As the new year approaches, so does the time of year when we have a slight, yet very exciting, change in leadership at the Urban History Association. This year, we welcome a new president and president-elect, as well as seven new board members, who will replace our outgoing president and the seven board members whose terms expire at the end of this year. Please read on to learn more about the newest members of the UHA’s leadership team. 

First, please join us in welcoming Joe Trotter as he moves into his new position as UHA President from his previous position as President-Elect.

Joe William Trotter Jr.

Giant Eagle University Professor of History and Social Justice, Carnegie Mellon University 

Joe William Trotter, Jr. is the Giant Eagle University Professor of History and Social Justice and  past History Department Chair at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He is  also the Director and Founder of Carnegie Mellon’s Center for Africanamerican Urban Studies  and the Economy (CAUSE) and a member of  the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His latest publication is Workers on Arrival: Black  Labor in the Making of America (University of California Press, 2019). Professor Trotter  received his BA degree from Carthage College in Kenosha, Wisconsin and his M.A. and Ph.D.  degrees from the University of Minnesota. He is currently working on a study of African  American urban life since the Atlantic slave trade. To learn more about Joe’s work, click here. Joe’s term as president will begin January 1, 2022 and end December 31, 2023.  

Replacing Joe as President-Elect is Andrew Sandoval-Strausz. 

Andrew Sandoval-Strausz 

Associate Professor of History, Pennsylvania State University

Professor Sandoval-Strausz is an accomplished scholar in the fields of urban, ethnic, and Latinx history. His first book, Hotel. An American History (2007), offered a new lens on the history of American cities, and especially their ability to accommodate travelers and migrants of all sorts. His second, Barrio America (2019) reinterpreted the era of postwar urban decline as one in which, through migration, small-business enterprise, and civic activism, Latinos ‘saved’ the American city. Although his research has focussed on the United States, he has been a leading proponent and exponent of the ‘transnational turn’ in urban history, within and beyond North America. Notably, the collection Making Cities Global (2018), co-edited with Nancy Kwak, makes the case that cities have been vital to the long historical process of globalization and that they should figure prominently in the field of transnational studies. To learn more about Andrew’s work, click here. Andrew’s term as president-elect will begin January 1, 2022 and end on December 31, 2023. He will take office as president January 1, 2024. 

Finishing her term at the end of December as the UHA President is Heather Ann Thompson, Professor of History and Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan. Heather will remain part of the executive team as Immediate Past President. 

We will also welcome seven new board members, who will replace seven members of the UHA Board of Directors finishing their three-year terms at the end of December. This coming December 31 - the final day of 2021 - the seven who will finish their board terms are: 

• Llana Barber, SUNY Old Westbury

• Dorothee Brantz, Technische Universität Berlin

• Emily Callaci, University of Wisconsin, Madison

• Janet Y. Chen, Princeton University

• Diana J. Montaño, Washington University of St. Louis

• Ato Quayson, Stanford University

• James Wolfinger, Illinois State University

We want to sincerely thank Heather and every one of our outgoing board members for their commitment and service, especially in navigating the challenges posed by the global pandemic over the last year and nine months. 

Our newest board members, taking office on January 1, 2022 and joining our continuing board members, are:

Katherine Zubovich, University at Buffalo, SUNY.

Katherine Zubovich is an Assistant Professor of History at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. Her work focuses on the history of Russia and the former Soviet Union. Her first book, Moscow Monumental: Soviet Skyscrapers and Urban Life in Stalin’s Capital, was published in 2020 by Princeton University Press. The book explores the broader social, cultural, and political effects of monumental construction undertaken in the Soviet capital in the 1930s-1950s.

Matthieu Caron, University of Toronto

Matthieu Caron is a doctoral candidate in history at the University of Toronto. Drawing on the recent ideas in the history of urban governance, sexuality, and labour, his research is examining how the transformation of Montreal during the mid- to late-twentieth century was accomplished by controlling the night. Before moving to the University of Toronto he obtained degrees from McGill University and the Université de Montréal. Since 2017 he has been the Urban History Association’s bibliographer for Canada. He has published in the Urban History Review as well as in Labour/Le Travail and BC Studies.

Pedro A. Regalado, Harvard University, Stanford University

Pedro A. Regalado is a Junior Fellow of the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. Beginning July 2022, he will be Assistant Professor of History at Stanford University. Regalado researches the history of race, immigration, planning, and capitalism in urban America. His book project, Latinx Gotham: Work and the Modern City, examines the history of New York City’s Latinx residents and their efforts to transform city space, politics, and economy. Regalado has been awarded the Michael Katz Award for Best Dissertation from the Urban History Association. He was also a finalist for the Ralph Henry Gabriel Prize for Best Dissertation from the American Studies Association. Regalado’s work has been featured in the Journal of Urban History, Boston Review, The Washington Post, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. Born in the Dominican Republic, he was raised in New York City’s Washington Heights.

Tikia K. Hamilton, Loyola University Chicago

Dr. Tikia K. Hamilton is an assistant professor at Loyola University Chicago. She holds a Ph.D. in History from Princeton University (2015) and a masters in African American Studies from Columbia University (2004). She attended Dartmouth College for her undergraduate work (1998), where she majored in History under a Mellon Fellowship. She has lengthy experience teaching at the secondary and undergraduate levels and working as an educational consultant. She is currently completing revisions for her first book, entitled Making a Model System: The Battle for Educational Equality in the Nation’s Capital before Brown, which chronicles the various campaigns African Americans waged to obtain equal resources under segregation in the federal city. Her research interests include: African American History, 20th Century U.S. History, African American/U.S. Women’s History, the History of Education, and Urban History. Dr. Hamilton is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Spencer Fellowship from National Academy of Education.  She is a native of Chicago and has travelled solo to over two dozen countries in Central and South America, Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean.

J.T Way, Georgia State University

J. T. Way lived in Guatemala for ten years prior to joining GSU, working as a University of Arizona faculty affiliate and ultimately directing CIRMA, the Centro de Investigaciones Regionales de Mesoamérica, a social science archive/research center. His 2021 book, Agrotropolis: Youth, Street, and Nation in the New Urban Guatemala explores the physical and cultural urbanization of space in quintessentially “rural” towns from 1983 to 2012. Centering working-class Maya and mestizo hometowns in planetary urban history, it shows how culturally assertive youth coming of age on the globally inflected city street used popular culture as one means of creating a new national imaginary that rejects Guatemala’s racially coded system of castes. This work follows The Mayan in the Mall: Globalization, Development, and the Making of Modern Guatemala, which maps the history of Guatemala City’s poor neighborhoods from 1920 to the new millennium against national and international development projects, arguing that, far from being chronically underdeveloped, this nation of contrasts—where shantytowns and humble municipal and street markets abut luxurious malls and wealthy neighborhoods—is the embodiment of globalized capitalism and a harbinger of globalization’s future. Way now researches urbanization and violence and serves as an expert witness in asylum hearings.

Lilia Fernandez, Rutgers University

Dr. Lilia Fernandez is an Associate Professor of Latino and Caribbean Studies and History at Rutgers University. Her scholarship, most notably her monograph Brown in the Windy City but also in numerous articles and other pieces of work, has offered critical insights for urban historians on Latinx immigration to and experiences within American cities, Chicago in particular. She also serves as the co-editor on the University of Chicago’s “Historical Studies in Urban America” series, and on the board of the Journal of Urban History.

The Society for American City and Regional Planning History released the call for papers for its 19th National Conference on Planning History, which is scheduled to take place both online and in person in Harlem, NYC in October 2022. The CFP submission deadline is February 15, 2022. 

For more information and for the full CFP, please visit sacrph.org/conference-2022. 

The UHA Board of Directors is thrilled to announce the winners of our 2021 award contests. This year, we're sharing the news through a special online presentation. Here, we reveal and share more information about our 2021 award winners, as well as revisit our winners from 2020 and 2019. To access the presentation, click here.

For the best viewing experience, we recommend opening the presentation link using a desktop browser. Once you open the link, click "Get Started" and then scroll down the page. Questions? Email us at info@urbanhistory.org.

New Book Series: Higher Education and the City

A new book series titled Higher Education and the City (Johns Hopkins University Press), is seeking scholarly, book length manuscript submissions, that examine higher education ecosystems from the lens of urban change with an emphasis on the past and future of cities and metropolitan areas.  Relevant cultural and social issues, the pursuit of innovation, and the relationship between higher education, economic and community development, will contribute to ongoing dialogues.  For information on contributing to the series, contact Costas Spirou, Book Series Editor at costas.spirou@gcsu.edu.  Please share the opportunity with any colleagues that might be interested in this initiative.

Call for participants: LaDale Winling, Associate Professor of History at Virginia Tech, will run his online urban history writing workshop again this fall. Once a month, on Fridays from 12 PM to 1 PM Eastern, the workshop reads and comments on a pre-circulated work of urban history in progress. Email or message him on Twitter to submit a piece for consideration. Submissions deadline: rolling.

The Urban History Association is thrilled to share next steps for Urban History Month– a month-long series of events organized and hosted by urban historians interested in exploring topics of relevance to urban history, broadly defined. Urban History Month events will take place in October 2021.

To learn more about how you can participate, click here.

The Living New Deal, a nonprofit in Berkeley, California, has established an annual New Deal Book Award to recognize and encourage non-fiction works about U.S. history in the New Deal era (1933-1942).

To be eligible, books for the 2021 New Deal Book Award must have a publication date of 2021 and be nominated by a publisher or author colleague. The New Deal Book Award and finalists will be chosen by a distinguished review committee.

The deadline for submissions is November 15, 2021. The winner will be announced in Spring 2022 and receive a cash prize of $1,000, to be awarded during the Roosevelt Reading Festival at the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum at Hyde Park, New York, in summer 2022, to which the five finalists will be invited.

Submission guidelines and a brief nomination form can be found at the Living New Deal website.

The Living New Deal began in 2007 as a project of the Geography Department at University of California, Berkeley, mapping the locations of New Deal projects—artworks, libraries, post offices, schools, community centers, airports, roads, bridges, parks and more. In addition to resources about New Deal policies, profiles and achievements, the website features an interactive map and descriptions of more than 17,000 New Deal sites crowdsourced by volunteers who submit their discoveries using the Living New Deal website and a mobile phone app. The website drew more than a million visits last year.

For more information, contact: Kurt Feichtmeir, Director of Development, The Living New Deal, kurt@livingnewdeal.org, (707) 494-8001.

We invite the submission of unpublished and original papers for a special themed issue of the journal Flux that examines the history of non-networked technologies, their role in the supply of urban services (e.g., energy, street lighting water supply, wastewater treatment, food supply…) and their relations to networked systems between the 18^th and the 20^th centuries.  Papers could explore the role of non-networked technologies and their relation to the emergence of networked technologies in cities in Europe and North America where networked technologies became dominant during that period.

Privileging a reflective historical approach, contributions will seek to reconstitute the course of diffusion or retraction of off-grid technologies, and their interactions with the development of large technical systems, which is often presented as a coherent and uniform, even hegemonic, process. They may emphasize the inertia (momentum) and the social, technological and/or territorial path dependencies at play; the forms of competition or complementarity and sometimes even symbiosis between networked and off-grid technologies the sociotechnical and urban imaginaries underpinning the observed dynamics; etc.

More generally, this themed issue will seek to add historical depth and a long-term perspective to the work of urban scholars (geographers, planners, architects, sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists…) who have sought to explore, conceptualize and at times anticipate the variegated figures and shapes of the post-networked city. Those researchers have questioned the dominant model –  the modern integrated paradigm of the networked city – by confronting the ideal figure of the homogenous and homogenizing infrastructure to the diverse models of organization, management and servicing of urban spaces that accompany, often facilitate and sometimes indurate socio-spatially differentiated forms of urban development. 

What were the historical conditions, modalities and spaces of deployment of off-grid devices? Did these technologies generate or facilitate forms of competition between spaces within given urban areas? Did they help maintain pre-existing socio-spatial differentiations? Did organizations in charge of networked and off-grid technologies systematically compete or did they develop links – industrial, commercial, technological, financial, territorial or otherwise? And from a more future-oriented perspective: can Western and other long-industrialized societies emancipate from a historical heritage characterized by the sociotechnical imaginaryof the network, and if so, how? Can they at least deal with its material, social and political ubiquity?

Flux therefore welcomes submissions to an “alternative history” of urban services (the essential services of everyday life) through the study of the trajectory of off-grid technologies and devices. As with the recent historiography challenging the notion of linear energy transitions, contributions may help question the validity of periodizations based on successive dominant sociotechnical systems and underestimating the importance of “alternative” technologies for the societies concerned.

Deadline for submission of proposals: October 1, 2021

Proposals may be submitted in English or French.

Proposals should be sent to:

Professors Benjamin Bothereau, Olivier Coutard, and  Joel Tarr

bbothere@gmail.com

coutard@enpc.fr

jt03@andrew.cmu.edu

The Urban History Association board voted last week to sign on to the "Joint Statement on Legislative Efforts to Restrict Education about Racism in American History." More than 80 organizations have signed on to the statement, which was authored by the American Association of University Professors, the American Historical Association, the Association of American Colleges & Universities, and PEN America.

For the full statement, click here. 

For coverage of the statement in The New York Times, click here. 

With each new year comes a slight change in leadership at the Urban History Association. Every December 31, seven members of the UHA Board of Directors finish their three-year terms, replaced the next day by a new cohort of seven. This past December 31-- the final day of 2020-- the seven who finished their board terms were: 

• Jessica Elfenbein, University of South Carolina
• Douglas J. Flowe, Washington University in St. Louis
• Rocio Gomez, Virginia Commonwealth University
• Walter Greason, Monmouth University
• Rachel Jean-Baptiste, University of California, Davis
• Tracy Neumann, Wayne State University
• Rachel Sturman, Bowdoin University

We extend our heartfelt thanks to our outgoing board members for their commitment and service. 

Replacing them, and joining our continuing board members, are: 

• Luther Adams, University of Washington, Tacoma
  Luther Adams is a student and teacher of history and culture. His work emphasizes Black life. He is Associate Professor of Ethnic, Gender and Labor Studies at the University of Washington in Tacoma. He is grateful for the support provided by fellowships at the Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities; the New York Public Library; the Center for African American Urban Studies and the Economy at Carnegie Mellon University; the NEH Summer Institute on African American Civil Rights at Harvard University; and the Woodford R. Porter, Sr. Scholarship. He publishes research on police brutality, African American migration and religion, urban history, and Black history in Kentucky. He is author of Way Up North in Louisville: African American Migration in the Urban South, 1930-1970. Adams is writing NO JUSTICE NO PEACE, a history of African Americans’ struggles with and against police brutality.

• René Luis Alvarez, Arrupe College of Loyola University Chicago
  René Luís Alvarez is a Clinical Assistant Professor of History at the Arrupe College of Loyola University Chicago where he teaches survey courses in United States history, Western Civilization, and an Introduction to Mexican American History course beginning in Summer 2021. Dr. Alvarez earned his PhD in American history and a graduate certificate in Urban Studies from the University of Pennsylvania in 2008. His primary research examines the educational history of Mexican-origin populations in Chicago during the twentieth century. Dr. Alvarez is a former Spencer Foundation doctoral fellow and has received grants from the Illinois State Historical Society and the Sargent Shriver Institute at the University of Chicago. The National Center for Institutional Diversity at the University of Michigan has recognized Dr. Alvarez as an Exemplary Diversity Scholar. Dr. Alvarez’ past service to the UHA includes serving on the Local Arrangements Committee for the Eighth Biennial Meeting in Chicago in 2016; when he also led a tour of the Pilsen neighborhood, highlighting the Mexican heritage of the area. Dr. Alvarez also was the featured Member of the Week in The Metropole UHA blog in January 2018, and served on the Best Article Awards committee in 2012. Having been a proud member of the UHA for many years, Dr. Alvarez looks forward to contributing to the organization’s future as a Board member.

• Lisa Krissoff Boehm, Bridgewater State University
  Lisa Krissoff Boehm is the Dean of the College of Graduate Studies and Professor of History at Bridgewater State University in Massachusetts. Previously she served as Founding Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences and Professor of History at Manhattanville College in Purchase, New York, Interim Dean, School of Humanities and Social Sciences and Professor of Urban Studies at Worcester State University, Senior Associate Dean of Academic Affairs and Professor of History at Emmanuel College and Visiting Assistant Professor of History at the University of Michigan-Dearborn. She is the author of Making a Way out of No Way: African American Women and the Second Great Migration (Mississippi, 2009), Popular Culture and the Enduring Myth of Chicago (Routledge, 2004), The American Urban Reader: History and Theory (with Steven Corey, Routledge, 2010), and America's Urban History (with Steven Corey, Routledge, 2014 and 2020). She is at work on a historical novel and a book about gender and the city. Boehm served several times on the UHA dissertation committee and several of the planning committees for the bi-annual conference.

• Julius L. Jones, Chicago History Museum
  Julius L. Jones is a historian, curator, lecturer, and digital media producer committed to telling new stories about the past in compelling and innovative ways. Julius is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History at The University of Chicago, where his scholarly interests include twentieth-century United States Social, Cultural and Urban History. His dissertation, “‘Ain’t Gonna Tarry Here Long’: African American Aspiration in Chicago, 1933–1968,” explores the idea that African Americans are the products of a culture that limits them on the basis of their race while simultaneously propagating notions of limitless possibilities and opportunities. This dichotomy creates liminal spaces between possibility and limitation, or sites of aspiration, where African Americans have sought not only to break down racial barriers to achieve success, but to assert their right to define success for themselves. Currently, Julius serves as an Assistant Curator at the Chicago History Museum, where he develops exhibition content, conducts research, seeks new acquisitions, and speaks on a variety of Chicago history topics. He also serves as a lecturer in the Department of Black Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago and in the Master of Arts Program in the Social Sciences at The University of Chicago. He earned his MA in History at the University of Chicago in 2018 and an AB in History and African and African American Studies from Duke University in 2012.

• Lisa Keller, Purchase College, SUNY
  Lisa Keller is Professor of History at Purchase College, State University of New York. From 2008 to 2019 she served as the Associate Director of the Herbert H. Lehman Center for American History at Columbia University, where she is Chair of the Seminar on the City, University Seminars. She is Executive Editor of the Encyclopedia of New York City(2nd edition, December. 2010). She specializes in trans-Atlantic (the U.S. and Great Britain) urban/suburban history and women’s history. She has written books, articles, and op-eds on New York, London, and Westchester County. Her book Triumph of Order: Democracy and Public Space in New York and London received the Urban History Association’s Kenneth Jackson Award for Best Book in North American Urban History in 2009 and the Herbert H. Lehman Award for Distinguished Scholarship from the New York Academy of History in 2012. She is the recipient of the State University of New York Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Faculty Service (2005), a Gilder-Lehrman Fellowship in American Civilization (2000), and an NEH grant for local history (1996). She has a BA from Vassar College and a PhD from Cambridge University. 

• Johana Londoño, University at Albany, SUNY
  Johana Londoño is an assistant professor in the Department of Latin American, Caribbean, and US Latina/o Studies at the University at Albany, SUNY. She received a PhD from the American Studies Program at NYU and a BFA from the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. Her research interests include Latinx studies, comparative ethnic studies, race, urban studies, aesthetics, and urban design. Her publications appear in the edited volumes Latino Urbanism: The Politics of Planning, Policy and Redevelopment (2012) and Race and Retail: Consumption across the Color Line (2015) and in journals including American Quarterly, Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power,Latino Studies, and Social Semiotics. She has received fellowships from the Ford Foundation, Princeton-Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities, Northeast Consortium for Faculty Diversity at Northeastern University, and NYU, among other institutions. Londoño is most recently the author of Abstract Barrios: The Crises of Latinx Visibility in Cities (Duke University Press, 2020). 

• Kyle Roberts, American Philosophical Society Library and Museum
  Kyle Roberts is the Associate Director of Library and Museum Programming of the American Philosophical Society Library and Museum in Philadelphia. Dr. Roberts helps to integrate the programming departments of the Library, which manage scholarly programming and digital outreach, with those of the Museum, which oversee education programming and adult learning. Prior to coming to the APS Library and Museum, Dr. Roberts was an Associate Professor of Public History and New Media and Director of the Center for Textual Studies and Digital Humanities at Loyola University Chicago. A scholar of urban religion, cities, and print, he is the author of Evangelical Gotham: Religion and the Making of New York City, 1783-1860 (Chicago, 2016) and the co-editor, with Stephen Schloesser, of Crossings and Dwellings: Restored Jesuits, Women Religious, American Experience 1814-2014 (Brill, 2017) and, with Mark Towsey, of Before the Public Library: Reading, Community, and Identity in the Atlantic World, 1650-1850 (Brill, 2017). Dr. Roberts is an accomplished public historian and digital humanist who is the Director of the Jesuit Libraries Provenance Project. He is currently working on a history of urban Catholicism told through the lens of a library collected in the 1870s by the Jesuits at St. Ignatius College (precursor to modern-day Loyola University Chicago).

Please join us in welcoming our newest board members. Their terms run from January 1, 2021 to December 31, 2023. For a full list of the UHA's officers and directors, click here.