Aidan Diable

I am a first year PhD student 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.

My thesis explores how ideas about urbanity and urban life materialised in the material and social environments of the suburbs of nineteenth and early-twentieth century Liverpool and Melbourne. More broadly, it considers how formal discourses and ideologies but also subjective ideas based on sensorial experiences and emotional reactions to cities can manifest in tangible ways in urban environments.

Research Interests

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

Conferences and Papers

'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