Date:
February: The City and Film - “Film’s undoubtedly apocryphal origin myth situates its beginnings in an 1895 Parisian basement where the brothers Lumiere projected a series of moving images on a blank screen, which incited equal amounts of terror and excitement among their bewildered audience members.” – “The Visual City: Photography, Film, and Postcards,” The Metropole, February 6, 2020.
Born in cities and of them, cinema and the metropolis are intertwined. The Metropole welcomes pitches for its February theme month on the city and film: how specific cities are depicted in film, how cities try to incentivize film-making, films promoting urban development, the reshaping of imaginaries around cities and other means of exploring the metropolis through film.
Deadline for pitches is December 15, deadline for an initial draft will be January 10 (though we have some limited flexibility on this latter date). 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.
March: The City Aquatic – Chicago reversed the flow of its river in order to improve sanitation and limit disease, flood control in 20th century Manila drove political discourse, and Mexico City’s location on a lake has long bedeviled it, as Matthew Vitz wrote for The Metropole in 2017 “a city with simultaneously too much water and too little, flooded while desiccated.” The Metropole welcomes pitches for its March theme month on cities and water, The City Aquatic: cities that stretch across archipelagos, cities dealing with rising sea levels/flooding, cities and drinking water, cities where the water is a major source of tourism and other related aspects of this metropolitan relationship.
Deadline for pitches is January 15, 2025, deadline for an initial draft will be February 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.
May: Los Angeles - With the Urban History Association's 2025 conference taking place at the Biltmore Hotel in Downtown Los Angeles (aka DTLA) from October 9-12, 2025 (see here for more details, and of course, come to the conference!), we want to feature the City of Angels.
We've written and 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. We've 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 our annual Digital Summer School project. Yet we've never featured it as a theme month. We invite pitches from historians and other writers regarding the city's history (we 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 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.
