October 2009
Centre for Urban History
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Welcome to Urban History News - a monthly digest of news and information for the urban history community.
25 Years of the Centre for Urban History
The Centre for Urban History has reached its quarter century! Founded in 1985 it has gone from strength to strength as the principal UK centre for research and postgraduate training in Urban History. Currently we have four full-time historians and the promise of a new post in Chinese Urban History starting in January 2010. We also have over twenty postgraduate students, including two new ESRC students: Tom Hulme who is just starting a PhD on civic culture in interwar Manchester and Chicago; and Tessa Holubowicz who plans to research London charities in the eighteenth century.
During 2009/10 we plan to have a number of celebratory events. Firstly there is the Anniversary Seminar Series, starting on 16 October. The University of Leicester has generously supported a full-time PhD studentship on H.J. Dyos and the origins of Urban History in Britain, which Gary Davies will be starting in October 2009. Peter Jones, one of Dyos’ students, has written an 8,000-word appreciation of Jim Dyos and Leicester, including an introduction to the Dyos Archive, which we shall be publishing in early 2010. And we hope to organise a conference on ‘Urban History: Past, Present and Future’ in early July 2010. Details will be publicised in the Newsletter. We hope we will see you at one or more of these events during the Anniversary year.
Download Anniversary Seminar Series poster
Landscape and Townscape
A new AHRC collaborative training programme for PhD students is being launched by the Centre for Metropolitan History, the Centre for Urban History, the Centre for English Local History and other partners. It starts in November 2009 and attendance is free for any registered PhD student at a UK university. The training events will be relevant not just to historians but also to those working in related disciplines such as archaeologists, historians of architecture, and environmental historians.
2009-10 programme • Online registration
Transitions: Leicester and the New Urbanism – Two Case Studies
14 October 2009 • Leicester, UK
To what extent do current developments in Leicester constitute an aspect of the new urbanism, and what are the issues and dilemmas that face the city when growth is anticipated but sustainable growth is expected? What role can inner city re-developments play in squaring the circle? Nick Ebbs, CEO of Blueprint, and Julian Marsh of Marsh:Grochowski Architects will engage in some “horizon scanning” by debating the Waterside and St. George’s re-developments. Julian Marsh is the architect, and Nick Ebbs’ Blueprint is the developer, of the Digital Media Centre in the St. George’s area.
This is the first of a series of lectures at East Midlands Universities over the next two years that will address “city and country” in regional, national and international contexts. The University of Leicester’s contribution to the series continues on 24 March 2010, with Franco Bianchini (LSE), author of The Creative City, who will offer European comparisons with Leicester and other UK cities; and, on 05 May 2010, with Adrian Jones (emda), who will re-cast urban-rural relations in the context of the regional plan.
PhD Scholarship in Holocaust Studies
The Stanley Burton Centre for Holocaust Studies – the oldest Holocaust research centre in Britain – is offering a part- time, fees only PhD scholarship for four years. Applications are invited on all aspects of the Holocaust between 1933 and 1945, as well as on post- war memory of the Holocaust in relation to ongoing oral history research at the Centre.
The Stanley Burton Centre for Holocaust Studies was originally founded in 1990 and re- founded under its present name in 1993 under the auspices of the Burton Trusts. It is a non-profit teaching and research centre within the School of Historical Studies at the University of Leicester.
Recent Publications
Critical Toponymies:
The Contested Politics of Place Naming
Edited by Lawrence D. Berg and Jani Vuolteenaho (Ashgate, 2009)
306pp, ISBN 978-0-7546-7453-5
This book brings together recent works that conceptualize the hegemonic and contested practices of geographical naming. Illustrated with a global range of local and national studies, this ground-breaking volume illuminates the key role of naming in the colonial silencing of indigenous cultures, canonization of nationalistic ideals into nomenclature of cities and topographic maps, as well as the formation of more or less fluid forms of postcolonial and urban identities.
Public Speaking in the City
Debating and Shaping the Urban Experience
Janet Stewart (Palgrave MacMillan, 2009)
240pp, ISBN 9780230218093
Dazzled, perhaps, by the seductive charms of new communication technology and equating modernity exclusively with the new, most accounts of the modern city around 1900 remain silent on the role that public speaking played in shaping and framing the urban experience. Janet Stewart sets out to break this scholarly silence, using primary material, and case studies of acclaimed speakers such as Karl Kraus, Adolf Loos and Georg Simmel, to reveal connections between location, speech and the metropolis in two archetypal modern cities: Berlin and Vienna. Public Speaking in the City provides a compelling analysis of debates in and about the modern city, asking: Who was speaking and what were they talking about?; What form did public speaking take and where did it take place? This imaginative study, drawing upon architecture, history, literary studies, new media and sociology, concludes by reflecting on public speaking in the construction of the virtual city.
upcoming events...
07-09 October 2009
Modeling Spaces - Modifying Societies
Darmstadt, Germany
14 October 2009
Transitions: Leicester and the New Urbanism
Leicester, UK
16 October 2009
London, the Thames and Water
London, UK
12-13 November 2009
Pomp and Power
London, UK
14 November 2009
Midlands History Graduate Conference
Leicester, UK
20-21 November 2009
Complexities of 'Europe'
Cambridge, UK
21 November 2009
Women’s Life and Leisure
Stoke-on-Trent, UK
21 November 2009
Local Population Studies Society Autumn Conference
Cambridge, UK
27 November 2009
Networks, Architecture and City Space
Edinburgh, UK
approaching deadlines...
08 October
London, the Thames and Water (registration)
15 October
Knitting the web 
30 October
EAHN 1st International Meeting
31 October
Midlands History Prize (submissions)
12 November
Complexities of 'Europe' (registration)
30 November
2010 IPHS book prizes (call for nominations)
Cities and Nationalisms
CUH seminars...
CUH Seminar Series 2009-10:
2009-10 marks the 25th Anniversary Year at CUH.
other seminar series...
Historical Perspectives: Work in Progress Seminars
Glasgow, UK
Birkbeck Urban Studies Group
London, UK
IHR Sport & Leisure History
London, UK
exhibitions...
London's Burning
Online exhibition
Coalbrookdale 300
The Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust has events throughout 2009 to celebrate 300 years of the Industrial Revolution.
Deadline for next issue:
01 November 2009
Back copies of UHN remain on-line for 6 months. Earlier issues are available on request.
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