Training the Humanitarian Eye: Missionary Print Culture, Female Authorship, and the Image of the Congolese Child, 1889-1906

This is the first chapter of a book project that explores the history of humanitarianism through the lens of the camera and its symbolic focus on the child.  The chapter focuses on the female-authored print culture of London-based Regions Beyond Missionary Union at the turn of the 20th century and its contributions to the emergence of a mass humanitarian response to atrocities in the Congo.

Heide Fehrenbach is Board of Trustees Professor of History at Northern Illinois University. Her past scholarship has explored German-American relations and post-1945 processes of democratization, with particular focus on film, race and gender; currently she is working on the visual history of humanitarian advocacy. She has published five books, including the prizewinning Cinema in Democratizing Germany (UNC Press, 1995); Race after Hitler: Black Occupation Children in Postwar Germany and America (Princeton UP, 2005, 2007); and, most recently, Humanitarian Photography: A History (Cambridge UP, 2015, 2016). She has also written on war children, international adoption and child migration, and has served as consultant on several film and television documentaries. A former Guggenheim Fellow, she was Haniel Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin and the recipient of grants from the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Endowment for the Humanities.