Valeska Huber talks about a region that was heavily affected by the Great War and was re-ordered in the aftermath. During her talk she explores distinct meaning of ordering the minds, namely:
1. Education and formation of elites in the Middle East.
2. The setting of international standards of comparability – finding expression in attempts to measure the mind or standardise admission to education or to unify degrees.
3. The creation of new mindsets aiming for instance at self-determination
4. The development of an international mind – to use a rather vague term of the period.
Valeska Huber, who joined the Deutsches Historisches Institut London in April 2011, studied history and political science at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and at the University of Cambridge. After undertaking archival research in Britain, France and Egypt she spent a year as Visiting Fellow at Harvard University working on her doctoral dissertation on the history of mobility and acceleration in the Suez Canal Region (1869-1914). Her main fields of interests are colonial and global history with a focus on the Middle East, the history of mobility and migration, as well as spatial approaches in history, particularly urban and maritime history. She is currently engaged in a research project on globalization and the export of education in the twentieth century.
Valeska Huber – Re-Ordering the mind: International Education in the Middle East after WWI from maxweberstiftung on Vimeo.