Vol. 59, October 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.
| IMPORTANT UPDATE
If you have already submitted a proposal for the conference and or GUHP Emerging Program, thanks so much for your interest in GUHP2!
Please: resubmit your proposal right away!
(Due to technical problems with our email system GUHP will not receive
any proposals emailed to us before Friday October 11).
If you submitted a proposal before Friday October 11th, GUHP will not receive any of your materials unless you resend them to
guhp@globalurbanhistory.org
We apologize for this inconvenience.
For all others:
The deadline and the format for proposals is unchanged.
Submit (or resubmit) all proposals by Friday October 18th to guhp@globalurbanhistory.org
| 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.
| 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 Earth That Modernism Built: Empire and the Rise of Planetary Design
By Kenny Cupers
(University of Texas Press, 2024)
The Earth That Modernism Built traces the rise of planetary design to an imperialist discourse about the influence of the earthly environment on humanity. Kenny Cupers argues that to understand how the earth became an object of design, we need to radically shift the terms of analysis. Rather than describing how new design ideas and practices traveled and transformed people and places across the globe, this book interrogates the politics of life and earth underpinning this process. It demonstrates how approaches to modern housing, landscape design, and infrastructure planning are indebted to an understanding of planetary and human ecology fueled by settler colonialism and imperial ambition...[more]
| | |  |
Mass Housing in Ukraine: Building Typologies and Catalogue of Series 1922–2022
By Kateryna Malaia and Philipp Meuser
(DOM, 2024)
With the scale of damage and loss in mind and the future wide-ranging reconstruction that will inevitably occur after the war, this study examines the history and typologies of mass housing in Ukraine. It does so to evaluate what is lost, explain the diversity of modes of urban living in Ukrainian cities, and finally, reconsider the narrative of how Ukrainian housing came about. The study covers the last 100 years: the time of the most dramatic expansion and changes in the character of Ukrainian cities. It begins with the experimental buildings constructed in the Soviet Central and Eastern Ukraine and Polish Western Ukraine in the 1920s and 1930s, continues by looking at type projects from the Stalin era, as well as the serial apartment blocks built during the reigns of Khrushchev and Brezhnev and in the late USSR. Finally, it showcases individually designed yet typical residential buildings from the turbo-capitalist period of the 1990s and 2000s. With the help of archival materials—texts, blueprints, and photographs—and contemporary documentation, the authors analyse 40+ examples of Ukrainian-designed or modified housing types....[more]
| | |  | | Feeding the Eternal City: Jewish and Christian Butchers in the Roman Ghetto
By Kenneth Stow
(Harvard University Press, 2024)
For Rome’s Jewish population, confined to a ghetto between 1555 and 1870, efforts to secure kosher meat were fraught with challenges. The city’s papal authorities viewed kashrut—the Jewish dietary laws—with suspicion, and it was widely believed that kosher meat would contaminate any Christian who consumed it. Supplying kosher provisions entailed circumventing canon law and the institutions that regulated the butchering and sale of meat throughout the city. Kenneth Stow finds that Jewish butchers collaborated extensively with their Christian counterparts to ensure a supply of kosher meat, regardless of the laws that prohibited such interactions. Jewish butchers sold nonkosher portions of slaughtered animals daily to Christians outside the ghetto, which in turn ensured the affordability of kosher meat. At the same time, Christian butchers also found it profitable to work with Jews, as this enabled them to sell good meat otherwise unavailable at attractive prices...[more]
| | |  | | Towards an Energetics of Class: Comparing Energy Protests in India and the United States
By Elizabeth Chatterjee
Comparative Studies in Society and History (January 2024)
From Iran and Mozambique to France’s Gilets jaunes, consumer energy protests are ubiquitous today. Little historical scholarship has so far explored such “fuel riots,” the problematic moniker bestowed by contemporary policy scholars. This article argues for disaggregating the homogenous crowd of so-called rioters, instead analyzing why particular socioeconomic groups persistently take to the streets. To do this, it sketches an energy-centered approach to class with both structural and subjective axes. This analytic is applied to a comparative history of two of the best-documented energy protests of the last half-century. During the 1970s, independent truckers blocked American highways to protest the high price of motor fuel. A decade later, half a million North Indian farmers mobilized to demand cheaper and more reliable electricity...[more]
| | |  | | Forging an Anti-Racist Praxis: Housing Discrimination against Ottoman Greek Immigrants in Early-Twentieth-Century Portland and Seattle
By Yiorgo Topalidis
Journal of Urban History (July 2024)
Whiteness provides its possessors with the privilege of homeownership without racial restrictions and obstructs black, brown, and Indigenous people. I examine that privilege for the Ottoman Greeks, an early-twentieth-century Southeastern European immigrant cohort to the United States. To conduct the examination, I analyze data from the Dictionary of Races or Peoples, the Segregated Seattle Project, and the Portland Restrictive Covenant Project. Racial formation theory and the concept of racial fluidity provide the framework for this study’s three main findings.1 First, housing discrimination impacted Ottoman Greeks less than other racialized groups. Second, Ottoman Greeks experienced this discrimination as racially fluid Greeks or Turks. Finally, Ottoman Greek housing discrimination occurred in elite white communities of Portland and Seattle. My findings illustrate an alternate knowledge of whiteness that, when harnessed by descendants of early-twentieth-century immigrants, can potentially lead them toward anti-racist political advocacy and activism...[more]
| | |  | | An Imperial Adventus into a City of Warehouses: History, Modernity, and Urbanity in the Symbolic and Material Construction of Hamburg's Free Port
By Lasse Heerten
Central European History (March 2024)
The article analyzes the contemporary material, political, and symbolic construction of Hamburg's free port, zooming in on its festive opening in 1888, when Kaiser Wilhelm II visited to perform this ceremonious act. Asking why the “Speicherstadt” (warehouse city) was right away dubbed a “city” even though this was an exclusively commercial space devoid of inhabitants, the article uses this case study to argue that process concepts like “urbanization” frame our perspectives in ways that eclipse how older ideas about urbanity still defined a late-nineteenth-century political imaginary. The article shows how the opening ceremony, staged as an imperial adventus, alongside the “Speicherstadt's” neo-Gothic red-brick architecture, made recourse to established cultural forms that historians and other commentators often deem premodern. To counteract the prospect that port expansion could turn Hamburg into a working-class city, Hamburg's bourgeois merchant elite tried to construct the free port as a global urban bourgeois space embodying the city's history and its longevity as a space of urban trade privilege. The latter had erstwhile been defined by Hamburg's city walls, which, as the article argues, were symbolically rebuilt in the form of the Speicherstadt. The latter was the “city” into which this modern-day imperial adventus led....[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 |  | Urbicide and Horizons for City Re-making
London and on Zoom
23 October 2024, 5:00 pm–6:30 pm
Grasping the impact of violence on cities is crucial to understanding the contemporary urban condition and the possibilities for spatial justice. Over the past year, the Gaza Strip has been transformed into a landscape of debris and grief. Along with what has been recognised by the International Court of Justice, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International as a plausible case of genocide, is the destruction of physical urban space and the erasure of social networks, communal spaces and collective memory of its residents. These intertwined processes, recognised by scholars as urbicide, domicide and ecocide, are employed as tools of erasure, spatial dispossession and control. In this panel, speakers explore what can be learned about home and the urban from the calamity we witness in Gaza, and other experiences of urbicide in Syria, Lebanon and Iraq. We trace experiences of resistance to spacio-cide and attempts at life and place-making to allow for the remaking, revival and restoration of urban life and home in the broadest definition, beyond visions for humanitarian reconstruction or security-controlled urban spaces...[more]
| | |  | London’s Waterfront and its World, 1666 to 1800: Discover the findings of a recently published archaeological and historical investigation of the City of London's waterfront.
London
23 October 2024, 6:00-7:00 pm
This talk by Stephen Freeth and John Schofield will present the findings of a recently-published archaeological and historical investigation of the waterfront of the City of London after the Great Fire of 1666, which is based on four archaeological excavations by the Museum of London in the 1970s and 1980s. These excavations uncovered buildings and the material culture of the post-Fire waterfront around London Bridge and Billingsgate. A significant new discovery was evidence of London’s involvement in slavery, in the form of cowrie shells used in the trade, found in the floor levels of early 18th-century warehouses. The documentary study of London’s part in slavery is not much developed, and Stephen and John are keen to further this research. The monograph publishing these results is London’s Waterfront and its World, 1666 – 1800 by John Schofield and Stephen Freeth, Archaeopress 2023...[more]
| | | Linking Persons and Places from Near Eastern History: Hands-on Data Workshop
Frankfurt, Germany
November 15-17 2024
Join us in Frankfurt 15–17 November, 2024 to network with DH projects and platforms working on places and persons in Near/Middle Eastern history. Students and scholars are welcome! Before and after, during the whole month of November, we'll be working online to link places and persons from these various projects. Bring your own project data or jump in with any of the participating projects! At the in-person meetup in Frankfurt, we'll learn more about each dataset and discuss challenges and solutions for linking our data...[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]
| | | Calls for Papers & Proposals | CFP: Eighth European Congress on Universal and Global History "Critical Global Histories: Methodological Reflections and Thematic Expansions"
Linnaeus University, Växjö, Sweden,
10−12 September 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. In recent years, decoloniality as a research practice and method has raised further questions regarding the situatedness of knowledge and the role of local sources for global history. At the same time, a current nationalist backlash in many countries has led to calls for a return to national history, thereby challenging the fundamental premises of global history...[more]
Submission deadline: October 15, 2024
| CFP: The International Association of the Study of the Commons International Conference
University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA
June 16-20, 2025
The overarching theme of the IASC 2025 conference is entitled “Regenerating the Commons: Addressing Pressing Concerns Through Learning about the Past and Innovating into the Future.” Commons and Commoning are in constant threat of “enclosure” in places where they are active, and in many locations are forgotten practice entirely or operate with little awareness they exist, such as in many places in the United States. Consequently, with IASC 2025 located in the northeast United States, we hope tha Commons scholars and practitioners will bring their research and activities to our event University of Massachusetts Amherst to both (1) promote their work and ideas and (2) learn what others are doing all over the world...[more]
Submission deadline: October 25, 2024
| CFP: 2025 Annual Meeting of the French Colonial Historical Society, “Representations of Empire: Art, Museums, International Expos”
Buffalo State University along with the University of Buffalo, NY
May 29-31, 2025
The 49th annual meeting of the French Colonial Historical Society (FCHS) will take place in Buffalo, New York (USA), from Thursday, May 29, through Saturday, May 31, 2025. Proposals on any topic related to French colonial history and its legacies are welcome. We especially invite papers related to this year’s theme, “Representations of Empire: Art, Museums, International Expos.” The FCHS invites participants to explore how the French colonial empire and its colonizing mission(s) were/are portrayed to audiences in the peripheries of empire, mainland France, and the wider world, as well as how the visual culture of empire created spaces for cross-cultural exchanges as well as resistance to empire. Recent years have witnessed an explosion in the historiography of the French imperial imaginary, including how the empire was depicted visually and in other forms. Scholars have discovered myriad means and ways by which people who worked on visual representations of empire have conceptualized French overseas conquest and rule, sometimes deepening longstanding stereotypes while at other times challenging and even changing cultural norms...[more]
Submission deadline: November 1, 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 |  | | 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
| | |  | | GHIL-MWF Tandem Fellowship on The British Empire and the History of Colonialism
GHI London- India Research Programme and the Max Weber Forum for South Asian Studies New Delhi
The GHI London- India Research Programme and the Max Weber Forum for South Asian Studies New Delhi invite applications for their joint Tandem Fellowship for early career scholars whose research is situated in the broad field of the British Empire and the History of Colonialism. This exciting new fellowship is open to scholars from India and Germany and aims to bring together one scholar from each of these two countries to meet and exchange ideas in the UK and India. Each scholar will be funded for 3 months, which will be divided between GHIL and MWF. Of these 3 months, there should be an overlap of one month in London for both scholars. Ideally, the scholar from Germany will spend 2 months at the MWF in India and 1 month in London. The tandem scholar from India will spend 3 months at the GHIL. The programme is meant primarily for early career scholars (postdocs/no later than 6 years from completion of PhD – you must have obtained your degree at the time of application) working on the history of the British Empire and colonial India. Transcolonial perspectives are very welcome...[more]
Application deadline: October 31, 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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