Vol. 58, September 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.
|  | | The Worlds of Victor Sassoon: Bombay, London, Shanghai, 1918–1941
By Rosemary Wakeman
(University of Chicago Press, 2024)
In this book, historian Rosemary Wakeman brings to life the frenzied, crowded streets, markets, ports, and banks of Bombay, London, and Shanghai. In the early twentieth century, these cities were at the forefront of the sweeping changes taking the world by storm as it entered an era of globalized commerce and the unprecedented circulation of goods, people, and ideas. Wakeman explores these cities and the world they helped transform through the life of Victor Sassoon, who in 1924 gained control of his powerful family’s trading and banking empire. She tracks his movements between these three cities as he grows his family’s fortune and transforms its holdings into a global juggernaut. Using his life as its point of entry, The Worlds of Victor Sassoon paints a broad portrait not just of wealth, cosmopolitanism, and leisure but also of the discrimination, exploitation, and violence wreaked by a world increasingly driven by the demands of capital...[more]
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Many Black Women of this Fortress: Graça, Mónica and Adwoa, Three Enslaved Women of Portugal’s African Empire
By Kwasi Konadu
(Hurst, 2022)
This book presents rare evidence about the lives of three African women in the sixteenth century—the very period from which we can trace the origins of global empires, slavery, capitalism, modern religious dogma and anti-Black violence. These features of today’s world took shape as Portugal built a global empire on African gold and bodies. Forced labour was essential to the world economy of the Atlantic basin, and afflicted many African women and girls who were enslaved and manumitted, baptised and unconvinced. While some women liaised with European and mixed-race men along the West African coast, others, ordinary yet bold, pushed back against new forms of captivity, racial capitalism, religious orthodoxy and sexual violence, as if they were already self-governing. Many Black Women of this Fortress lays bare the insurgent ideas and actions of Graça, Mónica and Adwoa, charting how they advocated for themselves and exercised spiritual and female power...[more]
| | |  | | Territories: The Claiming of Space
By David Storey
(Routledge, 2024)
Territories are more than simply bounded spaces; they reflect the ways in which we think of geographic space. Territoriality, or laying claim to territory, can be seen as the spatial expression of power, with borders dividing those inside from those outside. The book provides an introduction to the concept of territory, the ways in which ideologies and social practices are manifested in space, the deployment of territorial strategies and the geographical outcomes of these. This revised and updated third edition focuses on both macro-scale examples and those less obvious micro-scale ones, and it explores how territorial strategies are used in the maintaining of power, or as a means of resistance. Throughout the book, key questions emerge concerning geographic space. Who is "allowed" to be in particular spaces and who is excluded or discouraged from being there? How are territorial practices utilised in conflicts concerned with socio-political power and identity and how are ideologies transposed onto space?...[more]
| | |  | | History and Archeology of Urban Decline: Rome during the Medieval Climate Anomaly
By Anna Gutgarts and Ronnie Ellenblum
Journal of Urban History (July 2024)
In this article, we suggest a new analysis of the decline and abandonment of medieval urban landscapes, using as a case study the thoroughly excavated and documented Caelian Hill in Rome during the eleventh century, supported by notions from modern studies of climate change. We provide evidence for the concurrent decline of the urban landscape and the abandonment of waterways, including the aqueduct of Aqua Claudia that functioned since the first-century CE and was last recorded as functioning ca. 1006 CE. We further point to the implications of these processes on changes in the urban fabric in other areas of the city, challenging previous studies which associate its decline with political and economic circumstances culminating in the Norman sack of 1084. We suggest that these processes should be attributed to the effects of the regional climatic disturbances that affected Central-Southern Italy during the medieval climate anomaly (MCA)...[more]
| | |  | | Microhistory as Industrial History: Environment, Sugar Capitalism and Labour in Egypt, 1863–1879
By Adam Mestyan
Past & Present (August 2024)
This article argues that the microhistorical analysis of one specific industrial enterprise offers a useful perspective from which to study local participation in global industrialization and to unite business and environmental history. Using the example of the Daira Sanieh, a giant sugar holding in late Ottoman Egypt (the so-called ‘khedivate’), I map the economic logic of this non-sovereign polity and suggest that capturing capital was its rulers’ main priority. The article follows how Ismail Pasha, the khedive of Egypt, and his men looked for partners in trans-Mediterranean sugar capitalism, including even the establishment of a khedivial bank in Paris in 1870. It proceeds then to consider the problem of capturing human labour, necessitated by fire-engine sugar machines with increased processing capacity; and, drawing on the accountancy books of a single sugar factory, it discusses the Daira’s factories as the earliest pockets of high wage inequality in Africa. The conclusion poses the question whether this type of mechanization was a form of de-industrialization and suggests that global histories of capital can profit from industrial microhistory by considering how the interplay between non-sovereignty and industrialization hinders economic centralization...[more]
| | |  | | Between Global History and Microhistory: Rethinking Histories of “Small Spaces” and Cities
By Gaurav C. Garg
Comparative Studies in Society and History (January 2024)
How can historians of “small spaces” and cities focus on local events and issues and at the same time carry on conversations with peers in a disciplinary mode marked by the spatial expansiveness of global history, on one hand, and a focus on objects and individuals of microhistory on the other? At stake here are key questions connected with the intellectual value of place-based knowledge and detailed single-site historical case studies. I argue that as long as we are caught between the positivist idea that causal regularity and time-place independence of explanatory mechanisms are the hallmark of theory, and the postmodernist resistance to generalizations, histories of cities and other small spaces will suffer from “defanged empiricism.” This problem is particularly debilitating for non-global histories of small spaces and cities of the global South, which often “do not travel well.” Is there a way out?...[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 |  | 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]
| | |  | Future Teach: Teaching History in Landscape Schools
Online
20 September 2024, 12:00- 2:30 GMT
During the conference ‘Future Teach: Teaching History in Landscape Schools’, hosted in Sheffield from 8-9 September 2022 it was agreed to publish the Proceedings that included a Manifesto and to organise a follow up meeting that would explore any new issues and devise a way of sharing resources. The proceedings were published earlier this year by Routledge in a volume entitled Teaching Landscape History, edited by Jan Woudstra, David Jacques and Robert Holden. It comprises a review of the challenges facing teaching landscape history during the current era of global change. It argues that to thrive it should be on the curricula and address questions about its modern emphasis and direction. The text therefore comprised a renewed approach to teaching landscape history that students of several disciplines would find relevant and with which they would be eager to become engaged. The content included contributions by selected authors but also comments by participants during the conference and afterwards. Contributors to the volume included Thaïsa Way, Marc Treib, Nancy Pollock-Ellwand, David Jacques, Brent Elliott, Alayna Pukinui Rā, Hannah Hopewell, Jill Sinclair and Annette Freytag....[more]
| | | The Dutch in the Spatial History of Ottoman Izmir
Amsterdam Center for Urban History
21 November 2024
As part of the 2024/2025 Seminar Programme at the Amsterdam Center for Urban History, Çağla Yaner Yüksel (Baskent University) will give a talk on the presence of Dutch merchants and entrepreneurs in the Ottoman port city of Izmir...[more]
| | |  | Business History Conference: Doctoral Colloquium
Atlanta, Georgia
13 March 2025
The 2025 BHC Doctoral Colloquium (DC) in Business History will be held in Atlanta, Georgia on March 13th. The participants will be invited to a welcome dinner on March 12th in Atlanta. Typically limited to ten students, the colloquium is open to doctoral candidates who are pursuing dissertation research within the broad field of business history from any relevant discipline (e.g., from economic sociology, political science, cultural anthropology, or management, as well as history). Most participants are in year 3 or 4 or their degree program, though in some instances applicants at a later stage make a compelling case that their thesis research had evolved in ways that led them to see the advantages of an intensive engagement with business history. We welcome proposals from students working within any thematic area of business history. Topics may range from the early modern era to the present, and explore societies across the globe. Participants work intensively with a distinguished group of BHC-affiliated scholars (including the incoming BHC president), discussing dissertation proposals, relevant literatures and research strategies, and career trajectories...[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 | Call for Reviewers: Global Black Thought
Global Black Thought, the official journal of the African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS), is looking for book reviewers for volumes 3 and 4. We are seeking expert reviewers willing to evaluate key works on the field between 1,500 to 2,500 words. These reviews should not merely summarize texts, but carefully explain the book’s contributions, methods, and methodologies. We also want reviewers to examine the book’s place within the larger themes of Black intellectual historiography. We are seeking reviewers representing various ranks, including ABD graduate students and independent scholars, who work on various aspects of African American history, Africana Studies, and African Diaspora Studies...[more]
| 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 |  | | 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
| | |  | | Landhaus Fellowship Program
Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society and Herrmannsdorfer Landwerkstätten
The Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society and Herrmannsdorfer Landwerkstätten are pleased to invite applications for our fellowship program based at the Herrmannsdorf Landwerkstätten (an organic farm outside of Munich). Launched in January 2022, the Landhaus Fellowship Program is a residential program. Ten fellows live and work together in the newly renovated historic house on the Herrmannsdorfer farm. Fellowships are open to excellent doctoral, postdoctoral, and senior scholars working in the field of environment and society. We accept applications for academic projects in disciplines that are in dialogue with humanities-based approaches to environment and society. We also offer one fellowship for a writer-in-residence. Candidates for this position should be open to leading occasional writing seminars for the RCC community through our Environmental Writing Studio. All fellows are expected to spend their fellowship in residence at the RCC Landhaus, to work on a major project, and to actively participate in life at the RCC. Please note that the RCC does not sponsor field work or archival research...[more]
Application deadline: October 15, 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
| | |  | | Max Weber Programme
European University Institute
The Max Weber Programme (MWP) at the European University Institute (EUI) is a unique postdoctoral programme in the historical and social sciences in Europe. It is open to applicants who are within 5 years from the completion of their PhD, from anywhere in the world, regardless of nationality. The Programme is highly selective, with an annual acceptance rate of <5% for a total of 55-60 Fellowships in the fields of political and social sciences, economics, law, and history. Preference is given to applicants who have only just completed their doctorate and have not had a postdoctoral fellowship before. Selected Fellows will benefit from the stimulating combination of a global programme located in the heart of Europe offering a broad menu of multidisciplinary and disciplinary activities. The Programme awards 1- and 2-year fellowships according to departments. In extraordinary cases only, a fellowship can be extended to a third year...[more]
Application deadline: October 18, 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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