CAS Graduate Affiliate Tony Yeboah attends Urban History Association Conference

This past October, CAS Graduate Affiliate and PhD student in History Tony Yeboah attended the Urban History Association conference with support from the Council. He was a panelist for a roundtable on ‘New Directions in African Urban History.’ Other panelists included some of the leading urban historians of Africa: Jennifer Hart, Tasha Rijke-epstein, Ademide Adelusi-Adeluyi, Abosede George, Benjamin Twagira, and Sarah Balakrishnan. Tony was the only graduate student on this panel. He commented,  “I was thrilled to join the conversation about the state of the field of African urban history as it relates to recent contributions as well as new directions for future research. In their invitation, the organizers of this roundtable wrote that my research is ‘at the forefront’ of this conversation ‘that’s reconceptualizing sources and developing new methodological approaches’ and urged me to join them.” Tony expressed that this was a great opportunity to share findings from his doctoral dissertation with urban historians from different regions of the world, particularly because his interventions transcend the boundary of the African continent. During the roundtable discussion, Tony was asked by the chair to share some ideas about the future directions in the field, especially in thinking about issues that are overlooked within the African urban pasts. As he said, “This was a great question because for me, I want my work to affect how people think about urbanism and the history of the built environment broadly.” For Tony that means using what he is learning about Kumase, capital of the Asante region in Ghana and the focus of his research, to shape broader discussions about the city and beyond. In particular re-evaluating the garden city, a global town-planning concept believed to have been invented by a British socialist reformer at the turn of the twentieth century, is the beginning of a way into changing how  people think about modern urbanism in the first place. Doing this at the Urban History Association was a great place to test his ideas and to hear how scholars from different regions responded to it. To Tony, the question provided an excellent opportunity to share arguments from his research, which is essentially about pushing urban scholars, particularly scholars of town planning and the built environment, to take the influence of faith and belief in the ancestral world more seriously for our understanding of an increasingly urbanized world.  Tony is thankful to the Council on African Studies for supporting his participation in the Urban History Association conference in Pittsburgh.