Aidan Diable

I am a second-year doctoral candidate studying jointly at the University of Warwick and Monash University. My thesis, 'The Materialisation of Ideas in the Suburbs of Nineteenth and Early-Twentieth Century Liverpool, UK, and Melbourne, Australia', is supervised by Pierre Purseigle (University of Warwick), Lionel Frost, and Kate Murphy (Monash University) and is funded by the Monash-Warwick Alliance Joint PhD Scholarship.

It explores the circulation and materialisation of ideas about urbanism through the British colonial world via a transnational and comparative analysis of suburbanisation in nineteenth and early-twentieth century Liverpool and Melbourne. It considers city-building as a practice that is informed by both global exchanges of ideas and the local renegotiation of those ideas. More broadly, it considers how formal discourses and ideologies, but also personal, sensorial, and emotional reactions to cities manifest in tangible ways.

Research Interests

• Urban History
• Social History
• Intellectual History
• History of the Senses and Emotions
• Transnational and Comparative History

Conferences and Papers

''A hovel, in close proximity to a palace': The Materialisation of Class in the Suburbs of Nineteenth and Early-Twentieth Century Liverpool, UK, and Melbourne, Australia', Warwick History Department Postgraduate Conference, University of Warwick May 2025

'The Rotten Core: Discourses of Inner-Urban Decay as Integral to the Urban System', Irresistible Decay: Discourses of Death in Life from the 18th Century to Today, University of Warwick March 2025

''Dull', 'Homogenous, and 'Artificial': The Materialisation of Romanticism in the Suburbs of the Angloworld', 'In a Material World: A Warwick History of Art Symposium on Materiality, University of Warwick February 2025