Habsburg Encounters with Native America | Conference

To view the conference program, click here.

Organized by the Botstiber Institute for Austrian-American Studies and hosted by the University of Innsbruck, the conference presents leading scholarship on the legacies of Habsburg Austria in its encounters with the indigenous peoples of North America.

With five topic panels, together with a roundtable featuring curators from four ethnographic museums across Central Europe and the National Museum of the American Indian, the conference brings together scholars from North America and Europe to share research, to exchange ideas, and to stimulate new investigations into the long and complex historical relationship between the Habsburg lands and Native America.

Videos from the conference:

Keynote Address: “The ‘Kunstkammer’ as Contact Zone: Indigenous Knowledge in Habsburg Collections,” Robbie Richardson, Princeton University, Pabineau Mi’kmaq First Nation.

Panelist Presentation: “Painting ‘Indians’: Hans Larwin’s Genre Paintings and the ‘Other’ in Interwar Austrian Visual Culture,” Julia Secklehner, Masaryk University.

Panelist Presentation: “Plumes of Power: The Native American in Habsburg Festival Culture before 1700,” Alexander McCargar, University of Vienna.

Press coverage of the conference:

Article from Der Standard, July 19, 2023

Article from Austria Presse Agentur, June 22, 2023.

Article from Salzburger Nachrichten, June 19, 2023.