Database of Funded Projects

The Botstiber Institute for Austrian-American Studies has generously funded academic research and public history projects that promote an understanding of the historic relationship between the United States and Austria. The following search tools make it possible to explore these projects and to learn more about the scholars and organizations who have received BIAAS grants and fellowships.

2023-09-14T14:36:15+00:00

Kathryn Sederberg

2023
Topics: Literature, Research
Products: Article, Book

Writing Home: Emigration Diaries of German and Austrian Jews, 1933-1945 considers the practice of diary writing during emigration and exile, and the changes in writing and its functions as the author is geographically displaced. Beyond giving account of the history of emigration, the diary became a part of constructing a new self as a refugee in transit and in exile. Current political and humanitarian discussions surrounding refugee rights, asylum, and migration have fueled an even greater interest in refugee stories from the 1930s and 40s, and in personal accounts of emigration and resettlement. The archival evidence shows us that Jews throughout Europe continued to write diaries during the 1930s and 40s, whether as refugees, or in hiding, imprisoned in ghettos, or even in concentration and death camps. While many of these authors would not survive the Holocaust, some writers were able to find refuge through emigration, taking their diary with them. This project will demonstrate how the diary was often part of daily life for refugees: a site (a physical space and cultural practice) where writers document their search for a new life, and an instrument for interpreting and constructing life as a refugee. With a focus on Jewish emigrants from Germany and Austria, it traces the way these narratives give account of new beginnings in a strange country, where processes of acculturation and new concepts of self, home, and belonging shape the writing subject.

2023-09-14T14:16:54+00:00

James McSpadden

2023
Topics: History, Political Science, Research
Products: Article, Book

This project will explore behind-the-scenes political and personal connections among interwar Austrian politicians during Austria’s First Republic. From socialists to conservatives, Austrian politicians mingled with foreign guests and their political rivals at social gatherings in Vienna. In turn, these Austrians built up a network of political and social acquaintances that included a number of American senators, representatives, and high government officials. This archival research will not only further an understanding of private cross-party political connections in interwar Austria but also explore continuities from this surprisingly robust informal Viennese political culture into the lives of conservative and socialist Austrian émigrés to the United States during the 1930s and early 1940s.

2023-09-13T18:05:41+00:00

Filip Šír

2023
Topics: History, Migration, Research
Products: Article, Database, Exhibit

Music was of crucial importance to the immigrants from Austria-Hungary, and cultural and social practice of great importance to their communities in the USA. They could document this facet of their self-identification thanks to new technologies - in the form of wax cylinders. A remarkable set of recordings can be found under the title of "Ed. Jedlička Records'' in two phonograph cylinder collections held at the University of Iowa Libraries and Library of Congress. This more than a century-old set of unique cylinders contains original recordings of Bohemian songs, music, or short humorous performances, and are some of the earliest recordings made for and by a specific ethnic group in the United States.

2023-09-13T17:50:43+00:00

Elisabeth Piller

2023
Topics: History, Research
Products: Article, Book

For many Austrians, the years after 1945 were marked by scarcity, hunger, and deprivation. To survive, they relied heavily on international and especially American humanitarian aid. This project examines U.S. food aid to Austria after World War II, focusing on U.S. motives, Austrian reception, and the impact on transatlantic relations. Its findings will provide an important corrective to the extensive research on U.S. aid to post-war Germany and will shed light on the less studied period of Austrian-American aid relations prior to the European Recovery Program (Marshall Plan). The project situates the Austrian experience within a broader European and transatlantic framework, highlighting both the representative and unique aspects of the Austrian-American case.

2023-09-13T17:48:50+00:00

Hans Petschar

2023
Topics: Art, Culture, History, Photography, Research
Products: Article, Book, Exhibit

The research project will study the life and work of Yoichi Okamoto, personal photographer of General Mark Clark 1945–1948 in Austria, head of the United States Information Service Pictorial Section in Austria 1948–1954 and Presidential Photographer of Lyndon B. Johnson at the White House 1963–1969. Surprisingly enough, despite Okamoto’s extraordinary career in Europe and later in the U.S. as White House photographer during the Johnston era, a comprehensive biography of Yoichi R. Okamoto is still missing. Archival research will take place at the Daniel Library, The Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina, the National Archives in Washington DC and the Lyndon B Johnson Library in Austin, Texas. Research results will be integrated in exhibitions and scholarly publications in Austria and the U.S.A. Hans Petschar is a historian and Director of the Picture Archives and Graphics Department at the Austrian National Library. In 2015/16 he served as the Marshall Plan Chair at the University of New Orleans.

2023-09-13T17:20:18+00:00

Laura MacDonald

2023
Topics: Art, Culture, Research, Theatre
Products: Article, Book, Conference Paper

This project examines Austrian engagement with American musical theatre from postwar innovations at the Vienna Volksoper through to transnational programming and new musical development by contemporary Austrian institutions such as Vereinigten Bühnen Wien (VBW) and the Landestheater Linz. Having learned and developed from the Broadway musical, Austria is now influencing the growth and development of “das Musical” in East Asia, where Austrian musicals have become valuable models for new musical development and have introduced European practitioners to producers in Tokyo, Seoul, and Shanghai. This research will culminate in The Broadway Musical's Transnational Journeys: Circulating American Dreams in Europe and East Asia, a book-length study documenting European and East Asian musical theatre industries’ long histories and achievements and establishing that a comprehensive understanding of musical theatre must consider complex and dynamic global activity.

2023-09-13T17:11:00+00:00

Benjamin Korstvedt

2023
Topics: Art, Culture, History, Music, Research
Products: Article, Book Chapter, Podcast

The music and public images of Anton Bruckner (1824-1896) and Gustav Mahler (1860-1911), widely regarded as the preeminent Austrian symphonists of the epoch around 1900, have long been interpreted and reinterpreted in ways that reach far beyond the usual confines of musical life. This critical discourse originated in the context of the political and cultural upheavals Austria and Austrian culture underwent in the first half of the twentieth century, and as the music of both composers increasingly entered American musical life in the postwar, it was reformulated in new ways within the distinctive sociocultural milieu of the U.S. This comparative critical study of the changing views and representations of these two composers will shed light not only on their musical works but also on fundamental issues of cultural politics and changing definitions of Austrian identity.

2023-09-13T17:10:49+00:00

Anjeana Hans

2023
Topics: Culture, Film, History, Migration, Research
Products: Article, Book

This project focuses on Jewish filmmakers, actors, and film technicians forced to leave Germany after the Nazi’s rise to power, many of whom went first to Austria and worked in the independent film industry that existed there between 1933 and 1937. The project will examine how these independent films engage with the experience of persecution and whether the trauma of expulsion and expatriation finds expression on the levels of both narrative and form. Further, in examining these productions closely, contextualizing them in their historical moment and against the broader backdrop of early Austrian film, and considering their afterlives, the aim is to trace not only the impact of exile on these films, but also their influence on film broadly, both internationally and in Hollywood specifically. Anjeana Hans is a Professor of German Studies and affiliated faculty in Cinema and Media Studies at Wellesley College.

2023-09-13T17:10:43+00:00

Alison Clarke

2023
Topics: History, Political Science, Research
Products: Article, Book Chapter, Monograph

Design Diplomacy: Austrian-American Dialogues explores the crucial Cold War role of design as a form of diplomacy through the prism of relations between Austrian and US industrial designers. While architectural historians have argued the significance of postwar Austrian architects and US-sponsored exhibitions in consolidating the new postwar social order, the significance of Austrian designers and their role in policy-making remains unexamined. Using original archival research, the project asserts the vital relevance of design dialogues between the US and Austria in framing aspects of design and development policy of the Cold War period.

2022-10-12T15:24:39+00:00

Rudolf Svoboda

2022
Topics: History, Research
Products: Article

In the 1830s and 1840s, departures on missions from historic Austria to the United States were one of the most important ways of having contact between the Old and New Worlds. In Austria, they were supported by higher social circles and had a broadly positive response in the society of that time. This project will show the concrete ties and cultural exchanges between the American and Austrian environments in the 1830s and 1840s connected with the person of the missionary John Nepomucene Neumann. Neumann maintained a vast network of relations, which were retrospectively reflected in the Austrian environment, preparing for his missionary vocation and its actual implementation in the USA.