Joshua K. Leon is a writer, and Professor of Political Science and International Studies at Iona University. He was awarded the 2022-23 Robert David Lion Gardiner Fellow at New York Historical to research his next book, New York 1860.
His recent book is called World Cities in History: Urban Networks From Ancient Mesopotamia to the Dutch Empire, from Cambridge University Press. It has been called “the definitive worldwide analysis of pre-industrial cities.” World Cities in History explores 6,000 years of urban networks and the politics that drove them, from Uruk in the fourth millennium BCE to Amsterdam’s seventeenth-century ‘golden age.’ It provides a fresh, interdisciplinary reading of significant periods in history, showing how global networks have shaped everyday life. Alongside grand architecture, art and literature, these extraordinary places also innovated ways to exert control over far-flung hinterlands, the labor of their citizens, and rigid class, race and gender divides. Asking what it meant for ordinary people to live in Athens, Rome, Chang’an, or Baghdad – those who built and fed these cities, not just their rulers – he offers one of the few fully rendered applications of world cities theory to historical cases. The result is not only vividly detailed and accessible, but an intriguing and theoretically original contribution to urban history. As one critic pointed out, the book is an “invigorating comparative grand tour of ‘world cities’ over the past five thousand years which is sure to spark much debate.” See synopsis here.
**World Cities in History is now available to order here.
He is currently working on another manuscript called New York 1860: City on a Precipice, which is under contract with Columbia University Press. He recently spoke on it for New York Historical.
His last book, The Rise of Global Health: The Evolution of Effective Collective Action, was released in 2015, with a paperback release in 2016. The book analyzes how major actors such as the World Health Organization and World Bank fostered an expanded global health regime, aggressively addressing the health related aspects of globalization.
A doctorate in Political Science, he writes on urban history, international relations, and development. He has recently written for venues including The Chicago Tribune, The Progressive, Dissent, Third World Quarterly, City, Journal of Urban History, Planning Perspectives, Metropolis, Peace Review, The China Beat, Cities, Brooklyn Rail, Monthly Review, The Normal School, Asia Times, Foreign Policy in Focus, Arch Daily, Urban Omnibus, and Cambridge Review of International Affairs. He was author of the “World Watch” column for Next City from 2008-2011. In 2010, he covered the Shanghai World Expo for Next City magazine and Foreign Policy In Focus. He has also taught at Villanova, Temple and Drexel Universities. He lives in Manhattan.
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Contact: jleon@iona.edu
Joshua K. Leon 
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