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.
Marlo Poras [BIAAS-152409]
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.
Veronica Liotti [BIAAS-152407]
The Austrian-born artist Erika Giovanna Klien (1900-1957), young promise of European modern art, arrives in the United States in 1929, a few days after the Wall Street Crash. As a single mother of an illegitimate child, she left to a step family in Austria, she was looking for a chance in the art world to come back to him as a successful artist. In New York she had to adapt her ambition to reality and built a career as art teacher, employing the cutting-edge method of her Viennese mentor Franz Cižek at some of the most renowned private schools and universities of the time. She never returned to Europe and it seems that she never met her son in person. In 1938 she obtained the naturalization, and in 1957 she died alone and forgotten in New York City. Today, her artistic value has been recognized, and she is regarded as the most significant exponent of the avant-garde movement of Viennese Kineticism. Nevertheless, there remain many blind spots in her biography, especially about the American years. Thanks to a thorough archival research travel in the USA, the expected finding of new materials, letters, and documents will substantially contribute to depict a round portrait of the artist, and to complete the script of the first full-length movie about her.
Susanne Keppler-Schlesinger [BIAAS-142315]
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.
Anjeana Hans [BIAAS-142303]
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.
Patricia Allmer [BIAAS-132201]
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.
Christian Quendler [BIAAS-122113]
The Department of American Studies at the University of Innsbruck (Austria) is hosting an online conference in conjunction with an on-campus symposium that explores the manifold relationships between mountains and cinema. A special focus of this conference will be on transatlantic encounters and historical trajectories that connect Central European and North American film cultures. The conference is part of the research project "Delocating Mountains: Cinematic Landscapes and the Alpine Model" (https://www.uibk.ac.at/projects/mountainfilmstudies/index.html.en) run by Christian Quendler [...]
Suzanne Deguilio [BIAAS-112009]
The Nanovic Institute for European Studies received a BIAAS grant for a 2.5-day workshop dedicated to creating a “moral biography” of the 1921 US-Austria Peace Treaty. On August 24, 1921, the United States and Austria signed a Peace Treaty in Vienna in the aftermath of the First World War. This step was necessary for peace building purposes since the US Senate refused to consent to the ratification of the multilateral Treaty of Saint Germain in [...]
Leon Botstein [BIAAS-101901]
Leon Botstein and The Bard Music Festival received a BIAAS grant for its exploration of the life, work, and legacy of Austrian composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold. Korngold and His World: Bard Music Festival 2019 took take place at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, in August 2019. […]
Paul Lerner [BIAAS-101906]
BIAAS issued a grant for $10,000 to Paul Lerner (working in cooperation with Doris Berger (Academy Museum of Motion Pictures), Regina Range (University of Alabama), and Michaela Ullmann (USC Libraries) to fund a two-day symposium in 2020 on the topic of Austrians in Hollywood and Austrian-American cinematic connections. […]
Regina Range [BIAAS-091805]
Regina Range received a 2018 BIAAS grant for her project, “From Vienna to Hollywood: Uncovering the Forgotten Lives and Careers of Three Female Austrian-Jewish Exile Scriptwriters.” […]