Cities as Stories
Announcements
The UPLIFT project investigates how literature across cultures imagines space, especially cities, as both subject and method to interpret history and society
The UPLIFT project explores how literature across cultures imagines urban spaces: as settings, archives, laboratories, and mirrors of society. From Tokyo to Madrid, Hebrew to Polish texts, we explore realist, speculative, and dystopian narratives to see cities as repositories, laboratories, and mirrors of memory, imagination, and social change. Because fiction reveals how we shape and are shaped by our cities.
Step into the labyrinth
Transpacific speculative fiction and interactive media represent cities as unstable spaces where past and future collide. Narratives turn streets and skylines into experiments in time and imagination.
Tokyo & Modernity
Nineteenth-century Tokyo as a city imagining modernity and identity. Literature shows us how the urban landscape reflects social transformation.
Hebrew & Jewish Urban Imaginaries
From utopias to dystopias, showing urban spaces as sites of political, environmental, and existential anxiety, revealing how cities carry collective hopes and fears.
Madrid as a Living Organism
Madrid is alive in fiction. Contemporary Spanish narratives depict the city as a fluid, changing organism, mirroring social transformations and projecting crises.
Polish urban fantasy meets ecodystopia
Literature shows how culture and nature intersect in cities, offering social and environmental critique through imaginative storytelling.
Mapping imagination
The UPLIFT project combines close reading, cultural theory, and digital mapping to explore how literature conceptualizes space as a tool for understanding human experience and future possibilities.