Reaching the People: American Globalism and the Quest for Universal Literacy
May 05, 2022 | 6:30pm (ET)
Lecture at GHI Washington | Valeska Huber (University of Vienna)
2022 Spring Lecture Series: Not the Usual Suspects: Everyday Agents of Globalization in the Twentieth Century
Valeska Huber’s talk connects two global phenomena that are rarely brought together: Over the course of the twentieth century, world population grew from less than two billion to more than six billion. At the same time, literacy rates increased equally fast from an estimated twenty per cent to eighty per cent worldwide in 2000. In her talk, Valeska Huber will explore debates about access to information in the twentieth century through a range of microhistories related to the creation of new reading publics. Highlighting agents of cultural globalization that are not usually in the limelight, such as missionaries, primary school teachers and librarians, she will explore the reach and limits of American globalism in the field of twentieth-century information politics.
COVID-19 Policy: You will have to show proof of vaccination at the door. The GHI enforces a mask mandate throughout the building regardless of CDC guidelines
About the Speaker
Valeska Huber is Tenure Track Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Vienna. Until 2022, she was head of the Emmy Noether Research Group ‘Reaching the People: Communication and Global Orders in the Twentieth Century’ at Freie Universität Berlin and, before that, served as a Research Fellow in Colonial and Global History at the German Historical Institute London. In her research, she focuses on international communication in various forms, from migration and mobility to pandemics and international health regimes, and, more recently, international information politics in the twentieth century, with a specific interest in literacy and language. She is the author of Channelling Mobilities: Migration and Globalisation in the Suez Canal Region and Beyond, 1869-1914 (Cambridge University Press 2013) and co-editor of Global Publics: Their Power and their Limits 1870-1990 (Oxford University Press, 2020).
About the Lecture Series
Not the Usual Suspects: Everyday Agents of Globalization in the Twentieth Century
This lecture series reassesses globalization from a bottom-up perspective. Globalization processes have typically been associated with intergovernmental organizations, multinational corporations, and NGOs. Less known are the “everyday” agents of economic, cultural, and political globalization: historical actors who initiated and promoted connection and exchange (intentionally and unintentionally) across world regions through their day-to-day activities. Backpacking tourists in postwar Europe, for instance, redefined the very idea of Europe with their cross-border itineraries and the many interactions with their host communities. The lecture series shines a spotlight on these and other drivers of globalization at the micro-social level. The different lectures discuss the activities of individual and group actors since the 1920s, covering a truly global range of geographies including the Middle East, East Asia, and the Caribbean. By applying an actor-centered approach to the study of twentieth-century globalization, the lecture series highlights the significance of globalization agents not usually suspected of playing this role.
Organizers: Andreas Greiner, Mario Peters
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Robert Kramm (LMU Munich)
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Richard Ivan Jobs (Pacific University Oregon)
Reaching the People: American Globalism and the Quest for Universal Literacy
May 5, 2022 | 630pm ET (in person)
Valeska Huber (University of Vienna)