The Modern City Mediated: Emotion, Space, Image is an interdisciplinary collection that explores how academics, researchers, artists, and practitioners— from fields such as art, architectural and urban history, sociology, semiotics, urban planning, media studies, design, and fine arts— are inspired and challenged by subjective responses in connection to urban space. At its core, our project uncovers productive tensions at the intersection of emerging media forms, urban publics, and emotions from the 19th century to the present. We also see this collection contributing to a broader conversation about humanism and the Enlightenment Project within academia while sensitizing scholarship across relevant disciplines.
Emotions—both individual and collective—while rarely addressed explicitly, have always played a crucial role in design practices, critical analysis, historical reconstruction, artistic interpretation, and the everyday life of urban spaces. Their role in the image-making process and the way they manifest in observers’ reactions to images require explicit scrutiny. Yet emotion-based readings run the risk of universalizing the viewer, psychologizing the artist, depoliticizing images, and weakening historical specificity. This book invites contributions that counter such disqualifying responses by systematically tracing the emotional undercurrents of urban and spatial experiences and their various manifestations in imagery, and by delineating the meanings of these undercurrents for understanding our environment and society.
We invite scholarly investigations and case studies of the modern city mediated through the triad of emotion, space, and image from the late 19th century to the present. By gathering diverse disciplinary perspectives, historical moments, and geographical locations on this topic, our goal is to highlight the city not only as a catalyst for emotions and expressive forms, but also as a social and spatial construct shaped by representations intrinsically informed by emotions. In particular, we encourage submissions that adopt new methodological approaches and/or address underrepresented urban spaces and contexts, while sparking interdisciplinary curiosity. Media forms can range from the analog to the digital, including traditional and non-traditional means of representation and distribution, while the subject/scope under investigation can range from the exploration of a single emotion to the unpacking of a range of emotions. Ultimately, the focus of contributors should be to examine the lived experience and emotional worlds of cities and their inhabitants with their varied, imperfect, and unruly representations. We envision this collection providing food for thought to an engaged public of the role of emotions in one’s own and a community’s (mediated) life.
For some examples of the varied approaches that can be made in the contributions, please see the “Field Notes” published in Architectural Histories this past year written by the Urban Emotions Research Group: Elif Kaymaz (Middle East Technical University); Ines Tolic (University of Bologna); Davide Deriu (University of Westminster); Miriam Paeslack (University of Buffalo); Dorothy Barenscott (Kwantlen Polytechnic University), that forms the foundation of this book project: “Feeling through Images: Architectural Histories after the Emotional Turn,” https://journal.eahn.org/article/id/24859/
The proposed length of each chapter will be 8000 words.
Please send your 300-500 word abstract along with a short biography and/or any inquiries about the project to:
Miriam Paeslack and Dorothy Barenscott at moderncitymediated@gmail.com
Deadline for abstracts: September 15, 2026
Contact Information
Miriam Paeslack (University of Buffalo) New York, United States
Dorothy Barenscott (Kwantlen Polytechnic University) British Columbia, Canada