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

CFP: Sound, Language & the Making of Urban Space, University of Copenhagen, August 24th and 25th 2023.

This conference centers on the city, the metropolis, and on sound and language as central elements in the production of urban spaces and communities. The organizers particularly welcome contributions that explore ways in which sonic and linguistic approaches to urban communities, lifestyles and practices can enrich each other.

For more info click here, and for the full CFP click here. 

Paper proposals of up to 300 words plus short bio of up to 100 words to be sent to Jakob Ingemann Parby at jakobp@kk.dk before January 2nd 2023.

The Vernacular Architecture Forum (VAF) offers a number of awards and fellowships to promote and support vernacular architectural fieldwork and scholarship, as well as the dissemination of research. Prizes are awarded to recognize the contributions to the study of vernacular architecture. Information about applying and past winners can be found on the VAF website at: https://www.vafweb.org/awards.

The deadline, unless otherwise noted, is February 1, 2023.

The 2023 awards, prizes and fellowships will be presented at the 44th annual VAF conference in Plymouth, Massachusetts, May 17-20, 2023. 

The Vernacular Architecture Forum invites paper and poster proposals for its 44th Annual Conference, May 17 to May 20, 2023 in Plymouth, Massachusetts. The paper and poster sessions will be on Saturday, May 20. Papers may address topics relating to vernacular and everyday buildings, sites, or cultural landscapes worldwide and how people use these sites. We also welcome papers that explore new methodologies for researching vernacular architecture, or new pedagogies for engaging students in the analysis of everyday buildings and cultural landscapes. Full submission details HERE.

Deadline: December 19, 2022

The UHA is seeking a new co-chair for the program committee for 2023. The UHA program committee is dedicated to organizing various types of programming for UHA members with a heavy focus on virtual events. These events range from workshops and discussions such as Conversations on the Academic Job Market that took place on October 1st, to plenaries like “The State of the Global City: Problems and Possibilities”.  Note: This committee is separate from the conference programming committee. The events planned by this group are programs that happen outside of the conference. 

The co-chair position requires only a few hours a month of working with other committee members on event planning. If you're interested in the position, please contact the UHA executive director, Allyson Moralez, at amoralez@urbanhistory.org. 

We also would like to thank the two current co-chairs, Constanze Weise and Rachel Sturman for all of their amazing work and dedication! 

The Virginia Museum of History & Culture (VMHC) offers research fellowships of up to three weeks a year to promote the interpretation of Virginia and access to its collections. Thanks to a matching grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and generous gifts from individuals, fellowships carry a weekly stipend of $1,000 and $500 for local mileage. A week is defined as five days in the Mr. and Mrs. E. Claiborne Robins, Jr. Research Library, which is open 10am to 5pm, Monday through Saturday. For information about the research fellowships and how to apply for 2023, please visit the following page on the VMHC website: https://virginiahistory.org/research/research-resources/research-support

The deadline for applications is Friday, January 27, 2023. 

Are you preparing for an academic job search? Are you still early in your program and just want some info? Whether you've begun putting in applications or are just starting to think about future plans, join us for the UHA's Conversations on the Academic Job Market! This is a virtual event on October 1, 2022 at 2pm Eastern.

The event will feature Pedro A. Regalado, Joseph Watson and Constanze Weise, three scholars who have recently secured academic positions in history and architecture. They will share their experiences and offer tips for navigating the often difficult terrain of the academic job search. There will be ample time for conversation so bring any and all questions! Please register HERE for the Zoom link.