Co-spokesperson of the key research area Global History

Coordinator of the Joint MA European History

Valeska Huber is Associate Professor at the Department of Contemporary History at the University of Vienna. Prior to this, she headed the Emmy Noether research group Reaching the People: Communication and Global Orders in the Twentieth Century at the Freie Universität Berlin (2017-22) and worked as a research fellow in Global and Colonial History at the German Historical Institute London (2011-16). She has also spent time at the London School of Economics and Political Science, in Cambridge, Harvard and at the University of Konstanz.

Valeska Huber's research combines international and global history of the 19th and 20th centuries with social and microhistorical approaches. The role of spatial and social demarcation is at the forefront of her work. She specialises in the history of mobility and migration, epidemics and international health policy, as well as communication and the (global) public sphere, particularly in relation to education and language. In her current book project, she is examining the question of universal access to information using the example of 20th-century literacy campaigns.

Publications

Key Research Areas

• International and global history of the 20th century
• Mobility and global migration regimes
• Epidemics and international health policy
• Global public sphere and access to information

Awards

• 2019 Membership of the Young Academy of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities/National Academy of Leopoldina
• 2018 Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Prize of the German Research Foundation
• 2017-2022 Emmy Noether Programme of the German Research Foundation
• 2014 Martin Abel González Award for Excellence in Teaching (London School of Economics and Political Science)

Selected publications

• Globalizing Publics, AHR History Lab American Historical Review 129/2 (2024), S. 544-627.
• Reading: The Project of Universal Literacy, American Historical Review 129/2 (2024), S. 566-571.
• Openness and Closure: Spheres and Other Metaphors of Boundedness in Global History, in: Stefanie Gänger and Jürgen Osterhammel (eds.), Rethinking Global History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024), S. 139-160.
• Women’s International Thought and the New Professions, Modern Intellectual History 18/1 (2021), S. 121-145 (mit Tamson Pietsch und Katharina Rietzler).
• Pandemics and the Politics of Difference: Rewriting the History of Internationalism through Nineteenth-Century Cholera, Journal of Global History 15/3 (2020), S. 394-407.  
• Global Publics: Their Power and their Limits (mit Jürgen Osterhammel, Oxford University Press, 2020).
• Channelling Mobilities: Migration and Globalisation in the Suez Canal Region and Beyond, 1869-1914 (Cambridge University Press, 2013, Taschenbuchausgabe 2015).