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.

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

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

2022-10-12T14:31:58+00:00

Tomás Irish

2022
Topics: History, Political Science
Products: Article

This project explores the work of Walter Kotschnig (1901-1985), an Austrian student leader, humanitarian, and internationalist. Kotschnig was a crucial but relatively unknown figure in the creation of the United Nations and its institutions during the Second World War. This project will explore Kotschnig’s experiences as a student in early 1920s Austria, his involvement with international student welfare in the 1920s and 1930s to trace the development of his thinking and his networks, all of which were crucial to his work with the US State Department in the 1940s. The life of one man will be used to explore how Austria’s experience of post-First World War devastation informed American planning for the aftermath of the Second World War.

2022-10-12T15:58:50+00:00

Niall Michael Buckley

2022
Topics: History, Political Science, Research
Products: Dissertation

This project concerns itself with the integral role that the United States of America, at both an institutional and societal level, played in the Habsburg story from 1916 to the 1945. A 2023 research trip is intended to forward my Transatlantic qualitative analysis of interwar, Second World War and early Cold War Habsburg Monarchist Reactionism as an international geo-political phenomenon. It will specifically examine republican and legitimist (pro-Habsburg) activism of Austrian exiles in the US from 1930-1955, perceptions of Central Europe, Austria and the Habsburg family within the US popular imagination and their impact on US foreign policy.

2022-10-12T14:14:13+00:00

James Boyd

2022
Topics: History, Migration, Political Science, Research
Products: Article, Book, Monograph

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.

2022-10-12T13:56:23+00:00

Duncan Bare

2022
Topics: History, Political Science, Research
Products: Article

Gaps remain in the story of the growth and evolution of pre-centralized US intelligence services operating in Austria. The envisioned project will enable further exploration of both ‘the field’ and ‘headquarters’ components of the Strategic Services Unit (SSU) and Central Intelligence Group (CIG) in the Austrian context. Pursuant to this, the previously unassessed role of the counterintelligence and positive intelligence regional chiefs for Austria in Washington DC (Evelyn M. Williams and David F. Strong, respectively) must be examined in greater detail.

2020-07-28T15:07:32+00:00

The Nanovic Institute for European Studies

2020
Topics: Art, Culture, Film, History, Political Science
Products: Exhibit, Workshop

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 [...]

2021-03-25T22:15:19+00:00

Mark S. Weiner

2020
Topics: Political Science
Products: Article, Book, Film, other

Mark S. Weiner received an $18,000 BIAAS grant for his project, “A Social Theory of Emergency Medical Services: Mountain Rescue in Austria and the United States.” What lessons can be learned from the everyday work and cultural role of the Austrian mountain rescue service for democratic social and political theory? This project explores that seemingly unusual question by placing the Bergrettung in comparative context alongside the history of mountain rescue services in the United States. [...]