Professor David Peimer
Gertrude Bell: Radical Influencer of British Imperial Middle Eastern Policy
Summary
Gertrude Bell was unique; a writer, traveller, explorer, highly influential British Empire Middle East policy maker, archaeologist. She was friendly with the young Churchill, T. E. Lawrence and many others. She was fiercely intelligent and independent, one of the first Oxford University female graduates and greatly valued and esteemed by Empire leaders in London and abroad. In this talk, David Peimer looks at her fascinating life and achievements, and reflect on her influence today.
Professor David Peimer
David Peimer is a professor of theatre and performance studies in the UK. He has taught at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and New York University (Global Division), and was a Fulbright Scholar at Columbia University. Born in South Africa, David has won numerous awards for playwriting and directing. He has written eleven plays and directed forty in places like South Africa, New York, Brussels, London, Berlin, Zulu Kingdom, Athens, and more. His writing has been published widely and he is the editor of Armed Response: Plays from South Africa (2009) and the interactive digital book Theatre in the Camps (2012). He is on the board of the Pinter Centre in London.
Well, I don’t think she ever changed from being such an arabist. I think that she was disillusioned because she was kicked out of, let’s call it the circles of influence and power and made the director of the library, the director of antiquities, the museums, and all of that. But I don’t think she ever lost that romantic perception or idealism of the Middle East. Very different to Lawrence. Lawrence is a very different approach. And Churchill and many of the others, they didn’t romantic… Lawrence romanticised it, but then changes when he gets back to England, he questions at least, Churchill and many of the others, they also do because they never lose sight of one thing, it’s an imperial project, so that guides everything. She and the others get caught up in the romanticization that surrounds it, not just as an imperial endeavour.
I don’t think so, because let’s remember, she was against the suffragette movement for most of her life. So she was against equality for women in the vote back in London. So she’s against that and, but not for herself, but for others back in England. So a highly complex and multifaceted look, complex and complicated person, but a part of what makes her fascinating, and unnerving, and probably even disturbing.