Date: 19/20 March 2026
Venue: Wadham College, Oxford, Seminar Rooms 4 and 5.
[The programme may be subject to change.]
10.00 (GMT)
10.30–11.00
11.00–12.30
Registration
Welcoming Remarks and Introduction
Session 1:
ACTORS I: Gendered Politics of Urban Space in Colonial Africa
Chair: John Darwin (University of Oxford)
Sara Hussein (UCLA)
Anticolonial Solidarity from Cairo to Conakry: Afro-Asian Sisters Against Empire
Marius Kothor (Harvard University)
Nana Benz: Togolese Women Merchants and the Spatial Politics of Decolonization
Jennifer Hart (Virgina Tech)
Disturbances in the Gold Coast: Market Women, Global Trade, and the Politics of Decolonization in Post-War Accra
12.30–13.30
13.30–15.00
Lunch
Session 2:
ACTORS II: Supporting, Surveilling, and Controlling Anti-Colonial Actors in Eurasian Cities
Chair: Alexander Sedlmaier (Bangor University)
Maria Ketzmerick-Calandrino (ZMO Berlin)
Postcolonial Spaces and Postsocialist Realities: Afro-Asian Mobility, and the Stasi in the Divided City of Berlin
Joseph Ben Prestel (Free University of Berlin)
Migration, Anti-Imperialism, and a Gap in the Wall: How Berlin Turned into a Centre of Palestinian Politics (1960s–80s)
Malika Zehni (IHR London)
Roads to Tashkent: Infrastructures of Anticolonial Mobility (1920–60)
15.00–15.30
15.30–17.00
Coffee/Tea Break
Session 3:
TENSIONS I: Breeding Grounds of Rebellion: Neighbourhoods, Protests and Violence
Chair: Anna Nasser (University of Oxford)
Chris Saunders (University of Cape Town)
Windhoek as a Hub of Decolonisation
Sophie-Jung Kim (University of Vienna)
Shanghai and Anticolonial Globalities: An Alternative History of the Korean Manse Movement
Wallace Teska (University of Cambridge)
“Morts pour le Droit”: Law, Violence, and Anticolonial Protest in Daloa, Côte d’Ivoire, 1945–1950
17.15–18.45
(19 March 2026)
Keynote Lecture
Su Lin Lewis (University of Bristol)
The Other Side of Power:
Anti-Colonialism, Authoritarianism, and the Left in the Decolonising City
19.15
Dinner
9.00–10.30
Session 4:
TENSIONS II: Decolonial Dilemmas: Institutional Contradictions and Fractured Solidarities
Chair: Jim House (University of Leeds)
Yasmina Martin (UC Riverside)
Frustrated Solidarities: South African Exile and Transnational Anti-Apartheid Organizing in 1960s Dar es Salaam
Stephen Legg (University of Nottingham)
Spaces of Global Urban Historical Anticolonialism: Delhi’s Comparative Governmentalities
Natalya Benkhaled-Vince (University of Oxford)
A Colonial University in a Decolonised City? The University of Algiers and the Early Years of Algerian Independence
10.30–11.00
11.00–12.30
Coffee/Tea Break
Session 5:
VENUES I: Connecting Cities: Strategies, Logistics, and Rivalries across Urban Contexts
Chair: Jennifer Altehenger (University of Oxford)
Jocelyn Alexander (University of Oxford)
Making and Moving a Liberation Army in Zambian Cities: Zimbabwean Youth, Farmers, and Workers in the 1960s
Immanuel Harisch (University of Vienna)
Trade Unionists in Africa’s “Hubs of Decolonization”: An Entangled Perspective from Léopoldville, Dar es Salaam and Lusaka (1960–1968)
Clarence Chongo (University of Zambia)
A “Hub of Decolonisation”: Lusaka, Liberation Movements and the Struggle for Black Majority Rule in Southern Africa, c.1960s–1980
12.30–13.30
13:30–15.30
Lunch
Session 6:
VENUES II: Urban Politics: Re/Imagining City, Countryside and Nation
Chair: Norman Aselmeyer (University of Oxford)
Nora Lafi (University of Bayreuth)
War, De/Re/Colonization and Resistance: The Civic Sphere in Ghadames, Libya (1943–1953)
David M. Anderson (University of Warwick)
Forging the Nation: African Urban Politics in Nairobi, 1956–1966
Koni Benson (University of the Western Cape)
Reconfiguring Cape Town: Gender, Land, Movements, History
Maxwell Kwesi Asabere (West Virginia University)
Controlling the Cocoa Crisis: Colonial Interventions, Policies, and Urban Reactions to Cocoa Pests and Diseases in the Gold Coast (Ghana), 1930–1957
15.30–16.00
Coffee/Tea Break
16.00–17.00
Roundtable Discussion:
Cities and Decolonization in the Twentieth Century
Chair: Eric Burton (University of Innsbruck)
Reem Abou-El-Fadl (SOAS)
Prashant Kidambi (University of Leicester)
Hilary Sapire (Birkbeck)
Alexander Sedlmaier (Bangor University)