Joshua K. Leon is an associate 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 Society to research his next book, New York 1860. He has taught at Villanova, Temple and Drexel Universities.
His latest book is called World Cities in History: Urban Networks From Ancient Mesopotamia to the Dutch Empire, coming soon from Cambridge University Press.
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 slave trading “golden age.” These extraordinary places found novel ways to exert power over far flung hinterlands. They imposed harsh systems of control over the flow of people. They constructed class structures that were as rigid as their grand architecture. Yet radical ideas accelerated between cities along with trade—whether by sea or on foot. In times where population was power, cities built walls to hold people inside. They thrived on labor extracted from their spheres of influence. For the underclasses who built and fed cities, resistance often meant desertion. In vivid detail, World Cities in History asks what it meant for ordinary denizens to live in places shaped by global forces—places as varied as Ancient Athens and dynastic China. The question is a prescient one as the twenty-first century urban age progresses.
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 the New-York Historical Society.
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 lives in Manhattan.
Twitter: https://twitter.com/JoshuaKLeon1
Contact: jleon@iona.edu
Joshua K. Leon 
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