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.
Alison Clarke
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.
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.
James Boyd
Selling Emigration examines how the commerce of migration influenced departures from Europe in the nineteenth century. It explores migration as a sellable commodity, interrogating the role of migration commerce in migration decisions, and demonstrating the ways in which transport and shipping were connected to ethnic economies of mobility. The project is a monograph study on the role of migration commerce across Europe. The chapter funded by this grant will examine economies of mobility in Central Europe, and the role of Atlantic migration commerce as it affected the territories of the Habsburg/Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Philip Henry
Phillip Henry received a 2021 Botstiber Grant to complete the research towards an intellectual history of interwar Freudian psychoanalysis. Titled States of Exception: The Interwar Crisis and the Remaking of Psychoanalysis, this monograph study focuses on the entwined practical and theoretical revisions of Freudianism over the 1920s and 1930s. Focusing on a group of pioneering analysts working mainly in Vienna but also in Budapest, Berlin, and London, this project explores how the social and political turmoil of the times led to a rethinking of the Freudian theory of the self, of the technique of analytic therapy, and indeed, of the very politics of psychoanalysis.