Deadline november 17TH 2017   Urban history research has recently experienced increasing interest in “imperial” questions. One expression that is used over and over again is the “imperial city”. While this term has so far primarily been applied to the European metropolises of the western colonial empires, this conference aims to analyze the phenome non of the imperial city in the context of the continental empires of Eastern Europe, such as the Habsburg Monarchy, the Ottoman Empire and the Russian Empire. Since these empires do not draw a clear distinction between “colony” and “motherland”, we suggest therefore that “imperial cities” can be understood as parti cular cities where empire manifests itself, which are also marked by the imperial form of the state. Regar ding the empires of Eastern Europe, this includes not only the metropolises of Vienna, Budapest, Istanbul or St. Petersburg, but also such multiethnic provincial cities as L’viv, Kazan or Sarajevo, border cities like Brody, Tiraspol or Belgrade, port cities such as İzmir, Trieste or Odessa, and many more. Therefore, this conference will seek to determine how fruitful it is to call cities imperial in the context of the continental empires of Eastern Europe. What is specif ic about “imperial cities” in Eastern Europe? How can questions of imperial history expand our understand ing of these cities? And fi nally, how instructive is it to explore these empires in the light of urban history? Since we assume that imperial structures also shape cities in the long term, this conference approaches the phenomenon of imperial cities from the eighteenth to the twenty-fi rst centuries based on the following three, interwoven aspects: ❫ Cityscape: Imperial cities claim to represent the empire vis-à-vis both their own inhabitants and International Conference German Historical Institute, Moscow, April 26-27, 2018 VOH – Verband der Osteuropahistorikerinnen und -historiker e.V. / Association of Historians on East Central Europe DGO – Deutsche Gesellschaft für Osteuropakunde e.V. / German Association for East European Studies DHI Moskau – Deutsches Historisches Institut Moskau / German Historical Institute, Moscow Herder-Institut für historische Ostmitteleuropaforschung – Institut der Leibniz-Gemeinschaft / Herder Institute for Historical Research on East Central Europe – Institute of the Leibniz Association Universität Wien, Institut für Osteuropäische Geschichte / University of Vienna, Institute for Eastern European History foreign powers, and to provide space for dif erent population groups. To...