Dr Emma Hart wins AHRC International Research Network Grant

The School of History is delighted to announce that Dr Emma Hart has won an AHRC International Research Network Grant for a project on ‘The Global City: Past and Present’.

The project will consider the rise of the contemporary global city in its historical context. The global city – which both enables and embodies today’s inter-connected and globalized world – has become the focus of significant research and policy-making. However, the historical processes that produced many of the foundational practices of the global city have hitherto been overlooked. Whilst the immediate historical context of such spaces is commonly addressed, what is missing is a solid understanding of the historical precedents of the global city. This omission has grown out of a lack of interaction between global studies scholars and urban historians, as well as among urban historians working in different regions, who rarely have the opportunity to share their research or collaborate with one another. ‘The Global City: Past and Present’ will seek to address this lack by creating new opportunities for international and interdisciplinary networking.

New York – the modern global city. Photo by Daniel Scwen (By Daniel Schwen (CC-BY-SA-2.5) via Wikimedia Commons.

The project will be centred around four workshops, each discussing different aspects of ‘The Global City’. These events will bring together an international network of scholars to explore the connections between today’s global cities and their early modern colonial precursors from three angles; space, political economy and populations. The workshops will include geographers, urban planners, anthropologists, art historians, sociologists, and policy makers and will take place in St Andrews, Rio de Janeiro, and London at the Centre for Metropolitan History (part of the Institute of Historical Research).  There will also be a public lecture at the IHR. It is hoped that these events will both serve to improve our understanding of the global city as a historical phenomenon and provide the means by which this knowledge can be exchanged with academics and policy-makers at work in today’s global cities.

The AHRC Research Network Scheme is designed to promote wide-ranging discussion and intellectual exchange upon specific thematic areas, issues, or questions. As such, the ‘Global City’ project spans multiple continents and encompasses multiple research groups; Dr Hart’s Co-Investigator, Professor Mariana Dantas (a historian of colonial Brazil) is based at  Ohio University, and the St Andrews Centre for Transnational History will be involved with the project. Dr Jaap Jacobs, an Honorary Lecturer at the St Andrews School of History, was also a founding member of the network.