New Approaches to Urban History

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Brief Description

Urban history is one of the largest and quickest growing subfields in the historical discipline. It plays a critical role in the historiography of modern Eastern Europe and Eurasia, as it offers a way to understand the massive changes wrought by rapid urbanization, from the late nineteenth century to the present. The field is well defined, but also quite diffuse, uniting scholars whose methodologically diverse work crosses disciplinary boundaries. We bring this plurality of approaches together in conversation about methodologies employed by urban historians working across geographies, chronologies, and scales. Antoni Porayski-Pomsta discusses the negotiation of urban borders in late imperial Russian Poland with a particular focus on debates surrounding what contemporaries conceived of as the urban, the rural and the suburban. Jana Hunter discusses how urban temporalities structured everyday life and governance in fin-de-siècle Prague, exploring how the experience of time shaped civic identity and the negotiation of modernity in a rapidly changing city. Deirdre Ruscitti Harshman looks at how the intense problems surrounding urban housing in the revolutionary era resulted in a flurry of ideas regarding urban management. She explores what happens when we think about those debates as a conversation. Katherine Zubovich examines Soviet cities and their dependence on natural resource extraction, focusing on postwar urban rebuilding after 1945. Michael Brinley discusses the importance of regionalization and municipalization of governance in the USSR beginning with Khrushchev’s Sovnarkhoz reforms to think about the comparative value of regime politics in the city and the populist ends of industrial policy.

Sub Unit

• Urban Studies, Built Environments

Chair

• Deirdre Ruscitti Harshman, Christopher Newport U

Roundtable Speakers

• Michael Alexander Brinley, Princeton U

• Deirdre Ruscitti Harshman, Christopher Newport U

• Jana Katerina Hunter, Stanford U

• Antoni Porayski-Pomsta, U College Dublin (Ireland)

• Katherine Zubovich, SUNY Buffalo