Vol. 64, March 2025
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 Conference Registration
Registration for our upcoming conference, "GUHP2 Berlin: Stretching the Limits of Global Urban History," will open soon! Keep an eye out for an email with the preliminary program and a call to register!
For those wishing to book a room near the conference venue in Berlin well in advance, here is a good link to start your research.
|  | | Spaces of Anticolonialism: Delhi's Urban Governmentalities
By Stephen Legg
(University of Georgia Press, 2025)
Spaces of Anticolonialism is the first book-length account of anticolonialism in Delhi, as the capital of Britain’s empire in India. It pioneers a spatial governmentality analysis of the networks, mobilizations, and hidden spaces of anticolonial parrhesia, or courageous speech and actions, in the two decades before independence in 1947. Reading across imperial and nationalist archives, newspapers, memoirs, oral histories, and interviews, Stephen Legg exposes subaltern geographies and struggles across both the new and old cities, which have traditionally been neglected in favor of the elite spaces of New Delhi. Presenting the dual cities as one interconnected political landscape, Legg studies Indian National Congress efforts to mobilize and marshal support between the mass movements of Civil Disobedience (1930–34) and Quit India (1942–43). The book’s six chapters compare the two movements in terms of their public spaces of nonviolent anticolonialism, their problematization by violence, and their legacies....[more]
| | | | Liverpool and the Unmaking of Britain
By Sam Wetherell
(Waterstones, 2025)
Few cities in the world are as famous as Liverpool, the home of the modern world’s most celebrated rock group and of a legendary football team. The city is equally notorious for its poverty, its ethnic and racial divides and, above all, its decline. For Liverpool was once a major port, growing rich on slavery, on trade with the Americas and the British Empire’s outposts in Africa and Asia. In the 1980s, it was described as ‘obsolete’. Yet the city fights on. This is the epic history of Liverpool since the Second World War. It is a story of vast docklands shrinking and eventually vanishing when corporations discovered they could shift goods in containers and dispense with human workers, of industries like car manufacturing mushrooming and disappearing, of huge new suburbs being built...[more]
| | |  | Building Modern Scotland: A Social and Architectural History of the New Towns, 1947–1997
By Alistair Fair, Lynn Abrams, Kat Breen, Miles Glendinning, Diane Watters, and Valerie Wright
Combining architectural and social history, this open access book tells for the first time the in-depth story of Scotland's new towns.One of the most significant episodes in modern architectural, urban and social history, Scotland's postwar new towns offered new housing, new ways of life and new jobs. Begun between the late 1940s and the late 1960s, the new towns – East Kilbride, Glenrothes, Cumbernauld, Livingston and Irvine – were a key element of the planned Welfare State, attracting international attention and widespread publicity. These were places of architectural innovation, and economic and social change. Building Modern Scotland tells a new history of the new towns, combining architectural and social history to illustrate what was planned, what was built, and how these places were experienced by the communities who lived and worked in them...[more] | | | | The City is an Educator: Utopianism, Urbanism and the Creation of Republican Ankara
By Isaac Hand
Utopianism in the Middle East and North Africa, Edited by Simon Wolfgang Fuchs and Thomas Pierret
This chapter traces the development of utopian and urbanist thought in early Republican Turkey and how these coalescing intellectual currents informed the development of Turkey's new capital city in the 1920s and 30s....[more]
| | |  | | International Rivalry in China’s Urban Electrification: Suzhou, Shenyang, and Harbin, 1910s to 1930s
By Chenxiao Li
Journal of Urban History (February 2025)
This essay examines China’s urban electrification from the 1910s to the Sino-Japanese War in 1937 as a historical case study of how urban electricity became an arena of international rivalry between China and Japan. Using case studies of Suzhou, Shenyang, and Harbin, we reveal that Japan played a significant role in China’s urban electrification, providing startup money for the earliest electric light in many cities. However, Japanese investment was loaded with imperialist ambitions in China. The Chinese government and local communities interpreted urban electrification as a part of economic sovereignty. In Suzhou, the local community boycotted Japanese electricity. In Shenyang and Harbin, Japanese utilities were confronted by market competition from the Chinese community. The Sino-Japanese rivalries had different outcomes for the electrification process of Chinese cities. This essay re-evaluates Japan’s contribution to China’s urban electrification and highlights the geopolitical dimension of urban technology...[more]
| | |  | | Profiling local chroniclers in the early modern Low Countries
By Erika Kuijpers, Carolina Lenarduzzi, Judith Pollmann, Theo Dekker and Alie Lassche
Urban History (December 2024)
Early modern local chronicles are a largely neglected, yet stable genre of texts that can be used for comparative research over time and space. The NWO-funded research project Chronicling Novelty (2018–24) investigated the reception of new media and new knowledge among early modern chroniclers in the Low Countries. For this purpose, we created a digitized corpus of 204 Dutch-language chronicles from the period 1500–1850. This article presents the methodological decisions made in creating this corpus and their implications for its representativeness. The second part examines the social, religious and political profile of the chroniclers: who wrote chronicles and what does this reveal about chronicling as a cultural and social practice? Particularly interesting in this respect is how the chroniclers’ strong involvement in local public affairs authorized their chronicling practices, and vice versa...[more] | | | | Petty Capitalists: Race, Migration, and Real Estate in 19th Century Buenos Aires
Columbia University
April 10, 2025
Michael Goebel, Einstein Professor of Global History at Freie Universität Berlin will give a talk on Petty Capitalists: Race, Migration, and Real Estate in Nineteenth-Century Buenos Aires. Registration closes on April 9th at noon. Entrance to the building will be through 116th Street...[more]
| | | The Unveven City: Potholes, Pain, and Politics in Urban India
India Habitat Centre, New Delhi
March 28 2025
Sneha Annavarapu (National University of Singapore) will discuss six years of ethnographic material, analyzing how potholes shape driving dispositions in a city that is attempting to brand itself as a "world-class" city. She shows that far from being just physical interruptions on the surface of the road, potholes engender political subjectivities in three ways...[more]
| | |  | International Summer School Towards Inclusive Global Histories
Växjö, Sweden
7-9 September 2025
The summer school will focus on three novel research fields within global history: Global Diplomacy, gender, and environmental questions. By framing approaches that emphasize different voices and alternative archives in terms of “global histories” in the plural, we aim to promote the inclusion of a broad range of voices, perspectives, and orientations within the field, while forcefully rejecting the possibility of insisting on a single, dominating story or grand narrative of global history. The summer school will offer plenary sessions by leading experts in the field and allow for hands-on methodological conversations among all participating scholars. Early career scholars will be encouraged to reflect on key methodological questions along the lines of the summer school themes with scholars from around the world. We invite contributions consisting of projects based on original research and empirically grounded PhD thesis work in progress. We encourage theoretical, methodological, ethical, and historiographical reflections on how to make global history more inclusive. Although the main language of the summer school will be English, individual presentations and panels in other languages can be accommodated...[more]
| | | Calls for Papers & Proposals | CFP: Spaces of Health and Healing in Africa
Hybrid Liverpool and Online
April 17-18, 2025
Liverpool School of Architecture, at the University of Liverpool and the Program in the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology of the Johns Hopkins University invite proposals for a hybrid symposium to be held in Liverpool from the 17-18 April 2025. We welcome presentations that explore various settings for health and healing, such as shrines, sacred healing huts, and herbal 'apothecaries' and other spaces for indigenous medicine and healing practices; ‘basic’ health care infrastructure incorporating dispensaries, clinics, and hospitals developed for early missionary and colonial medicine; post-independence medical centres. We are also interested in papers examining the use of healthcare ‘vectors’ such as barefoot doctors, travelling midwives and paramedics and their spread of health care practices such as vaccinations, and childhood nutrition programmes in urban and rural areas...[more]
Submission deadline: March 25, 2025
|
CfP: University of Dar es Salaam Conference on Humanities in the Digital Age
The University of Dar es Salaam
August 25-26, 2025
The College of Humanities (CoHU) at the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, invites submissions for the African Humanities Conference 2, scheduled for August 25-26, 2025. This year’s theme is "Reimagining African Humanities in the Digital Age." The conference will explore the relationship between humans and technology across various themes, including the impact of digital technologies on language studies, accessibility and inclusion, representation of technology in literature, historical human-technology interactions, the future implications of emerging technologies and ethical issues around artificial intelligence...[more]
Submission deadline: March 30, 2025
|
Becoming Local? Forgotten Lineages of Displaced Communities across the Indian Ocean World, 1650-1850
Leiden, Netherlands
December 10-11, 2025
On December 10-11, the Forgotten Lineages research project featuring GUHP fellow Dries Lyna will organize the two-day conference Becoming Local? Forgotten Lineages of Displaced Communities across the Indian Ocean World, 1650-1850 in Leiden. Confirmed keynote speakers are Jennifer Gaynor (University at Buffalo SUNY) and Sue Peabody (Washington State University), with Michael Laffan (Princeton University) as one of the discussants. The conference will advocate the urgency of uncovering the genealogy of racialized social categories, what purposes they served at given times, and how displaced descent permeated the making and shaping of racialized groups in colonial and imperial cities across the Indian Ocean. The call for papers can be found here, and abstracts should be sent to forgottenlineages@hum.leidenuniv.nl before 31 March 2025....[more]
Submission deadline: March 31, 2025
|
CFP: Good Governance and the Built Environment of Late Medieval Cities (ca. 1200–1600)
Brussels
September 3-5, 2025
This conference seeks to address this lacuna by asking specifically how the built environment of late medieval cities was conceptualised and physically shaped in relation to ideals of good governance. The focus will be on urban centers in diverse geographical regions (from North-Western Europe and the Mediterranean to the Middle East), and this in the period of 1200 to 1600. We invite contributions coming from a variety of disciplines (architectural history, art history, literary history, political history and so on) to explore how—and to what extent—building was integral to governing a late medieval city....[more]
Submission deadline: April 7, 2025
| CfP: EAUH 2026 – City Networks in Europe and Beyond
Barcelona, Spain
September 2-5, 2026
The Seventeenth Conference of the European Association for Urban History (EAUH) will be held in Barcelona from Wednesday 2 September to Saturday 5 September 2026. The central theme of the conference is ‘City Networks in Europe and Beyond’, although it covers all themes, periods and regions within urban history. City networks have been of as much strategic significance in the past as they are in the present. Although the history of Europe is often identified with states and nations, it is largely the history of its networked cities. This is clearly evident in Barcelona, a major medieval centre in the Mediterranean, which also took the lead in the great leap forward of the industrial age, with crucial links to other cities, and that regained this role in post-Franco period. Cities and interurban links have contributed as much or more than states to the shaping of Europe and its reach beyond the continent, particularly in terms of colonial relations. The concept of network has become widespread in many disciplines and can create meaningful relationships between the past and the present of Europe and the wider world...[more]
Submission deadline: April 15, 2025
| CfP: The Roots and Routes of Black Power
Special Issue
The Journal of African American History is planning a 2026 special issue titled “The Roots and Routes of Black Power.” During the past few decades, the field has proliferated with scholars fundamentally reshaping the temporal, leader- ship, and ideological bounds of the movement and its key players. Students and newcomers to the traditional Black Power period (1960s–1980s) now have a wealth of books, articles, archival repositories, and digital sites to help them understand the period and its impact like never before. However, as the field has matured, it has shifted shape and in some instances splintered, leaving lingering questions about the current and future states of the field...[more]
Submission deadline: July 1, 2025 | Fellowships, Grants, & Awards | | Gilder Lehrman Center Residential Fellowships, 2025-2026
The Gilder Lehrman Center
The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition (GLC) at Yale University invites applications for residential research fellowships for academic year 2025-2026. The Gilder Lehrman Center seeks to promote a better understanding of all aspects of the institution of slavery from the earliest times to the present. We welcome proposals that will utilize the special collections of the Yale University Libraries or other research collections of the New England area, and explicitly engage issues of historical slavery, contemporary forced labor, resistance, abolition, and their legacies. Scholars from all disciplines, both established and younger scholars, are encouraged to apply...[more]
Priority application deadline: March 12, 2025 | | |  | | The Northwestern University Transportation Library Research Grant
Northwestern University
The Northwestern University Transportation Library holds one of the largest transportation research collections in the world, covering all modes of transportation including aviation, rail, highway, public transit, and pedestrian and bicycle transportation. In addition to our technical collections that support research on current transportation issues, the library maintains special and archival collections such as timetables, passenger ephemera, and rare books and journals. It also holds a substantial collection of mid-19th to early 21st century transportation annual reports, and one of the most complete U.S. Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) collections in existence. This research grant was established in 2021 to facilitate and support research projects that significantly benefit from substantial onsite use of the Transportation Library’s unique technical, special, and archival collections...[more]
Application deadline: April 1, 2025 | | | |