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.
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.
Mikkel Dack
Dr. Mikkel Dack received a $7,500 BIAAS grant for his project, “Confronting Fascism: American Denazification Strategy Occupied Austria, 1945-1955.” This archived-based study investigates the character of American occupation strategy and the long-term impact that reorientation activities had on Austrian-American relations. The project diversifies our understanding of the postwar Austrian-American relationship by emphasizing the reciprocal influence of punitive and rehabilitative programs. This research comprises one part of a larger book project that investigates US-led antifascist campaigns in postwar Europe and Asia. Research will be conducted at archives in Vienna, Salzburg, Linz, and Washington, DC.
Max Ehrenfreund
Ehrenfreund's dissertation is a study of the socialist calculation debate, an intellectual exchange among interwar economists, journalists, and politicians who sought an economic theory for a socialist society. Using archival sources, Ehrenfreund presents a new interpretation of this debate in the context of contemporary shifts in the cultural meanings of calculation and the political valences of mathematics in Austria and the United States. With the Botstiber Institute's support, Ehrenfreund will travel to archives in Michigan [...]
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.
Dominique Kirchner Reill
“The Habsburg Mayor of New York” reconstructs the 8 years Fiorello LaGuardia spent in some of the Habsburg Monarchy’s most vibrant cities before becoming a New Yorker. This project is less a biography than an archival restoration of the social worlds that formed the young man who would later revolutionize American progressive politics. Thanks to research funded by Botstiber in Hungary, Croatia, Italy, and the United States, this book project will show how much of LaGuardia’s particular blend of social welfare, capitalist, and cross-ethnic politicking emerged thanks to these Habsburg experiences and that thereby the changes he wrought to New York should be seen as much as a Habsburg legacy as an American one.
Kirsten A. Krick-Aigner
Dr. Kirsten A. Krick-Aigner received a $10,000 BIAAS grant for “Jewish Austrian Women Artists in Exile: Bettina Ehrlich, Lisel Salzer, and Lisl Weil,” a research project which recognizes the artistic work of three underrepresented 20th-century Jewish Austrian artists, whose contributions to the cultural life of the U.S. was founded in knowledge acquired during their upbringing in Vienna and their training at the Viennese School of Applied Arts. While Ehrlich and Weil went on to write and illustrate children’s books, some documenting their exile experience, Salzer would become a prominent enamel artist in Seattle. Her research on the artists’ contributions will be published in articles and a culminating digital repository highlighting the artists’ work, as well as link to resources, such as oral interviews, art exhibits, manuscripts, and letters.
Allison Schmidt
Dr. Allison Schmidt has received a $15,000 research grant for her project "Emigration Routes from Austria-Hungary," a focus on emigrant journeys to the United States in the late-nineteenth, early-twentieth century. Archival research in Austrian and Czech Archives will contribute to an article on the subject and a book on state surveillance of the transmigrants in Germany. Allison Schmidt received her PhD from the University of Kansas and currently serves as a Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Pennsylvania.
Thomas R. Schmidt
This research explores the influence of American journalistic norms, routines and practices on Austrian journalism between 1945 and the 1990s. Archival research and oral history interviews will document how Austrian journalists experienced different phases of American influence beginning with training by American government officials between 1945 and 1955 to the adoption of American news formats such as investigative, narrative, and alternative journalism. Illuminating how U.S. influence on Austrian journalism was embraced, resisted and negotiated by various reporters, editors and publishers will not only document the institutional evolution of Austrian journalism but will also shed light on the cultural history of transatlantic relations between Austria and the U.S.
Rachel E. Scott
Rachel E. Scott received a BIAAS grant to conduct research on Austrian music festivals held under American occupation. The project will explore the tensions between American and Austrian identity that were performed on musical stages during this period and provide insight into the relationship between Austria and the United States as both countries made strategic use of music festivals to achieve mutually beneficial goals. The grant will enable archival research at the National Archives in [...]