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.
Cornelia Weiss [BIAAS-152412]
Gendered pay inequality continues today as a major issue in Austria (and the U.S., as well as the rest of the world). The immediate post-war period of the WWII era was a period in which the military governments had the power of law and force to eliminate or impose unequal pay against women and girls. “Answers to Unequal Pay: The U.S. Military Government in Post-WWII Austria” excavates what the U.S. military government in Austria did -- and did not do -- with their power (and the possible echoes in today’s gendered pay gaps).
Jacqueline Vansant [BIAAS-152411]
Some weeks after National Socialist Germany annexed Austria in March 1938, a small group of 15 and 16 year-old classmates of Jewish heritage promised one another that they would do their best to maintain ties. The boys’ original promise resulted in an extraordinary group correspondence that stretched over fifteen years and spanned three continents. This correspondence serves as the point of departure for a collective biography focusing on the classmates who participated in the exchange. The Botstiber Research Grant will support archival research on the army experiences of the Austrian classmates who fled to the United States. Three of the most avid correspondents served in the army and their attitudes and varied experiences highlight the important contributions they made to the U.S. military.
Hannes Richter [BIAAS-152410]
The main purpose of the proposed project is to publish an English language, edited volume on the life, work, and the significance of photographer Yoichi Okamoto and the photographic record he created in Austria and in the United States. Using a visual frame of reference, the authors investigate the impact of Okamoto’s photography on our understanding of post-WWII Austria, its reconstruction and cultural life and connect it all the way to the pictorial record of the Johnson Administration and its many crucial moments in history through one unique lens.
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.
Alexander McCargar [BIAAS-152408]
In 1571, a Habsburg wedding was celebrated in Vienna which included personifications of the four continents, one of which was the “King of America.” Among the artists involved in designing and planning the celebrations were Giuseppe Arcimboldo and a circle of humanist thinkers including Giovanni Battista Fonteo and Jacopo Strada. An investigation of drawings related to the festivities now spread across collections in Austria, Italy, Germany and Sweden will shed more light on the perception of Indigenous peoples in Vienna during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and from what main sources Viennese-based artists were building their understandings of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas.
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.
Alexander Langstaff [BIAAS-152406]
This dissertation examines the emergence of public opinion research in Austria and Czechoslovakia. From interwar debates about ‘plebiscitary democracy’ to the post-socialist emergence of ‘Samizdat surveying’, via postwar reconstruction, consumerism, and prognostics, I tell a story about the forgotten work of pollsters in Vienna and Prague. Broadly, I hope to offer an alternative account of the postwar social sciences that decenters unidirectional transatlantic narratives.
Markéta Křížová [BIAAS-152405]
Within the frame of the economic migrations of late 19th and early 20th century, two-way communication flows and cultural transfers took place, that contributed to the identity-formation processes both within the United States and within Habsburg Austria. With respect to the Czech migration to the United States, there was the crucial role of Enrique Stanko Vráz (1860-1932), traveler and popularizer of Czech “colonial fantasies” in the Atlantic realm. On the basis of so far little explored archival sources, the project aims at increasing the public awareness of shared history and the numerous ties between the USA and Central Europe.
Sophie Higgerson [BIAAS-152404]
This research project examines Austrian architect Lois Welzenbacher’s inclusion in the 1932 Museum of Modern Art exhibition on the International Style. Despite his inclusion, Welzenbacher’s work was harshly reviewed by the exhibition’s American curators, Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock, and he remains little known in the United States today. The project will investigate why Welzenbacher was ultimately marginally included in discourses of architectural modernity directed from the United States, which uplifted numerous other European architects.
Miriam Gassner [BIAAS-152403]
The research project in question undertakes the attempt of tracing the “transfer” of legal thought, Austrian norms and maybe also “Austrian legal culture” to the United States. It does so by telling the story of three “Austrian” legal scholars, who all left their alma mater between 1933 and 1945 and continued their career in the United States - working each in one of the main fields of law (Private law, Public law, Legal Philosophy).