Global Goes Local: Christian Workers, Gender and Cultural Translation in the Late Ottoman Balkans

Dr. Nevila Pahumi, Alexander Nash Fellow, UCL SSEES

Christian workers were by definition a professional category in the hierarchy of the global nineteenth century American Protestant missionary enterprise. They were adjutants to fledgling missions, and important contacts for both local communities and missionary organizations. But where missionary sources address them as “Christian workers,” local sources have perhaps even more narrowly labelled them as “patriots”.

Between these two frameworks, how can we ground the nature of these cosmopolitan religious-nationalist go-betweens? Moreover, what is at stake in embedding them in the revisionist narratives about the socio-political transformations of the late Ottoman Balkans? In this talk I would like to address the contributions that Christian workers made to Balkan nationalisms and spiritual life in the 19th and 20th centuries, but more specifically, to novel concepts of gender and their place in the public sphere. In this, they borrowed extensively from an American female educational ethos and translated locally through schools for women.

A seminar hosted by the UCL SSEES South-East European Studies Seminar Series.
Convenor: Dr Diana Georgescu