Research in urban history: a review of recent theses

The writing of this review has been complicated this year due to the fact that it has had to be prepared rather earlier than in the past, which has somewhat skewed the careful construction of statistical comparisons that have been developed over previous years. The problem is compounded by the fact that last year's review was, in turn, also prepared earlier than in previous years, leading to a backlog on 2005 theses to be reported. The change of schedule also means that the British and Irish thesis list, the Index of Theses located at http://www.theses.com/, has not yet reported on the 2006 theses, while the American Dissertations International located at http://wwwli.umi.com/ dissertations has reported many of the 2006 theses. Thus this review is a slightly mixed offering in that it features theses from both 2005 and 2006, but it is hoped that this problem will have been overcome by 2008. It was, however, not difficult to find theses which fit the liberal definition of urban history that has always underpinned this review. For the first time it was necessary to cull severely the identified theses to produce a reasonable coverage of topics and a manageable number of theses to review. This suggests that urban history continues to be a vibrant and productive discipline.