris and the Paris Center for Narrative Matters at Université Paris Cité...[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: 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: 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
| CFP: "Dissent in World History"
World History Bulletin is seeking quality research essays, experiential learning case studies, and classroom activities for inclusion in its upcoming Fall/Winter 2024 issue, “Dissent in World History.” Guest-edited by Barbara J. Falk, Professor in the Department of Defence Studies at the Royal Military College of Canada and Director of Academics at the Canadian Forces College, the issue will explore the question of national and transnational dissent in its broadest sense and across all historical time periods. Falk has written, published and taught about resistance, dissent and dissidence for more than 30 years...[more]
Submission deadline: November 1, 2024 | Fellowships, Grants, & Awards | | 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
| | | | Four Postdoc fellowships in Global History and Governance at the Scuola Superiore Meridionale
The Scuola Superiore Meridionale, Naples
The Scuola Superiore Meridionale invites applications for four 1-year (renewable for up to 3 years) postdoc fellowships in Global History and Governance. Special attention will be paid to projects focusing on the period between the 19th and 21st centuries and insisting on one or more of the following areas: Ideas and Practices of Citizenship, History of the Welfare State, History of Affirmative Action and Preferential Policies, History of Rights, History of Minorities and History of Minority Rights, History of Migration, General principles of global law, Global regulatory regimes, Global dispute resolution mechanisms, Institutions and decision-making processes in a globalized world, Relationships between legal orders....[more]
Application deadline: October 15, 2024
| | | | Carnevali Small Research Grants Scheme
The Economic History Society
The Economic History Society maintains a fund to encourage small-scale research initiatives or pilot studies in economic and/or social history. Funds are available to support the direct costs of research that is aimed at a specific publication outcome and/or for pilot projects that will form the foundation for applications to other bodies for more substantial funding...[more]
Application deadline: November 1, 2024
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