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.
Despina Stratigakos
The book chronicles the life, work, and impact of Austrian-American Ella Briggs, an innovative artist, designer, and architect. Briggs appeared at the turning points and places of modernist history: she painted with the Secessionists in Vienna, created luminous rooms in Gilded Age New York, erected workers' housing in the First Austrian Republic, and constructed suburban homes for Americans in the prosperous Roaring Twenties. Fifteen Austrian and American experts in modernism collaborate in this project to uncover the little-known history of Briggs, revealing how her international networks helped to spread ideas of modernism between the United States and Austria.
Kathryn Sederberg
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.
James McSpadden
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.
Thomas Antonic
The aim of this project is to study the sojourns of the U.S. poet Allen Ginsberg in Austria in 1957, 1980, and 1993, and to examine the impact of these visits on the poet's work as well as the influence of his time in Austria on the country’s literary and cultural landscape. The focus is thus on the cultural exchange(s) between the USA and Austria. The research results are to be published in book form in English. In addition, two audio CDs with previously unpublished recordings of a performance by Allen Ginsberg in Graz in 1980 will be included with the book.
Elisabeth Piller
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.
Hans Petschar
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.
Laura MacDonald
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.
Christopher Long
This book, Volume 3 of Viennese architect Josef Frank's complete writings, features a single work, a series of linked essays Frank wrote in the mid-1940s but never published. In addition to an introduction by Christopher Long, the work includes important essays about Frank's life and work written by Tano Bojankin, Hermann Czech, and Otto Kapfinger. This translation of the original German-language volume marks the first time this seminal work of Frank's—a powerful critique of modernism—will [...]
Anjeana Hans
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.
Jonathan Singerton
This project focuses on the Leopoldine Society, an Austrian state-sponsored missionary foundation which supported provided financial relief to Catholic dioceses across the United States. From 1829 until 1914, the Leopoldine Society amassed over 4.5 million Austrian gulden (roughly $30 million dollars in today’s currency) through parish alms across Austria-Hungary. Using these donations, the Society founded over 400 Catholic churches and supported at least 300 Austro-Hungarian missionaries who travelled to the United States. The project’s goal is to advance our understanding of the Leopoldine Society through the collection and evaluation of new archival sources leading to a book-length monograph.