News

The AISU (Associazione Italiana di Storia Urbana) would like to inform UHA members about the Congress in Ferrara, Beyond the Gaze, Interpreting and understanding the city (scheduled from September 13th to 16th, 2023).

https://aisuinternational.org/en/ferrara-2023-ferrara/

They also invite scholars under 40 to submit contributions that will be published in a monographic issue of the magazine "Urban History" dedicated to the history of Italian cities.

https://aisuinternational.org/en/call-for-papers-sviluppi-recenti-della-storia-urbana-nuovi-contributi-e-ricerche-sulle-citta-italiane/

Dear Colleagues, 

We hope this annual letter to our membership, officers, and staff finds you well and enjoying the New Year. As the New Year gets underway, we are writing to extend our deepest gratitude to you for both your membership and ongoing contributions to the mission of the Urban History Association. Your abiding support and help continue to be indispensable to the success of our organization. In addition to expressing appreciation for your support, we are also writing to bring you up to date on our accomplishments, challenges, and plans for the current calendar year.

Our achievements unfolded along multiple lines of activity during 2022. We continued our very fruitful relationship with the Journal of Urban History; increased the Association’s operating budget; improved our organizational structure; established plans for the 2023 biennial conference, to be held in Pittsburgh; and, finally, and perhaps most important, we created an executive planning committee to craft a “Five-Year Plan” to help set priorities and channel our work over the next half decade. Under the editorship of David Goldfield, selected UHA members continued to play a vital role on the editorial board of the JUH, while scores of other members served as reviewers for recently published books and referees for articles under consideration for publication in the journal.

In addition to our collaboration with the JUH, the UHA’s prize committees selected the winners of the established Hirsch, Jackson, and Katz awards, as well as the award for the Best Book in Non-North American Urban History. On behalf of the UHA, we extend congratulations to all 2022 Award Winners! In reviewing our list of awards, the board discussed the prospect of expanding the number and diversity of prizes to reflect the changing geographic and demographic reach of the organization. A committee on UHA awards has been established and is dedicated to achieving that goal.

In the spring of 2022, we were awarded $75,000 in funding from the American Historical Association’s Grants to Sustain and Advance the Work of Historical Organizations Program, an opportunity made possible with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Thanks to this grant, we were able to strengthen the financial package of the Executive Director (Allyson Moralez); add a new Operations and Special Projects Assistant (Daniela Sheinin); and supplement modest existing stipends for Avigail Oren, Ryan Reft, and the editing team for The Metropole. In addition to being awarded grant funding, the UHA was especially pleased and grateful to President Elect Andrew K. Sandoval-Strausz for securing generous sponsorships from Penn State University’s Department of History and its College of the Liberal Arts. The Penn State grants have enabled The Metropole editors to offer modest compensation to blog theme month contributors. Reinforcing its keen interest in expanding the financial base of the UHA, the board approved an increase in membership fees (effective in 2023) to keep pace with the rising costs of services to our members.

Moreover, in order to strengthen the organizational structure of the Association and help to maximize its resources, the board approved changes to the by-laws governing the newsletter, secretary, and treasurer. Following up on these changes, the board approved the appointment of James Wolfinger, Dean of the School of Education at St. John’s University, as the new treasurer; and Amanda Boston, University of Pittsburgh, to succeed Kara Schlichting, Queens College, as membership secretary. The new general secretary’s post remains open. The UHA membership also elected a stellar slate of new members to the Board of Directors: Emiliano Aguilar, Taylor Desloge, Claire Dunning, Sandra I. Enriquez, Georgina Hickey, Nancy Kwak, Kyle T. Mays, and Kevin Mumford; for their immense service to the organization, we also thanked outgoing board members Harold Bérubé, Guadalupe García, Paige Glotzer, Clayton Howard, Alejandro Velasco, Matthew Vitz, and Constanze Weise.

Over the past year, we invested considerable energy into planning the 2023 biennial conference of the UHA, our first in-person conference since meeting in Columbia, South Carolina in 2018. Under the Conference Theme, “Reparations & the Right to the City,” our conference will be held at the Westin Pittsburgh in the heart of the Central Business District this October 26-29, 2023. Conference planning is in the able hands of a stellar roster of Program and Local Arrangements Committee members and co-chairs. Marcus Hunter, UCLA, and Alison Isenberg, Princeton, are co-chairs of the 12-member Program Committee, while historians Laurence Glasco, University of Pittsburgh and Andrew Masich, the Heinz History Center, are co-chairs of the 16-member Local Arrangements Committee.

Both committees are hard at work organizing an innovative conference that will include among other exciting features a collaboration with the Westmoreland Museum of American Art’s Frank Lloyd Wright Exhibit and Symposium. This collaboration will allow us to explore Wright’s “Unbuilt'' works (not just his iconic buildings like Fallingwater) in the Pittsburgh region from the bottom up as well as the top down. Another creative dimension of the conference entails cooperation with the A. W. Mellon-funded multi-city national reparations project, “Crafting Democratic Futures: Situating Colleges and Universities in Community-Based Reparations Solutions.” Drawing upon selected papers from the 2023 UHA biennial conference, we also envision assembling and publishing an edited state of the field collection of essays on reparations, past and present.

Finally, and no doubt most significant for the future of the UHA, we created a new strategic planning committee. Under the leadership of the UHA executive committee, we charged this committee with crafting a “Five-Year Plan” for submission to the Board of Directors. The board will in turn review, comment on, and help to refine the “5-Year Plan” during calendar year 2023. We invite our members to share their thoughts on setting priorities and goals that will shape the vision of the UHA over the next five years.

In the meantime, most immediately, we urge our members to visit the conference website (https://www.urbanhistory.org/pittsburgh2023) and submit proposals for the 2023 program. Your engagement with the theme will help ensure the conference’s deep resonance for the academy, activists, policy makers, workers, educators, and the general public. The deadline for papers is February 20, 2023.

Again, many thanks for your ongoing commitment to the UHA. Enjoy a fruitful New Year.

Sincerely,

Joe William Trotter, Jr., President

Andrew K. Sandoval-Strausz, President-Elect

Riyadh Region Municipality is delighted to invite you to participate and attend the 19th International Association for the Study of Traditional Environment (IASTE) conference which will be held in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia on January 5-9, 2024 in collaboration with King Saud University and the Ministry of Culture.

Scholars, professionals, and practitioners in the field of traditional environments are invited to showcase their latest research, projects, and innovations in the field. The conference theme of IASTE 2024 is titled “The Dynamism of Tradition”, where we refer to the adaptability and continuity of tradition to evolve as a legitimate manifestation of the socio-cultural and socioeconomic spheres through space and time.

For details on the conference theme and submission requirements, please use the following links:

• IASTE 2024 webpage: https://iaste.org/iaste-2024-riyadh/

• IASTE 2024 CFA poster: https://iaste.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/IASTE-2024-15-jan-edits-HI2.pdf

• IASTE 2024 Submission link: https://app.oxfordabstracts.com/stages/1107/submitter

The conference will provide an excellent opportunity to share knowledge, collaborate with peers, and exchange ideas with experts in the fields of architecture, landscape architecture, urban design and planning, urban studies, sociology, and history.

Deadline: May 1, 2023

The European Association for Urban History (EAUH) will hold a one-day online symposium on 6 September 2023 focusing on cultural and material exchanges between urban Europe and the wider urban world, extending across all historical periods. Our aim is to contribute to the larger global urban history currently being written by helping to situate European cities, not solely as the locus of post/colonial power but also as sites of exchange. 

Exchange might include one or more of the following:  

• Movements of people and goods   
• Trade flows and relationships  
• Cultural exchange: foods, street naming, statuary, etc.  
• Transformation of technologies e.g. sanitation, across urban settings  
• Architecture and planning: collaborations and influences  
• The export and import of ideas between urban spaces  

Above all, we are looking for presentations that stimulate new thinking about the relationship of urban Europe with other parts of the world.  

KEYNOTE LECTURE: Peter Stabel (Centre for Urban History, Antwerp)  on the comparative and entangled urban history of Latin Europe, the Islamic Worlds and the Byzantine Empire.   

The conference committee welcomes proposals (max 300 words) from scholars at all career levels, including graduate students, and that address diversity.  For more info, click HERE. 

Deadline for Submission: 1 April 2023  

Submit proposals and inquiries to:  

Simon Gunn sg201@leicester.ac.uk  

Rosemary Wakeman rwakeman@fordham.edu  

Apply to participate in Reading, Writing, and Teaching the Rust Belt: Co-Creating Regional Humanities Ecosystems, a two-week residential institute for higher education faculty members. This National Endowment for the Humanities-funded project focuses on the importance of regional storytelling in fostering a sense of place. June 4 through June 18, 2023 at Ursuline College in Cleveland, Ohio.

Click HERE for more info. 

Deadline: March 3, 2023

The new Environmental Design Archives (EDA) short-term research fellowships, which are open to both junior and senior scholars, will support travel to conduct research on-site at the EDA, located within the College of Environmental Design at the University of California, Berkeley.

See HERE for more information. 

Deadline: March 1, 2023

The UHA is pleased to announce new board members coming in the new year! On January 1, 2023, eight new members will join our continuing members on the Board of Directors, bringing with them a range of experiences and expertise.

As always, we express our deepest gratitude to the outgoing board members who will complete their terms on December 31, 2022. 

Thank you to the outgoing UHA board members: 

Harold Bérubé

Guadalupe García

Paige Glotzer

Clayton Howard

Alejandro Velasco

Matthew Vitz

Constanze Weise

Welcome to the incoming UHA board members: 

Emiliano Aguilar

Emiliano Aguilar is a political and labor historian of the United States, specifically the Latina/o Midwest. His manuscript in progress, Building a Latino Machine: Caught Between Corrupt Political Machines and Good Government Reform, explores how the ethnic Mexican and Puerto Rican community of East Chicago, Indiana navigated machine politics in the 20^th and 21^st centuries to further their inclusion in municipal and union politics. The project further outlines this inclusion’s costs (and paradoxes) for generations of residents and reformers. In grappling for political power, these Latina and Latino residents renegotiated their place within the city, particularly under the threat of urban renewal and later deindustrialization within the rust belt community. Through his research, Emiliano has gained an interest in municipal archives and issues surrounding their transparency and accessibility to communities.

Taylor Desloge

Dr. Taylor Desloge is a Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Connecticut College. His research and teaching interests span the fields of African American history, environmental history, and urban history, but at the core he is interested in how African Americans defined health and well-being in the context of the industrial city and how those ideas served as a basis for critique and political action. His book project, “The Lost Politics of Urban Blight: Black Health, Black Power and the Making of Modern Urban America, 1877-1940,” explores the long roots of mid-20 th century mass displacement and the many ways in which local, state, and federal policies have appropriated and channeled longstanding black political struggle against Jim Crow, endemic diseases of segregation and exploitation of black neighborhoods towards destructive ends. Alongside his book project, he is currently working in collaboration with his students on a public history project on the impact of the Great Migration on the politics, culture and institutions of New London, CT. A longtime member, his work has appeared in the Journal of Urban History and has been featured at several UHA events.

Claire Dunning

Claire Dunning is an assistant professor in the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland, College Park, where she is also affiliated with the History Department. Dunning is a historian of the United States in the 20th century, focusing on the histories of poverty, race, governance, and nonprofit organizations in American cities. Her work has been published in the Journal of Urban History, Enterprise & Society, and Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, and reached more popular audiences in The Washington Post and The Boston Globe. She is the author of Nonprofit Neighborhoods: An Urban History of Inequality and the American State (University of Chicago Press, 2022), which traces the local consequences of pursuing a public good through private organizations. At present, she is at work on a new book on philanthropy, race, and housing policy after 1968. Dunning holds a PhD in history from Harvard University and an AB from Dartmouth College. She was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University and previously worked at a community foundation.

Sandra I. Enríquez

Sandra I. Enríquez is an Assistant Professor of History and the Director of the Public History Emphasis at the University of Missouri – Kansas City. She is a social historian of modern United States history with research and teaching interests in Chicanx and Latinx history, urban history, borderlands, social movements, and public history. Enríquez received her BA and MA from the University of Texas at El Paso and earned her Ph.D. from the University of Houston. Her first book ¡El Barrio No Se Vende!: Grassroots Activism and Revitalization in El Paso (under contract with the University of Texas Press), examines how Mexican American tenants organized to save their border neighborhood from the bulldozer while shaping urban policies through their proposed community-controlled grassroots alternatives to top-down revitalization in the 1970s and 1980s. Trained as both an academic and a public historian, Enríquez is interested in connecting students and general audiences to their local and regional histories. She has curated and collaborated on several public history initiatives in Missouri and Texas, including Show Me Missouri, Guadalupe Centers Centennial, and the Civil Rights in Black and Brown. Enríquez was born in Ciudad Juárez and grew up on both sides of the U.S.-México border.

Georgina Hickey

Georgina Hickey is a professor of History at the University of Michigan Dearborn, specializing in U.S. Urban and Women’s History.  She is the author of Hope and Danger in the New South City: Working Class Women and Urban Development in Atlanta, 1890-1940 and a forthcoming book entitled, Breaking the Code: Challenging Gender Segregation in the Twentieth Century Urban United States (University of Texas Press, 2024), as well as articles on women’s access to public space and urban-based activism. Her current research explores the intersection of grassroots movements for social change and electoral politics in post-1967 Detroit through the public life of long-time city council member, activist, and social worker, Maryann Mahaffey.  Hickey teaches courses on urban, social, and cultural history; social movements; and race and gender.  She is affiliate faculty in the Urban and Regional Studies and Women and Gender Studies programs and currently serves as the chair of the Department of Social Sciences.  Off campus, she devotes time to community cooperatives and cycling.  She is an advocate for inclusive communities, transportation systems, and public bathrooms.

Nancy Kwak

Nancy Kwak is an Associate Professor of Urban Studies and Planning and History at UC San Diego. She is the author of  Homeownership for All: American Power and the Politics of Housing Aid Post-1945 (University of Chicago Press) and co-editor with Andrew Sandoval-Strausz of Making Cities Global (University of Pennsylvania Press.) She is working on two research projects now, one on global urban informality and the other, on urban agriculture in California. Nancy is particularly interested in working with others to make our professional organizations  more equitable and representative of the places we study.

Kyle T. Mays

Kyle T. Mays (he/him) is an Afro-Indigenous (Saginaw Chippewa) scholar in the Departments of African American Studies, American Indian Studies, and History at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is a scholar of urban history and studies, Afro-Indigenous history, and contemporary popular culture. He is the author of three books, including City of Dispossessions: Indigenous Peoples, African Americans, and the Creation of Modern Detroit (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022) and An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States (2021).

Kevin Mumford

Kevin Mumford is Professor of History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His publications include Not Straight, Not White: Black Gay Men From the March on Washington to the AIDS Crisis; Newark: A History of Race,Rights, and Riots in America,; Interzones: Black/White Sex Districts in Chicago and New York in the Early Twentieth Century; “The Trouble With Gay Rights: Race and the Politics of Sexual Orientation in Philadelphia, 1969-1982.” He has also served as Fulbright Senior Scholar, Erfurt Universitait (2011); Warren Center for the Study of American History at Harvard University (2008); Schomburg Fellow, NYPL/ NEH (2005). His publication awards include Binkely-Stephenson Award (2012), Organization of American Historians; the Audre Lorde Prize (2012), CLGBTH/AHA; Stonewall Honor Prize, ALA; and the Bullough Prize.

Dear Colleagues, 

We hope this letter finds you in good health and enjoying the impending Holiday Season.  

We are writing to thank you for your membership and ongoing contributions to the mission and work of the Urban History Association---“to foster connections among the diverse, interdisciplinary field of urban history, for the benefit of its members’ scholarship and professional development, and to disseminate urban-related scholarship to the broadest possible audience.”  

As we near the close of the current calendar year, we are pleased to report significant progress on all phases of our programs and mission, including plans to host and fund-raise for the 2023 biennial meeting in the city of Pittsburgh under the theme: “Reparations & the Right to the City.”  With rising global interest in issues of injustice, past and present, and movements for various forms of redress, we anticipate significant participation in this conference.  Moreover, in an effort to enhance the transnational reach of the conference, we are forging diverse programmatic collaborations, most notably with the world renowned Frank Lloyd Wright Fallingwater Archives and Museum in Western Pennsylvania; the Smithsonian Museum affiliated Heinz History Center in Pittsburgh; and the multicity A. W. Mellon Foundation-funded Crafting Democratic Futures Project, housed at the University of Michigan’s global Center for Social Solutions.  

Thanks to the dynamic and diligent leadership of our staff and officers, the UHA is maintaining and even beginning to expand its range of programs and services to members in the slowly emerging post-pandemic world.  In January 2023, we will provide an update on our progress over the calendar year 2022.  

None of this important work would be possible without the continuing and dedicated support of our members.  Your membership is simply indispensable to the success of this organization.  We not only hope that you will renew and continue to be part of the UHA community, but that you will also spread the word and help us recruit new members among your network of students, friends, and colleagues.  

You can renew your membership online by logging on to our website with your email and password at https://www.urbanhistory.org/. Once you are logged in, click on your name to access your member profile and renew your membership. Don't know your password? Reset it here: https://www.urbanhistory.org/Sys/ResetPasswordRequest 

Again, thanks for joining the UHA.  Should you have any questions about renewing your membership, or about the UHA in general, please don’t hesitate to contact our membership director, Amanda Boston, at amb610@pitt.edu.  

Sincerely,

Joe William Trotter, Jr., President and Andrew K. Sandoval-Strausz, President Elect

The History Department at UNC-Chapel Hill (history.unc.edu) invites applications for this distinguished professorship in global history, beginning 1 July 2023. Click here for more information. 

Review of applications will begin on 9 December 2022 and will continue until the position is filled.

The Graduate Group in City & Regional Planning at the University of Pennsylvania's Weitzman School of Design welcomes applications from those wishing to complete a PhD in City & Regional Planning with a focus on the history of the built environment.

The Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of Pennsylvania Weitzman School of Design recently launched the Initiative in the History of the Built Environment. The initiative organizes and amplifies existing work at Penn, promotes new scholarship, and supports doctoral students committed to studying history in the fields of city planning, preservation, and design.

Beginning with the 2022-23 admissions cycle, the Graduate Group in City & Regional Planning enthusiastically welcomes applications from those wishing to complete a PhD in City & Regional Planning with a focus on the history of the built environment. These Fellows in the History of the Built Environment will complete their coursework through targeted offerings in the Departments of City & Regional Planning and History, as well as a broad array of options across the Weitzman School and larger university. Specific course requirements include the regular doctoral colloquium sequence in City & Regional Planning, readings and research seminars in the History of the Built Environment, and courses in the methods and practice of history. These Fellows will receive five years of doctoral fellowship funding.

Applicants should follow the standard doctoral admissions process at Weitzman School of Design, but be sure to elaborate upon their particular interest in the urban or metropolitan history of the built environment in their research statement. In addition, the submitted writing sample should showcase historical research, ideally based upon primary sources.

To learn more about the doctoral program in City & Regional Planning at Penn, please see our website. For any questions, or to discuss this opportunity further, feel free to reach out to Eugenie Birch, Graduate Group Chair, or Francesca Russello Ammon, director of the Initiative in the History of the Built Environment.

Deadline: 12/15/2022