Julia Hauser
Julia Hauser is affiliated with the University of Kassel as a non-salaried senior lecturer (Privatdozentin). In 2022, she received the habilitation (final degree in German higher education post PhD). From 2014 to 2021, she was an Associate Professor of Global History and the History of Globalization Processes at the University of Kassel, Germany, after graduating from the University of Göttingen in 2012. She teaches classes on the entangled history of Europe, the Middle East and Asia, as well as on the history of globalization.
Her research interests include the history of cultural entanglements with regards to knowledge, food, religion, and gender. In her first book, published with Brill in 2015, she looked at German entanglements with the Ottoman Empire, examining the work of female Protestant missionaries in Beirut. Her second book, published with Columbia University Press in 2024, investigates debates on vegetarianism between Germany, Britain, South Asia, and the United States. She also wrote an illustrated global history of the plague with artist Sarnath Banerjee published by Harper Collins India in 2024.
Her work, which takes her to libraries and archives in Germany, Lebanon, India, Britain, France, and the United States, has been supported by grants from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, the Gerda Henkel Foundation, the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the Deutsche Morgenländische Gemeinschaft and the Max Weber Foundation. In 2008, she was a visiting doctoral student at Rice University, Houston/Texas, USA. In 2010, she was a doctoral research fellow at Orient Institut Beirut (OIB), Lebanon. During a research trip to India in 2017, she was affiliated with the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata. In 2022, she was a senior research fellow at ICAS:MP, Delhi. She is also an alumna of the Arab-German Young Academy of Sciences and Humanities (AGYA).
https://julia-hauser.de
Her research interests include the history of cultural entanglements with regards to knowledge, food, religion, and gender. In her first book, published with Brill in 2015, she looked at German entanglements with the Ottoman Empire, examining the work of female Protestant missionaries in Beirut. Her second book, published with Columbia University Press in 2024, investigates debates on vegetarianism between Germany, Britain, South Asia, and the United States. She also wrote an illustrated global history of the plague with artist Sarnath Banerjee published by Harper Collins India in 2024.
Her work, which takes her to libraries and archives in Germany, Lebanon, India, Britain, France, and the United States, has been supported by grants from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, the Gerda Henkel Foundation, the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the Deutsche Morgenländische Gemeinschaft and the Max Weber Foundation. In 2008, she was a visiting doctoral student at Rice University, Houston/Texas, USA. In 2010, she was a doctoral research fellow at Orient Institut Beirut (OIB), Lebanon. During a research trip to India in 2017, she was affiliated with the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata. In 2022, she was a senior research fellow at ICAS:MP, Delhi. She is also an alumna of the Arab-German Young Academy of Sciences and Humanities (AGYA).
https://julia-hauser.de
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An interview, in German, on my book A Taste for Purity. An Entangled History of Vegetarianism. Columbia Studies in International and Global History. New York: Columbia University Press, 2024.
Blog posts by Julia Hauser
Books by Julia Hauser
Reviews of my work by Julia Hauser
An interview, in German, on my book A Taste for Purity. An Entangled History of Vegetarianism. Columbia Studies in International and Global History. New York: Columbia University Press, 2024.
however, there was an overlap in motives from the late nineteenth century onwards. Particularly in
Europe and India, debates on vegetarianism became intertwined. Health was an important argument for
vegetarianism in Europe, though always as part of a larger agenda understood in terms of a thorough bodily
and moral reform of society. India, where vegetarianism seemed to be embraced for ethical reasons, played
a pivotal role in this context. During the colonial encounter, Europeans and Indians engaged in dynamic
conversations on vegetarianism. Thus, notions of spiritual purity began to influence European authors
while Indian sources began appropriating Western arguments for health.
Series:
Islamic History and Civilization, Volume: 163
Editors: Kirill Dmitriev, Julia Hauser and Bilal Orfali
Insatiable Appetite: Food as Cultural Signifier in the Middle East and Beyond explores the cultural ramifications of food and foodways in the Mediterranean, and Arab-Muslim countries in particular. The volume addresses the cultural meanings of food f See More
Publication Date: 24 September 2019
ISBN: 978-90-04-40955-2
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004409552
Julia Hauser, Christine B. Lindner and Esther Möller, eds., Entangled Education: Foreign and Local Schools in Ottoman Syria and Mandate Lebanon (19th-20th centuries), Beiruter Texte und Studien (BTS) | 137, (Würzburg: Ergon-Verlag, 2016), ISBN 978-3-95650-101-2
Protestant knowledge production about the religious Other depended crucially on space, gender and Protestant self-perception. Responding to widespread apprehensions about women's participation in the missionary enterprise and mission in Muslim lands, female missionary work in Ottoman Syria was framed as a process of doubly indirect mission. Women religious were to propagate Christianity indirectly by deed rather than word. In doing so, they were to target Christians, who, again indirectly, would influence their non-Christian environment. These discursive boundaries notwithstanding, German female missionaries did try to address and influence individual Muslims, thereby collecting knowledge on Islam and its adherents. Yet due to their scope of action and gender-specific conventions of writing, their knowledge production remained practice-oriented and episodical rather than panoramic. Moreoever, it reached the home field but to a limited extent.
This interruption of knowledge circulation was not just due to conventions of gender but also to questions of PR strategy intimately tied to Protestant self-perceptions. Whereas part of the missionary public at home would be intrigued by individual conversion narratives, mission to Muslims, by and large, remained a controversial issue in nineteenth-century Protestant Germany, particularly when it came to female agency. Responding to this ambivalence, female missionaries' individual narratives as reproduced in reports at home were complemented by a male-authorized master narrative focusing on an ultimate battle between Christianity and Islam in which female missionaries figured in the paradoxical role of a non-belligerent force. Reports on encounters on the ground questioning this binary opposition between both faiths hardly ever reached supporters in the metropole."""
Nevertheless, or so will be argued in this paper by drawing on sources related to a German Protestant school compound in late Ottoman Beirut, they are not the only intermediaries worth considering in analyses of cultural encounters between locals and foreigners in the Ottoman Empire. Indeed, examinations of specific encounters seem to call for a broadening of focus in order not to overlook the significant contributions of individuals with a different social, gendered or religious profile.
To be sure, this wider perspective is not without problems. Many intermediaries, at least those of lower social status, left scanty traces in historical record. Sources from the orbit of foreign organizations offer mere glimpses at cultural brokerage in many cases. Moreover, they tend to downplay brokers’ rootedness in local society while overemphasizing their alleged foreign allegiances, thus rendering their identity less ambiguous than it may have been in practice.
On the other hand, microhistorical analysis of this kind offers some insights to research on cultural encounters and cultural brokerage in the late Ottoman Empire more generally. First, it may direct scholars’ awareness to cases in which individuals other than affluent Christians and Jews acted as cultural intermediaries. In relation to this, it widens our understanding of the ways in which cultural brokerage could take place. Finally, in line with other papers in this panel, it helps to develop a differentiated perspective on the concept of hybridity. At least in some cases, actors’ strategies over time appear in terms of situative positioning rather than ongoing and simultaneous allegiances.
Organizers: Julia Hauser (Göttingen), Christian Saßmannshausen (Berlin)
Speakers: Christine Lindner (Beirut), Uta Zeuge (Berlin), Julia Hauser (Göttingen), Christian Saßmannshausen (Berlin), Nora Lafi (Berlin)
Final Comment: Gudrun Krämer (Berlin)
With the emergence of a new imperial history, scholars have become aware of the epistemological potential offered by the exploration of transnational biographies. Often, however, studies of relevant characters are presented irrespective of their geographical fields of action, as if these were interchangeable sceneries on the transnational stage. This panel, by contrast, argues that transnational biographies can only be examined fruitfully by comparing actors within a given geographical context. On the one hand, cultural brokers acted within [or between] imperial frameworks whose legal and political structures cannot be disregarded in historical analysis. On the other, Western colonial fantasies tended to attach themselves to definite areas. These parameters shaped the conditions under which cultural intermediaries were able to act.
In the Ottoman Empire, certain members of religious minorities were crucial to various kinds of interactions with Europe as well as, increasingly, with the United States of America. Their multiple identities, their liminalstatus in Ottoman society and, in many cases, their affluence, disposed them for this function. At the same time, their status was often an ambivalent one, since many of them enjoyed a status of extraterritoriality while at the same time being embedded culturally, economically and socially into local contexts. A growing literature continues to examine the crucial (and often ambiguous) role of non-Muslim minorities in cultural exchange during the late Ottoman Empire., Certain arguments to be found in research, however, are in need of revision, as they reproduce a myth of sectarianism at odds with recent historical research on Ottoman society. First, non-Muslim members of minorities, on account of their alleged proximity to Europe, have been cast in the role of modernizers. They have also been referred to pathbreakers of secularization and of nationalism who challenged Ottoman rule. Finally, they have been regarded in isolation rather than in their local contexts. Beyond these general critical interventions, it seems worthwhile to expand the usual cast of characters. Cultural brokership, after all, was not just restricted to trade and diplomacy. The literary public as well as education were important fields where members of minorities interacted with Europeans and Americans. Secondly, and in this very context, social status and gender must be brought within the fold. Female members of religious minorities, some of whom taught in missionary and other schools, were important cultural intermediaries, yet acted under conditions significantly different from those of their male peers. Often of lower social status than male cultural intermediaries with a minority background, they were less likely to enjoy the costly privilege of extraterritoriality. Both class and gender, therefore, made for differences impacting the agency of cultural intermediaries: differences in need of investigating.
This panel, therefore, addresses a number of questions. Which role(s) did members of minorities play in cultural contacts between Europe, America, and the Middle East?How did they avail themselves of the “jeuxd’identité”Marie-Carmen Smyrnelis observed in her study of nineteenth-century Izmir in these contacts? On which occasions did they assert hybrid identities? When, on the other hand, did they play the card of fixed identities? A closer look the biographies of members of minorities who acted as cultural intermediaries opens up the chance of rewriting the story of imperial encounters from its very foundations.More particularly, it invites scholars to rethink the oft-employed concept of hybridity. While this term is able to accommodate the multiple allegiances characterizing transcultural subjects in the Ottoman Empire, it suggests a degree of continuous intermixedness belied by the often shifting strategies employed by cultural intermediaries. Ultimately, this panel hopes to arrive at a more satisfying terminology apt to characterize the striking playfulness resorted to by members of minorities in cultural exchange; to develop a terminology beyond the comfortable vagueness of the hybrid without losing sight of the transgression of boundaries central to cultural brokership.
Crossing boundaries is not just the raison d’être of cultural intermediaries. It is also a necessity for historians analyzing their biographies. Other than in the US, the notion of historiography as the handmaiden of nation building has long shaped academic historiography, with transnational and global history being but recent developments. In Germany, as a consequence, Ottoman history has long been the subject of Arabic and Islamic studies exclusively. In an age of growing global entanglements, German historians ought to enter dialogue with area studies and other disciplines (and vice versa) dedicated to the study of the world beyond Europe, while area studies ought to intensify their dialogue with historians.
This panel, therefore, is both interdisciplinary and international in composition. From the vantage point of intercultural theology, Uta Zeuge (Berlin / Wien) investigates the influence of cultural brokership on the self-fashioning of male Christian members of the emerging middle stratum in Ottoman society. Christine Lindner (Beirut), historian by training, examines the agency of female members of religious minorities in interactions with Protestant missions in Mount Lebanon and Beirut. Julia Hauser (Göttingen), trained in history as well, takes a closer look at the local supporters of two foreign schools in late Ottoman Beirut, emphasizing the heterogeneity of cultural brokers’ social and religious profile.Christian Saßmannshausen, on the other hand, whose background is in Islamic studies/Ottoman history, sheds light on how privileged extraterritorial actors navigated between conflicting identities by drawing on the example of a Greek Orthodox notable family from Tripoli. While deeply embedded into local society, they acted as cultural brokers with transregional ties and mobile lifestyles. Nora Lafi, likewise an Ottomanist, examines how Jews in late Ottoman Tunis negotiated their identity between local roots and global changes. A concluding comment by Gudrun Krämer leads into the final discussion.
Referring to Early Modern European banquet culture, Mikhail Bakhtin described the act of eating as an "interaction with the world." In a different sense, this interpretation of food and eating is of particular salience in present times. As the world's population increases disproportionately to the natural resources on the globe, exacerbated by patterns of consumption in affluent countries, media and scholars alike have discovered food and foodways as topics of crucial importance.
Like no other item of daily life, food intimately connects the world's population to the process of globalization - a process that was by no means a recent development. Particularly Europe and the Mediterranean have been connected by alimentary exchange since antiquity. Yet while food serves to build bridges, it is also a potent marker of social, religious, gendered, and ethnic differences. This conference aims at exploring the cultural as well as scientific ramifications of food and foodways in Europe and the Mediterranean in a longue durée and interdisciplinary perspective.
In recent years, food has increasingly received attention in the humanities and social sciences. Food scandals, global environmental problems, and the change of foodways through migration, but also the increasing importance of food to self-fashioning in Europe and North America, have helped propel food, once considered a topic too marginal for research in the humanities, to the centre of attention in various disciplines, as well as in the general public. Major events at the interface of research and society, such as the EXPO 2015 with its core theme “Feeding the Planet, Energy for Life”, but also the “International Forum on Food Fabrication” in Beirut in early 2015, have offered a forum for exchange between research and public concerns. While these events were largely concerned with present-day debates around food, our conference will shed light both on the past and present of food in Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Arab world, showing that many of the concerns about food voiced today, such as purity, impact on health, importance in processes of subjectivation, relationship with gender, race, and other “imagined communities” (Benedict Anderson), as well as questions of food, drink and morality, can look back on a long history.
Sections:
1 Food and Social Status
2 Prohibitions and Prescriptions I
3 Prohibitions and Prescriptions II
4 Body
5 Intoxication
6 Abstention
7 Scarcity and Humanitarianism
8 Food and Gender
Die von Mitgliedern der AGYA working group “Common Heritage and Common Challenges” organisierte Konferenz “Insatiable Appetite” untersucht Essen als kulturellen Bedeutungsträger zwischen Europa, dem Mittelmeer und den Ländern der arabischen Welt aus interdisziplinärer Perspektive. In sieben thematisch organisierten Panels treten HistorikerInnen, Anthropologen, Islamwissenschaftler, ArabistInnen, eine Journalistin und eine Hebraistin in interdisziplinären Austausch über ein in den Geistes- und Kulturwissenschaften lange vernachlässigtes Thema von unmittelbarer Relevanz für die globalisierte Gegenwart. Ein conference dinner führt den Teilnehmenden die kulinarische Entwicklung in Vorderasien von Byzanz bis zu den Osmanen vor Augen – und zum Munde. Diese öffentlich stattfindende Veranstaltung hat gleichzeitig outreach-Charakter. Eine in Kooperation mit der Food Heritage Foundation, einer lokalen NGO, entwickelte Exkursion entlang des Food Heritage Trail vervollständigt das Bild bis in die Gegenwart hinein. Beirut bietet sich besonders als Ort für diese Konferenz an. Mit der American University of Beirut ist die Arab-German Young Academy seit kurzem auch institutionell verbunden. Am ebenfalls in die Konferenz eingebundenen Orient Institut der Max Weber Gesellschaft liegt der Forschungsschwerpunkt mehrerer WissenschaftlerInnen auf der Geschichte von Hunger und Ernährung. Zudem hat das Institut 2015 das Beirut Food Forum organisiert., das jedoch – anders als die AGYA-Konferenz – gegenwartsorientiert war. Neben der institutionellen Vernetzung soll die Konferenz der Vernetzung deutscher und arabischer NachwuchswissenschaftlerInnen aus verschidedenen Disziplinen der Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaften dienen.
Sociologist Shmuel Eisenstadt was one of the first scholars to criticize these assumptions with his concept of “multiple modernities”, pointing out that there was more than one path to modernity, more than one isotropic condition of modernity. His assumptions were quickly taken up, in part because they allowed to emphasise the specific modernity of often syncretic cultural phenomena from outside of Europe and the U.S. which embraced and appropriated both global (and putatively modern) and local (supposedly traditional) conditions of production. Nevertheless, the notion of “multiple modernities” was beset by a range of theoretical and ethical problems and is increasingly confronted with harsh criticism, especially from postcolonial theory. Foremost among these are the allegations that it shares with older theories of modernity an essentialist definition of culture and that by “decomposing modernity” it retranslates development into hierarchy, and risks essentialising economic asymmetries into cultural difference, thereby depoliticising contemporary globalization.
This summer school, targeted at doctoral candidates and early postdocs, aims at a critical reflection of modernization theory up to its most recent guises and critiques and seeks an engagement with cultural and aesthetic practices that express the seeming contradictions of contemporary global modernity. These may include, but are not narrowed to: literature and the arts, media, fashion/clothing, food, urbanisation, religious practice. It hopes to foster exchange between young researchers from diverse cultural backgrounds and disciplines in the social sciences and humanities whose work is related to theoretical implications and cultural, social, and aesthetic phenomena of global modernity.
Each day will commence with a keynote lecture delivered by renowned scholars and ample opportunities for discussion afterwards. Keynote speakers include Stefan Haas (Göttingen), Gurminder K. Bhambra (Warwick), Lars Eckstein (Potsdam), Gauri Viswanathan (New York), and Parama Roy (Davis). The afternoons will be dedicated to short presentations by participants based on papers circulated in advance and discussions of seminal texts on modernity. Select papers will be published. Anyone interested in participating is kindly requested to apply with a CV, list of publications (if available), and an abstract of 500 words at maximum until 15 March 2014. Accommodation is free for all participants. Reimbursement for travel costs is available for a limited number of applicants. In case of further questions, do not hesitate to contact the organizers, Jens Elze and Julia Hauser, via jens.elze@fu-berlin.de and jhauser1@gwdg.de.
Jens Elze and Julia Hauser
Georg-August-Universität Göttingen
Graduiertenschule für Geisteswissenschaften
Friedländer Weg 2
37083 Göttingen
Germany
jens.elze@fu-berlin.de
jhauser1@gwdg.de
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We are especially interested in papers addressing one or more of the following topics:
- food and/as pleasure
- abstention, (de)privation, and hunger
- food and spirituality
- (religious) policies of food
- food and ethics
- food and social standing
- food and gender
- food as a cultural heritage
We as members of AGYA accept abstracts from the humanities, social sciences, medicine, and natural sciences related to Europe and the Middle East. Please send your abstract to the organizers, Kirill Dmitriev (kd5@st-andrews.ac.uk), Julia Hauser (jck.hauser@gmail.com) and Bilal Orfali (borfali@gmail.com) before July 31, 2015.
We are especially interested in papers addressing one or more of the following topics:
- food and/as pleasure
- abstention, (de)privation, and hunger
- food and spirituality
- (religious) policies of food
- food and ethics
- food and social standing
- food and gender
- food as a cultural heritage
We as members of AGYA accept abstracts from the humanities, social sciences, medicine, and natural sciences related to Europe and the Middle East. Please send your abstract to the organizers, Kirill Dmitriev (kd25@st-andrews.ac.uk), Julia Hauser (jck.hauser@gmail.com) and Bilal Orfali (borfali@gmail.com) before July 31, 2015.
What has been assessed to a lesser extent is the degree to which knowledge of the body became a discursive contact zone between Indian and European actors in the colonial period. This workshop aims to advance the historiographical debate by examining the role of knowledge in shaping bodily understandings and practices in colonial India. How did Indians and Europeans construct, transmit and challenge knowledge of the body and its associated bodily practices? How did the colonial encounter affect older forms of knowing and doing? How did knowledge of the body turn into a focal point for debates around personal and collective emancipation?