Austrian Studies Program, University of California, Berkeley

The Austrian Studies Program at UC Berkeley was founded in 2017 with the support of the Austrian Marshall Foundation and the Austrian Bundesministerium für Bildung, Wissenschaft, und Forschung. It is an integral part of the Institute of European Studies (IES), home to the leading concentration of researchers and scholars on European affairs and the European Union in the Western United States.

Since the second half of the 20th century, UC Berkeley has been a recognized leader in Austrian Studies, especially in the areas of language and literature, art history, and political and cultural history. In literary studies, Heinz Politzer was America’s leading expert in Kafka scholarship; Peter Selz, who founded the Berkeley Art Museum, was a much-celebrated authority on Central European Art of the 20th century; while historical scholars from Charles Gulick through Carl Schorske and William Slottman to John Connelly have made Berkeley the place in the United States to study the history of the Habsburg Monarchy and the Austrian republics.

In the realm of historical scholarship and teaching, Berkeley’s Austrian Studies Program emphasizes today the significant role that the multi-national Habsburg Monarchy played in Europe, along with the meaning that this legacy of transnational governance carried – and might continue to carry – for the wider world. The current Austrian Second Republic is studied within the broader framework of regional politics as well as within the European Union. Our program also fosters the exchange of graduate students and faculty with Austrian universities.

Programs And Activities

The Austrian Studies Program has organized a series of lectures and events focused on enriching knowledge of Austrian topics at UC Berkeley and in the wider Bay Area community. In April 2018, IES organized its inaugural Austrian Studies conference on the topic of “Authoritarianism and Democracy.” The three-day conference involved 21 scholars from Austria and the United States, bridging literary, historical, economic and technological perspectives. Barry Eichengreen (Economics and Political Science, UC Berkeley) delivered the keynote address on the legacy of the Marshall Plan in Austria and Europe. The conference concluded with a roundtable discussion chaired by Wolfgang Petritsch (President of the Austrian Marshall Foundation) and Oliver Rathkolb (Univ. Vienna) on the development of new political, cultural and economic framework conditions for the stabilization of Western parliamentary democracies.