https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/B/Ben-Katchor3 Affordable paperback @ $20.00!! The first book dedicated to exploring the comics of Ben Katchor Description The recipient of a 2000 MacArthur fellowship, Ben Katchor (b. 1951) is a beloved comics artist with a career spanning four decades. Published in indie weeklies across the United States, his comics are known for evoking the sensorium of the modern metropolis. As part of the Biographix series edited by Frederick Luis Aldama, Ben Katchor offers scholars and fans a thorough overview of the artist’s career from 1988 to 2020. In so ..read more

CfP:  The Journal of Urban Cultural Studies invites submission of abstracts to be included in the interactive short paper session at the Association of American Geographers Conference to be held March 23-27, 2023, in Denver. The Urban Cultural Studies session features innovative research that connects urban geography and cultural studies in order to better understand the culture(s) of cities. The interactive short papers will explore aspects of urban studies through humanities texts such as literature, film, graphic novels, music, art, graffiti, video games, and other textual forms of cul ..read more

Reviews “Barcelona, City of Comics is a must-read for anyone in comics studies and in urban cultural studies—and for any reader curious about comics, Spain, cities, and architecture. Fascinating, elegantly structured, and compellingly written, Fraser deftly weaves together urban history, politics, and close attention to aesthetics, offering readers snapshots of dynamic artists who exploded the myth of unification and homogeneity after the Francoist dictatorship. A lively, significant contribution that will resonate across fields.” — Hillary Chute, author of Why Comics? From Undergro ..read more

A crowd of people at Chinatown Gate plaza moves around a small, red house made of fabric. There are videos projected onto the walls of the house. (2021 Sean Foulkes) In Boston, a freeway runs through Chinatown. Actually two do: I-90, the barreling East – West interstate that stretches from Boston in Massachusetts to Seattle in Washington State, and I-93, an interstate that runs North from Massachusetts through New Hampshire, and Vermont. Freeways running through Chinatown – and other nonwhite neighborhoods – is not rare, but entirely common in the United States. In Seattle, Los Angeles, C ..read more

Cities Under Stress: Urban Discourses of Crisis, Resilience, Resistance, and Renewal The Third International Conference of the Association for Literary Urban Studies (ALUS) University of California, Santa Barbara on 17–19 February 2022. Deadline for submissions: September 1Conference website: https://blogs.helsinki.fi/hlc-n/2022-conference/ Keynote speakers: Caroline Levine (Department of English, Cornell U) Sara Meerow (School of Geographical Science & Urban Planning, Arizona State U) We invite proposals for contributions at the third international conference of ALUS, scheduled ..read more

Hilltop, Tacoma, the site of a new urban CLT by Forterra. Photo by Jon Armstrong. In 1969, New Communities was established in the state of Georgia as the largest single tract of Black-owned farmland in the United States. This was achieved through the community land trust (CLT), boldly put forth by Charles Sherrod, a black pecan farmer, and other civil-rights activists after a fact-finding trip to Israel in 1968 sponsored by the National Sharecropper’s Fund. Particularly drawn to moshavim shitufim, a system of land ownership in which large, cooperatively owned farm fields were surrounded by sma ..read more

There is a stretch of I-90 in Eastern Washington that could make you forget the pandemic. From Cle Elum to Spokane the highway unfolds like a hallucination, two hundred miles of lonesome sky. You feel lopsided thinking of all the country eastward. You feel stranded as you move. We are all hunkered down somewhere, and that somewhere has become a burden. Fleeing Seattle for the first time in August 2020, I felt crazed by the escape. Destination: Libby, Montana, and I wondered what destination meant anymore. If our sense of place is tied to the possibilities on the ground – to move freely, to be ..read more

I am excited to introduce two new writers for the Journal of Urban Cultural Studies Blog: Jonathan Banfill and Danielle McClune! Jonathan Banfill is Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Champlain College in Burlington, Vermont. He holds a PhD in Comparative and International Education from UCLA and his research focuses on interdisciplinary and experiential pedagogies for engaging with global cities. From 2016-2019 he was a teacher and researcher at the UCLA Urban Humanities Initiative, helping to lead study programs that compared contemporary urban life in Los Angeles, Toky ..read more

The Georgetown ‘Exorcist Steps’ It’s October, which means only two things: Halloween, and horror films. Within the genre of horror, cities play an active role as settings, characters, and themes. In William Friedkin’s ‘The Exorcist’ (1973), Georgetown, Washington (DC) is the setting of a demonic possession. But the city takes on a greater role, as Friedkin’s demon pulses through its Catholic infrastructures (the Jesuit namesake university, churches), and the infamous stairwell which animates the film’s visceral defenestration-finale (spoiler). In Roman Polanski’s ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ (1968) it is ..read more

Cities Under Stress: Urban Discourses of Crisis, Resilience, Resistance, and Renewal The Third International Conference of the Association for Literary Urban Studies (ALUS) University of California, Santa Barbara on 17–19 February 2022. Deadline for submissions: September 1Conference website: https://blogs.helsinki.fi/hlc-n/2022-conference/ Keynote speakers: Caroline Levine (Department of English, Cornell U) Sara Meerow (School of Geographical Science & Urban Planning, Arizona State U) We invite proposals for contributions at the third international conference of ALUS, scheduled ..read more