Opportunities and Resorces
Call for Papers Urban History Association 2025 Conference in Los Angeles
UHA seeks proposals for papers, panels, roundtables, posters, workshops, retrospectives, lightning rounds, professional development opportunities, and many other kinds of sessions on any aspect of urban, suburban, and metropolitan history in the United States and globally. The goal is to convene a vibrant and generative conference that will showcase new research, consider the state of the field, engage with a broad public, and introduce new audiences and new communities to our area of study. UHA especially hopes to engage K-12 teachers, writers, activists, artists, and community leaders invested in Los Angeles and its region. The conference theme, “Metropolitan Majorities,” reflects trends across the world: the ongoing population growth of cities and their metropolitan areas; the rising ethnoracial and cultural diversity of urban and suburban places; the increasing concentration of economic activities; and the contentious politics that have accompanied these changes. This is the first meeting not just in Los Angeles, but also in California and on the West Coast. Holding this conference in a metropolitan region approaching twenty million people—one that is highly diverse, extremely wealthy and unequal, globally connected, and a preeminent center of cultural production— offers an ideal venue to think about these trends, their historical antecedents, and their present implications. The deadline for submissions is February 1, 2025. More information is available here.
Call for Papers about Los Angeles for the Urban History Association Metropole Blog
The Metropole has published pieces about Los Angeles numerous times, including recent contributions by David Helps, David Bruno, Max Felker-Kantor, Meredith Drake Reitan, and Becky Nicolaides, as well as older pieces exploring Chester Himes’s L.A., the city’s circus-like nature and the metropolis’s depiction through film noir. They have highlighted digital humanities projects such as Sunset Over Sunset exploring Ed Ruscha’s photography of the city and the mapping of Bunker Hill as part of an annual Digital Summer School project. Yet they have never featured it as a theme month. The Metropole invites pitches from historians and other writers regarding the city’s history (they will consider pieces that focus on L.A. suburbs as well), using these examples as a guide to what and how it’s been covered. Pitches are due by March 10, 2025, and drafts are due by April 10, 2025. Guidelines can be seen here. Final submissions should be between 1,200 and 3,000 words. Authors of selected essays will be compensated $200 for their post. Please send pitches to themetropole@urbanhistory.org