Emotional Cities: Debates on Urban Change in Berlin and Cairo,1860-1910
Book Launch with Joseph Ben Prestel, On Barak, Julie Ren and Helen Gibson
Author Joseph Ben Prestel (FU Berlin) in conversation with On Barak (Tel Aviv University) and Julie Ren (HU Berlin) — Moderated by Helen Gibson (FU Berlin)
At the end of the nineteenth century, contemporaries in Berlin and Cairo discussed urban change in remarkably similar terms. Authors in both places claimed that the transformation of these cities affected people’s emotions. In his new book Emotional Cities: Debates on Urban Change in Berlin and Cairo, 1860-1910, Joseph Ben Prestel traces these debates and asks what the similarity of arguments about emotions in Cairo and Berlin can tell us about a global urban history of the nineteenth century. On Barak and Julie Ren will discuss the book and its findings with the author.
On Barak is senior lecturer in Middle East history at Tel Aviv University. He is the author of On Time Technology and Temporality in Modern Egypt (2013) and Names without Faces: From Polemics to Flirtation in an Islamic Chat-Room.
Julie Ren is a research associate at the Geography Department, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She is the author of several works on comparative urbanism, and is currently working on a study of contemporary art biennials in Dakar and Taipei.
Joseph Ben Prestel is a research associate in history at the Freie Universität Berlin. His first monograph Emotional Cities: Debates on Urban Change in Berlin and Cairo, 1860-1910 has been published in September 2017.
www.nylonberlin.org
Joseph Ben Prestel
Emotional Cities: Debates on Urban Change in Berlin and Cairo, 1860-1910
Oxford University Press, 2017