Job Offer from September 22, 2025
EAUH 2026 Conference
City Networks in Europe and Beyond
Barcelona, September 2-5, 2026
This session aims to explore how cities were represented in Early Modern times through cartographic, artistic, literary, and historiographical forms, and how these representations were often embedded in the network of traveling intellectuals. By situating these knotted dynamics within a global framework, we aim to trace the motion of people, ideas, and urban imaginaries across the Mediterranean and beyond, also looking at transatlantic and transpacific circulations.
This session seeks to explore how urban spaces were represented, conceptualized, and experienced between the 15th and 18th centuries. We are particularly interested in examining the relationship between visual and textual representations of the city —including texts, images, cartographies, and urban descriptions— and the movement of people, ideas, and knowledge across the Mediterranean and beyond. Thereby, our aim is to investigate how both physical and conceptual motion shaped the ways in which cities were understood, described, and imagined in the early modern times.
We use motion not only to refer to the displacement of individuals across different territories, but also as a conceptual lens to examine the circulation of urban knowledge and the formation of relational representation of the urban landscape. In doing so, we think that cities were shaped by learned transregional itineraries through textual and visual productions. The movements of erudites, artists, diplomats, and merchants forged circuits in which the city became both a lived space and a representational object, often mapped, narrated, and ordered.
We are particularly interested in how urban descriptions–artistic, literary, historiographical, and cartographic–can be seen as tools for shaping both social imaginaries and political order. These representations often reveal how early modern cities were understood as expressions of social structure and political identity. By placing emphasis on connected histories, we seek to trace the epistemic, visual, and textual threads that linked cities across frontiers.
This panel aims to bring together contributions that explore how cities were imagined as connected spaces, how antiquity was invoked in public urban contexts, and how writing about the past functioned as a political discourse in civic life. In doing so, this session not only foregrounds early modern urban experiences and representations but also brings up a broader geographical frame to include transimperial, transatlantic, and transmediterranean circuits of knowledge and information.
We welcome both case studies and comparative proposals revolving around the following topics:
- Cities as connected spaces. Connected histories of learned communities and intellectual networks across political and cultural frontiers.
- The city and the world. Thinking the global not as a backdrop, but as a condition of early modern urban culture by examining individuals who lived between different urban frameworks to trace transregional narratives.
- Cities along waterbodies. The relationship between the connectivity of specific cities marked by their natural state close to a body of water.
- History in motion. Urban historiography and memory as political discourse in a comparative perspective.
- Imagined cartographies. Tracing symbolic organization of urban spaces through texts, maps and vistas.
- Urban cartouches. Exploring the dialogue between text and image in the city representations centered in the historical narratives.
Deadline: October 22, 2025 (Abstract length: up to 450 words)
Submit through: www.eauhbarcelona2026.eu
Contact: idamauro@ub.edu, fernando.loffredo@stonybrook.edu
Organizers:
Fernando Loffredo (SUNY Stony Brook – Max Planck Partner Group “Empires, Environments, Objects”)
Ida Mauro (Universitat de Barcelona)
Tanja Michalsky (Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History)