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Werner, Anja, Deaf German Missionary Berta Foster (1939–2018) and Deaf Education in West Africa. A Woman in the Background, London 2026.

In 1960, 21-year-old Berta Zuther left her life in West Berlin behind to join African American missionary Andrew Foster in Ghana, thus embarking on a journey that would span three continents and result in the establishment of schools for the deaf across Africa. Berta and Andrew were both deaf themselves. They got married in Nigeria in 1961 and devoted their lives to building educational opportunities for deaf Africans - founding 32 schools, churches, and community centers in 13 African countries between 1957 and 2009.

This volume places Berta Foster at the center of interest, a woman who has remained largely invisible in existing accounts of her husband’s pioneering educational mission. While Andrew Foster has been celebrated as an icon in Black and Deaf American history, Berta's crucial contributions as administrator and driving force not just behind their German support network have been overlooked. Drawing on private family archives, including hundreds of personal letters, and interviews with family members as well as former students and colleagues from deaf communities in Ghana and Nigeria, this book explores how deafness, gender, and race intersected in the lives of a Christian couple working across cultural boundaries during the Cold War era.

“Deaf German Missionary Berta Foster (1939–2018) and Deaf Education in West Africa” was published by Routledge in July 2026.

Front page

Schröder, Iris/Bachour, Natalia/Schmidt-Funke, Julia (eds.), Thematic Section: Ulrich Jasper Seetzen's Travels to the Middle East: Ways of Knowing and Translation, in: Mediterranea. International Journal on the Transfer of Knowledge 10 (2025), pp. 123-361

This thematic section explores Ulrich Jasper Seetzen's (1767-1811) travels through the Middle East, framing him as a knowledge broker between Europe and the Ottoman world. Drawing on his diaries and collections, the contributions examine Seetzen's observations of local physicians, religious groups, and cultural practices, as well as his role in collecting manuscripts, artefacts, and linguistic data. By analysing his encounters with Ottoman society - from medical traditions to renegades and Bedouin communities - the articles highlight Seetzen's efforts to document and translate knowledge across cultural boundaries. The section challenges simplistic Orientalist narratives, instead emphasising the complexities of cross-cultural exchange, the limits of European understanding, and Seetzen's position as an intermediary in a transnational network of scholarship. It invites a critical reassessment of how knowledge about the Middle East was produced, circulated, and contested during the early nineteenth century.

This thematic section was published in April 2025 in Mediterranea. International Journal on the Transfer of Knowledge.