2024 Botstiber Grant Recipients
Announcing this year’s research and project grantees
Our sincerest congratulations to the 12 individuals and their affiliated institutions who will be supported by the Botstiber Foundation for their upcoming research and projects. We are excited to see what they accomplish, and we are happy to present some information about their work, below!
Get to know this year’s grantees…
Cristian-Alexandru Cercel
This project investigates the journey of eighty letters and postcards exchanged between Sigmund Freud and Eduard Silberstein, now housed at the Library of Congress. It seeks to trace how these letters, written in the 1870s, traveled through various hands, exploring their publication in a Romanian journal in 1965 and their eventual arrival at the LoC. The research also examines broader historical and cultural issues, including Central European history, Jewish life in Brăila, and the evolving concepts of collecting, property, ownership and provenance.
Péter Tibor Csunderlik
This project aims to survey and catalogue the archival legacy of Hungarian civic radical politician Oscar Jászi, focusing on his unregistered correspondence from his American years (1925–1957) held at Columbia University. It seeks to create a comprehensive index of these documents and produce a study on Jászi’s involvement in American intellectual and political debates during the New Deal era. The project also explores the broader impact of Central European progressive immigrants, like Jászi, on U.S. politics and intellectual history.
Miriam Gassner
This research project explores the transfer of Austrian legal thought and culture to the United States by examining the careers of three Austrian legal scholars who emigrated between 1933 and 1945. It focuses on Josef Laurenz Kunz in international law, Helen Silving in criminal law, and Albert Armin Ehrenzweig in civil law, highlighting their contributions and influence in the U.S. legal field. The project addresses the broader impact of World War II on Austrian-American legal scholarship, filling a gap in existing research by focusing on the scholars’ lives and work in their new homeland.
Sophie Higgerson
This research project examines Austrian architect Lois Welzenbacher’s inclusion in the 1932 Museum of Modern Art exhibition on the International Style. Despite his inclusion, Welzenbacher’s work was harshly reviewed by the exhibition’s American curators, Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock, and he remains little known in the United States today. The project will investigate why Welzenbacher was ultimately marginally included in discourses of architectural modernity directed from the United States, which uplifted numerous other European architects.
Markéta Křížová
Within the frame of the economic migrations of late 19th and early 20th century, two-way communication flows and cultural transfers took place, that contributed to the identity-formation processes both within the United States and within Habsburg Austria. With respect to the Czech migration to the United States, there was the crucial role of Enrique Stanko Vráz (1860-1932), traveler and popularizer of Czech “colonial fantasies” in the Atlantic realm. On the basis of so far little explored archival sources, the project aims at increasing the public awareness of shared history and the numerous ties between the USA and Central Europe.
Alexander Langstaff
This dissertation examines the emergence of public opinion research in Austria and Czechoslovakia. From interwar debates about ‘plebiscitary democracy’ to the post-socialist emergence of ‘Samizdat surveying’, via postwar reconstruction, consumerism, and prognostics, I tell a story about the forgotten work of pollsters in Vienna and Prague. Broadly, I hope to offer an alternative account of the postwar social sciences that decenters unidirectional transatlantic narratives.
Veronica Liotti
This project examines the life and work of Austrian-born artist Erika Giovanna Klien, who emigrated to the United States in 1929, pursuing an art career while navigating the challenges of being a single mother. Although she built a successful career as an art teacher in New York, she never returned to Europe or reunited with her son, passing away in 1957. Through archival research in the U.S., the project aims to fill gaps in Klien’s biography, contributing to the first full-length film about her and offering a broader reflection on the role of women artists and the concept of success in art history.
Alexander McCargar
In 1571, a Habsburg wedding was celebrated in Vienna which included personifications of the four continents, one of which was the “King of America.” Among the artists involved in designing and planning the celebrations were Giuseppe Arcimboldo and a circle of humanist thinkers including Giovanni Battista Fonteo and Jacopo Strada. An investigation of drawings related to the festivities now spread across collections in Austria, Italy, Germany and Sweden will shed more light on the perception of Indigenous peoples in Vienna during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and from what main sources Viennese-based artists were building their understandings of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas.
Marlo Poras
When filmmaker Marlo Poras’ grandmother escaped Nazi occupied Austria, she was stripped of her citizenship and everything she owned. Now Austria is offering Marlo the chance to “reclaim” her grandmother’s citizenship for herself. The Escape, a documentary film, follows Marlo’s journey deep into the Alps to unearth an unsettling family history that has haunting lessons for today.
Hannes Richter
The main purpose of the proposed project is to publish an English language, edited volume on the life, work, and the significance of photographer Yoichi Okamoto and the photographic record he created in Austria and in the United States. Using a visual frame of reference, the authors investigate the impact of Okamoto’s photography on our understanding of post-WWII Austria, its reconstruction and cultural life and connect it all the way to the pictorial record of the Johnson Administration and its many crucial moments in history through one unique lens.
Jacqueline Vansant
Some weeks after National Socialist Germany annexed Austria in March 1938, a small group of 15 and 16 year-old classmates of Jewish heritage promised one another that they would do their best to maintain ties. The boys’ original promise resulted in an extraordinary group correspondence that stretched over fifteen years and spanned three continents. This correspondence serves as the point of departure for a collective biography focusing on the classmates who participated in the exchange. The Botstiber Research Grant will support archival research on the army experiences of the Austrian classmates who fled to the United States. Three of the most avid correspondents served in the army and their attitudes and varied experiences highlight the important contributions they made to the U.S. military.
Cornelia Weiss
Gendered pay inequality continues today as a major issue in Austria (and the U.S., as well as the rest of the world). The immediate post-war period of the WWII era was a period in which the military governments had the power of law and force to eliminate or impose unequal pay against women and girls. “Answers to Unequal Pay: The U.S. Military Government in Post-WWII Austria” excavates what the U.S. military government in Austria did — and did not do — with their power (and the possible echoes in today’s gendered pay gaps).
More information on individual research, project and event grants can be found in the database of funded projects.