Anja Werner

Postdoctoral Research Fellow

Ph.D.

Residence: April 1, 2012 - March 31, 2013

Profile

Anja Werner (née Becker)

I am currently focusing on deaf history in the long nineteenth century. I examine Anglo-American and German newspapers and journals to trace debates on how best to educate the deaf. As deaf people represent a small section of the population, and as schools for the deaf had been established in Western Europe and North America since the late eighteenth century, deaf communities on both sides of the Atlantic actively exchanged notes on the subject already back then, of which a larger public took note. The controversy ran between the so-called “French system” (also in use in the U.S.A.), which meant that students were taught in sign language, and the “German system,” which favored teaching the deaf lip-reading and articulation. Various combined systems existed as well.

My main research interest is the transfer of knowledge across the Atlantic in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Before joining the Arnaud-research group, I coordinated the Alexander-von-Humboldt-in-English project at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee in collaboration with the Romance Languages Department of the University of Potsdam. The only historian on the project, I was in charge of compiling the annotations. I also served as co-translator of Humboldt’s Political Essay on the Island of Cuba based on the 1826 edition. While coordinating the Humboldt-project, I began co-editing a volume on Black intellectuals in the Atlantic World and beyond. My own contribution for the volume discusses well-known African American civil rights activists and their interaction with the East German dictatorship.