Dr. Mariana Dantas, Associate Professor of History, and her colleague Emma Hart of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland have won an International Research Network Grant from the United Kingdom’s Arts and Humanities Research Council.
Dr. Mariana Dantas
The grant will be used in support of the “Global City: Past and Present” project, which is a network of urban scholars and professionals—such as public historians and urban planners—who explore the global city in a historical perspective through scholarly workshops, intellectual exchanges, and scholarly publications.
The Global Cities AHRC International Research Network has two goals. Firstly, it seeks to promote interdisciplinary dialogue between scholars working on the history of those cities that anchored Europe’s early modern empires. The network will bring together scholars investigating the city in an imperial setting between 1500 and 1850 to discuss urban life in a comparative framework.
Central to discussion will be the network’s second goal, which is to better understand the relationship of these cities to the modern “global city” and the associated process of globalization. While the idea of the “global” or “world” city is well-established among social scientists, urban historians have not customarily considered such labels to describe their subject. At the same time, the long history of such cities is not often acknowledged by scholars and policy-makers at work in a contemporary urban context. This network will seek to improve understanding of the global city by promoting discussion of the phenomenon across both time and space.
Dantas is a member of the Global City: Past and Present Research Network’s steering committee. She is currently organizing the network’s second workshop, planned for November 2015, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The first planned workshop will be held at the University of St. Andrews on May 14-15, 2015. A call for papers and other information about the Research Network is available at globalcities.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk/.
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