CfP: Urbanities of Belonging: Emigres from East Central Europe in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Cities

This session at the forthcoming international conference of the European Association for Urban History (EAUH), Barcelona, 2-5 2026, seeks to examine the ways in which migrants from East Central Europe found new homes in cities outside of the region between the Napoleonic Wars and the fall of the Berlin Wall. The geographical scope includes, but is not limited to, Europe. While the networks of political exiles, intellectuals and other groups and their, often transitory, lives abroad have been largely analysed on national and international scales, it is often overlooked that these networks were often inter- and intra-urban, as was the sense of belonging to their new and old homes. It was through such urban networks that new professional and private relationships were established, and new centres of migrant activities emerged. The session also seeks to pay attention to the maintenance of links to home cities and the ways such links facilitated and/or restricted migrants’ adaptation to the new urban environments. To what extent were nineteenth- and twentieth century cities linked through migrant networks of political, intellectual, academic, cultural and leisure activity? How regional and/or international were such groups in each city and who did they include apart from the migrants themselves? How urban was the migrants’ new sense of belonging and did emigration turn some of them into true urbanites? How did such processes intersect with status, nationality, gender and age?