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.
Michael E. Ruhling
International interdisciplinary conference “Reassessing Haydn’s Sacred Music” in Eisenstadt, Austria 12-14 June 2023, sponsored by the Haydn Society of North America and Internationale Joseph Haydn Privatstiftung Eisenstadt. Presenters will be leading scholars from the U.S. and Austria, and the sessions will be open to the public.
Hannes Richter
The main purpose of the proposed project is to present the life and work of Yoichi Okamoto to both an academic audience and the public via academic panels and corresponding publications, a physical exhibition, and a website. Okamoto was the personal photographer of General Mark Clark 1945–1948, head of the Pictorial Section United States Information Services in Austria 1948–1954, artist and Presidential Photographer of Lyndon B. Johnson at the White House 1963–1969. In a unique fashion, Okamoto’s work spans from post-War Austria to the highest echelons of Presidential politics in the United States via the medium and art of photography.
Susanne Keppler-Schlesinger
Together with her daughter Leonille Wittgenstein and son Constantin Wittgenstein, celebrated Swiss-Hungarian actress Sunnyi Melles, who has i.a. performed the role of Jedermann’s lover (Buhlschaft) at the Salzburg Festival 1990-1993, will trace the eventful journey of Max Reinhardt’s life in a multimedial way, by reading from writings and contemporary documents, with music and sound design by Constantin Wittgenstein. The reading will last about 50 minutes. The performance will be followed by an artist talk with Dr. Helga Rabl-Stadler, Austrian politician, businesswoman and president of the Salzburg Festival 1995-2022. The event will take place on November 29th, 2023, at the Austrian Cultural Forum New York.
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.
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.
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.
Benjamin Korstvedt
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.
Patricia Allmer
Tilly Losch: Interstitial Modernism between Vienna and Hollywood offers the first book-length analysis of the life and extensive corpus of works by the Austrian-Jewish dancer, choreographer, film star, painter, and celebrity Tilly Losch (1903-75). Redressing critical neglect of her work, the book will resituate Losch in the interstices of conventional definitions of modernist cultural practice. It will employ recent theoretical and historical material alongside extensive archival research to recalibrate and refine our understanding of transatlantic modernism and of Austria-US relations via a critical assessment of Losch’s long and diverse interdisciplinary and transmedial career in Vienna, Paris, England, New York, and Hollywood.
Megan Brandow-Faller
The cult of child creativity taking root in postwar America—or notions that all children are inherently creative with unique access to expressive powers—remains ubiquitous in contemporary American society. But rarely are such discourses connected to their intellectual roots in Secessionist Vienna. My project spotlights the critical role of pedagogue, craftswoman and designer Emmy Zweybrück-Prochaska (1890-1956), a partially-Jewish Austrian-American émigré, in shaping and popularizing Secessionist ideals of child creativity in postwar America. The goal of the grant is fund research for two peer-reviewed essays on Zweybrück’s American influence while feeding into a book project entitled Inventing Child Art in Secessionist Vienna.