Fulbright-Botstiber Fellows

Hiram Maxim (Professor of German Studies, Emory University) will be hosted by the University of Vienna’s English Department. He will conduct a research and teaching project titled “Content-based Foreign Language Education in the United States and Austria: Intersections, Divergences, and Possibilities for Collaboration.” His project will investigate the theory and practice of Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) in Austria in order to explore fruitful intersections between CLIL and analogous content-based language learning approaches in the United States. Based at the University of Vienna, home of leading international scholars of CLIL and the country’s largest foreign language teacher education program, this project will also open up possibilities for increased bilateral collaboration regarding integrated language learning and thereby build on the long history of educational exchange between the United States and Austria.

Christian Quendler (Associate Professor in the Department of American Studies, University of Innsbruck) will be hosted by the Office of International Education and Development at Appalachian State University. He will conduct a research and book project titled “Mountain Film Studies: transnational and transhuman.” His project will examine the role mountains play in different generic, cultural, and aesthetic traditions of European and North American cinema. The project examines mountains as visual and conceptual metaphors that gauge the virtue of film in early pictorial, impressionist, and classical theories of film. The key questions this project aims to explore will (a) address the historical and cultural revisionism of the classical mountain film from a transnational perspective and (b) re-assess the role mountains play in the history of film theory in light of recent anthropogenic reconceptions of film and media theory.

Erich Striessnig (Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Vienna Institute of Demography, Austrian Academy of Sciences.) will be hosted by the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. He will conduct a research project titled “Spatial Projections of Age-Structured Populations”. The main goal of his research is to explore differential vulnerability to natural disasters by adding age-structure to spatial projections of populations based on migration patterns within US census data. He intends to combine the cohort-component approach applied at his home institution with the gravity approach practiced at the U.S. host institution. The resulting projection model will be applied in a comparative context to study the exposure to environmental hazards in both the U.S. and Austria. Determining the vulnerability status of sub-populations at smaller spatial units will improve the precision of climate change interventions and address their vastly under-researched social inequality dimension.

Joseph Malherek (Research Fellow at the John W. Kluge Center, Library of Congress) will be hosted by the University of Vienna. He will conduct a research project entitled “From Bauhaus to Maxwell House: Emigres and the Making of American Consumer Culture, 1933–1976”. The main goal of his research will be to examine the twentieth-century transfer of scientific and practical knowledge from Europe to the United States, and the significant role it played in the development of the Keynesian consumer society in the postwar period. He will examine a cohort of influential émigré social scientists and designers, many of whom were Central European Jews who had fled Nazism. They worked in a variety of fields: applied sociology, consumer psychology, commercial market research, architecture, urban planning, and industrial design. Their experience as émigrés was fundamental to their creative application of Continental methods of empirical social science and industrial design for commercial purposes.

Farid Hafez (Research Fellow at the Department of Sociology and Political Science, University of Salzburg) will be hosted by University of California, Berkeley’s by the Department of Near Eastern Studies, Asian American Studies. He will conduct a research project titled “Understanding Islamophobia in a Global and Comparative Perspective. The main goal of his research will increase the mutual understanding and create an academic dialogue between scholars on Islamophobia in Austria and the United States. First he will ask which notions of Islamophobia have been employed in Islamophobia Studies and have been used since the term was first coined in 1997. In the second step, epistemological assumptions of different usages of Islamophobia will be investigated with a special emphasis put on German-speaking literature and studies influenced by anti-Semitism-Studies and the Anglo-Saxon literature.

Marc Landry (Postdoctoral Scholar at the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, Utah State University) will be hosted by the Institute of History and European Ethnology at the University of Innsbruck. He will conduct research project titled Energetic Transformations: The United States, Kaprun, and the Postwar Austrian Landscape. His project will promote the understanding of the historical relationship between Austria and the United States by teaching and performing collaborative research in the history of energy. His course on modern world energy history, will cover (among other things) the role of United States economic aid in the creation of the postwar Austrian electricity supply. He also plans to complete research for his current book project on the environmental history of electrification in Europe by composing a chapter on the environmental impacts of American-financed, postwar Austrian hydroelectric development.

Professor Dean Jeffrey Kotlowski (Department of History, Salisbury University) will be hosted by Salzburg University’s American Studies program. He will demonstrate and build connections between American and Austrian studies by: (1) expanding scholarly understanding of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Paul V. McNutt, U.S. High Commissioner to the Philippines, by comparing their conceptions of security with those of the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, in an article to be published in Austria; (2) revising for publication in Austria a paper on McNutt’s role in bringing 1,300 Austrian and German Jews to Manila in the late 1930s; (3) giving lectures on McNutt’s assistance to Jews, including screening the critically-praised documentary “Rescue in the Philippines: Refuge from the Holocaust” (2013); and (4) teaching courses that will allow Austrian students to see ties between the USA and Austria, especially during the 1930s and 1940s.

Professor Max Preglau (Full professor at the Department of Sociology, School of Political Science and Sociology at the University of Innsbruck, areas of research: Theory and Methodology of Sociologie; Social Structure and Social Change in Austria, Europe and the USA; Social Policy and Gender Equality Politics in Austria, Europe and the USA) will be hosted at the Department of Government, College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. He will conduct a research project that is part of his longer term research program titled “Welfare States in Transition – Austria, Europe and the USA in Comparative Perspective”. The special focus of his studies at Austin will lie on the regional state level of the U.S. social policy. Furthermore, he will teach a course titled “Rise, Current Challenges and Transformations of the Welfare State: Austria, Europe and the USA”.

Dr. Bettina Leibetseder (Department for Politics and Social Policy at Johannes Kepler University) was hosted by the Department of Political Science at Hunter College of The City University of New York (CUNY). While at Hunter College, Dr. Leibetseder lead a course titled “Comparative Welfare Policy: U.S. and Europe”. The course sought to acquaint students with the basic conceptual and theoretical issues of U.S. and European social policy in a historical and contemporary perspective. Dr. Leibetseder engaged in a research project titled, “Discrimination on the Frontlines of Welfare Administration: Comparing Racial and Religious Bias in the U.S. and Europe.” Her core objective was to develop an understanding of discrimination at the frontlines in the welfare offices in a comparative perspective.

Professor David S. Luft (Department of History at Oregon State University) was hosted by the University of Vienna. He worked on a book titled, “The Austrian Tradition in German Intellectual History: 1740-1838/1939,” which provided a contextual narrative for thinking about Austrian intellectual history in relation to modern German Culture. Professor Luft taught a course titled, “Out of Austria: The Austrian Mind in Exile.” The course emphasized Austrians in a variety of fields who became important figures after they left Austria.

Professor Heidemarie Uhl (Institute of Culture Studies and Theatre History at the Austrian Academy of Sciences) was hosted by The Europe Center at Stanford University. At Stanford, Professor Uhl engaged in a comparative analysis of the Austrian and U.S. memory of the Holocaust. She also led a course titled “The Holocaust in Recent European Memory: Conflicts-Commemorations-Challenges.”

Professor Kurt Ellenberger (College of Interdisciplinary Studies at Grand Valley State University) was hosted by Graz University. He led a course called “Music, Culture, and Aesthetics” including music aesthetics and culture studies with a targeted focus on the contrast between European jazz pedagogy and American jazz pedagogy.

Professor Primus Kucher (Germanistik/Klagenfurt) was hosted by the University of Vermont during 2012 – 2013 as the initial Austrian recipient of this award to the U.S. He taught a seminar in Austrian literature and engaging in bilateral research on the reception of American modernism in Austria and Austrian modernism in the U.S. during the interwar period.

Professor Katherine Baber (Music/University of the Redlands), the first U.S. grantee to Austria under the auspices of these awards, taught a seminar on Leonard Berstein at the University of Vienna and a survey course on American Music at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna in addition to doing archival research on Berstein’s association with Vienna.