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 examines the suburbanisation of Liverpool and Melbourne through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to investigate how ideas and practices of (sub)urbanism were circulated and materialised through the British colonial world. Focusing on the interplay between the local environmental, social, and cultural factors of cities with their entanglements in wider national or colonial networks, the project seeks to challenge centre-periphery models of colonial urban exchange and provide a more complex, global perspective on the history of (sub)urbanism in the anglophone world.

Research Interests

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

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