Lecture: Dr. Nikki Brown

Dr. Nikki Brown holds a PhD from Yale University and is an Associate Professor of History at the University of New Orleans.

Her first book, Private Politics and Public Voices: African American Women's Politics from World War I to the New Deal, won the Letitia Woods Brown Award for best book in African American Women's History in 2007.

She is also a professional photographer and documentarian. Brown focuses on African American history and visual culture of the 20th century, particularly the African diaspora, art, global feminism, and gender studies.

Her photographs have been on exhibition in the United States and Austria. She is also the co-editor of The Encyclopedia of Jim Crow, 3 vols (2009)

Lecture: Samuel R. Williamson

With a book presentation of Günter Bischof, Ferdinand Karlhofer, Samuel R. Williamson, Jr., eds., 1914: Austria-Hungary, the Origins, and the First Year of World War I (Contemporary Austrian Studies 23).

Samuel R. Williamson, Jr., a native of Louisiana, is President Emeritus of the University of the South. Educated at Tulane,

Edinburgh, and Harvard, he has taught at the U. S. Military Academy (as a serving officer), Harvard, UNC-Chapel Hill and the University of the South. At Chapel Hill he served as Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and Provost of the University, then later for twelve years as President of the University of the South.

He has written widely about the origins of the First World War: The Politics of Grand Strategy: Britain and France Prepare for War, 1904-1914 (1969); Austria-Hungary and the Origins of the First World War (1991), and with Russel Van Wyk, July 1914: Soldiers, Statesmen, and the Coming of the Great War (2003). Most recently, he was guest editor of 1914: Austria-Hungary, the Origins, and the First Year of the World War I.

2014 UNO-City of Innsbruck Art Exhibition

In the exhibition known as 'environmental scanning' at the St. Claude Gallery in New Orleans, artists Katharina Cibulka and Nicole Weniger explore the relationship between human beings and human modes of perception of surrounding spaces. The works on exhibition thematize and visualize the impact of a given environmental field on one's identity as a human being and the human behavior which is born of that impact.

Katharina Cibulka was born in 1975 in Innsbruck. She studied media and performance art at the Academy of Visual Arts in Vienna and analog film at the New York Film Academy. In her films, photographic works, installation art pieces, performances and textual works, she thematizes the relationship of individuals to their immediate environment, thus highlighting a precarious balancing act between subjective desires and demands placed on individuals by the external world. Her critical scrutiny of deeply entrenched habits in order to counteract this syndrome by presenting proof of the contrary through artistic means - thus making change possible - forms an integral part of her handicraft.

Nicole Weniger was born in 1987 in Innsbruck. She studied transmedial art at the University of Applied Art. In her artistic works she addresses the inner needs of urbanized people and the disparity between nature and culture. Nicole Weniger views urban city space as theatre. Her performance-like stagings and interventions are aimed at provoking irritations among city inhabitants and the concomitant responses; as well as depicting certain social, spatial and economic relationships.

Scheduled Events - Fall 2014

September 13, 2013
UNO St. Claude Gallery
Opening of Innsbruck Art Exhibit: Art by Nicole Weniger & Katharina Zibulka

September 23, 2014
(in World War I Lecture Course), LIB 407
Dr. Hans Petschar, Director, Picture Archives of the Austrian National Library
The Visual Record of World War I: Gathering War -- The Austrian National Library's Collections on World War I

September 30, 2014
(in World War I Lecture Course), LIB 407
Dr. Samuel F. Williamson, Jr., President Emeritus, University of the South
Austria-Hungary and the Origins of World War I
(incl. Presentation of Günter Bischof/Ferdinand Karlhofer/Samuel R. Williamson, Jr., eds., 1914: Austria-Hungary, the Origins, and the First Year of World War I(Contemporary Austrian Studies 23)

November 3, 2014
[location to be determined]
Professor Wilhelm Kohler, University of Tübingen & Harvard University
Recent Developments in Global and Transatlantic Trade Policy

November 14, 2014
Liberal Arts Lounge
Professor Victoria I. Zhuravleva, Russian State University for the Humanities (RGGU), Moscow
Russia and the United States: An Image of Each Other in the Context of the Ukrainian Crisis

Annual Botstiber Lecture in Washington, D.C.

The Botstiber Annual Lecture at the Austrian Embassy on May 30, 2014  was a panel discussion chaired by Professor Beer (Director, Botstiber Institute of Austrian-American Studies) on "Intelligence Gathering in the 21st Century"with the panelists (from left to right): Audrey Kurth Cronin (George Mason University), James Jay Carafano (Heritage Foundation), Timothy Naftali (New York University), Siegfried Beer (University of Graz), John Irvin (Washington, D.C.), Guenter Bischof (CenterAustria, University of New Orleans).

Book Talk - Relationships? Beziehungsgeschichten

RELATIONSHIPS/BEZIEHUNGSGESCHICHTEN: AUSTRIA AND THE UNITED STATES IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY (TRANSATLANTICA 4). INNSBRUCK; STUDIENVERLAG, 2014

Panel Discussion with Ambassador Hans Peter Manz, Günter Bischof, James Jay Carafano. Wine reception to follow.

Free. Please rsvp at https://www.eventbrite.com/e/relationships-beziehungsgeschichten-book-talk-panel-discussion-tickets-11683488629

After the breakup of the Habsburg Monarchy, the Austrian – American relationship was characterized by a dwarf confronting a giant. America continued to be a haven for a better life for many Austrian emigrants from the Burgenländers and Jewish refugees in the interwar years, to GI brides, skiers, students and scholars after World War II. For the increasingly preponderant

America after World War I, the small Austrian Republic was insignificant. And yet there were times when Austria mattered geopolitically, especially on the eve and after World War II. During the postwar Austrian occupation, the U.S. helped reconstruct Austria economically and was the biggest champion of its independence. During the Cold War, the U.S. frequently used Austria as a mediator in the rigid East-West confrontation and site of summit meetings. American mass production models (Fordism and Taylorism), consumerism, and popular culture (jazz and Coca Cola) were adopted by Austrian youth. Americanization and American preponderance also produced anti-Americanism. With the end of the Cold War and Austria's accession to the European Union it once again lost significance for Washington geopolitics. These themes and more will be addressed in the essays written by the author over the past 30 years and collected here for the first time.

Dr. Hans Peter Manz, a career diplomat and former foreign policy adviser to Chancellor Wolfgang Schüssel, has served as the Ambassador of the Republic of Austria to the United States since 2011.

Dr. Gűnter Bischof is a University Research Professor of History, the Marshall Plan Professor and Director of CenterAustria at the University of New Orleans; he is the author of Austria in the First Cold War, 1945/55 (1999) and co-editor of the series Contemporary Austrian Studies (22 vols) and TRANSATLANTICA (7 vols). He has been serving as Presidential Counselor and member at the National World War II Museum and as a board member of the Botstiber Institute of Austrian-American Studies.

Dr. James Jay Carafano, a leading expert in national security and foreign policy challenges,is The Heritage Foundation's Vice President, Foreign and Defense Policy Studies, E. W. Richardson Fellow, and Director of the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for International Studies. After a 25 year career in the U.S. Army, he studied for a PhD in History at Georgetown University with a dissertation on the Austrian occupation after World War II, published as Waltzing into the Cold War (2002). His latest book is Wiki at War: Conflict in a Socially Networked World (2012).

Center Austria Fellows Research Presentations

Gertraud Griessner (Center Austria), Markus Habermann (Austrian Ministry of Science Fellow), Martina Prugger (Nick Mueller Fellow) and Guenter Bischof (Center Austria)

 

Martina Prugger
Nick Mueller Fellow, University of Innsbruck, Applied Mathematics
A Short Introduction to Mathematical Fluids

 

 

Markus Habermann
Austrian Ministry of Science Fellow, University of Vienna, Political Science
Emotion in Political Communication: Can Austrian Politicians Learn from American Politicians?

 

Martina Prugger was born in Hall in Tyrol, Austria, in 1987. She graduated from the University of Vienna in Statistics in 2010 and did her Masters' degree at the University of Innsbruck in 2013 in applied mathematics. In her master thesis, she studied numerical methods to solve partial differential equations that describe the dynamics of gases. In 2013, she was awarded the Nick-Müller scholarship to go to New Orleans and work on her dissertation. In cooperation with Alexander Kurganov, Tulane University, she was able to deepen her understanding of such methods and work on a new idea of implementation.

 

 

Markus Habermann grew up in Herrnbaumgarten, Lower Austria, and lives in Vienna. He studied Political Science, Sociology, as well as the Czech language at the University of Vienna and in the Czech Republic. After his studies he began to work as a lobbyist for Austria's biggest agency. He has also been working as a press spokesman for the regional government of Lower Austria. As the 2013 "Austrian Ministry of Science Fellow" at UNO, he is conducting research and field work for his dissertation analyzing emotion in political communication, comparing American and Austrian politics.

Lunch Lecture

Andrea Grisold is professor of economics at the University of Economics and Business in Vienna, and currently Schumpeter Fellow at Harvard University.

She was a visiting professor at UNO before and after Katrina, first as Marshall Plan Chair of Austrian Studies in 2003/04, then as Fulbright professor in 2009. She specializes in the field of media economics, namely the political economy of mass media, besides topics such as the economic policies of the European Union and gendered labor markets, and has widely published in those areas.

In this lecture the analysis of long term change in media industries is intertwined with long term economic change, using Schumpeter's theory of innovation to identify causes for the rise and fall of media industries, exemplified here for the TV sector. The most prominent argument for structural transformation in the media industries is that of new and revolutionary technological progress. It will be argued that this falls short of recognizing changes in the general economic settings, and the importance mass media gain for economic development and stabilization.

Annual Marshall Plan Lecture

As a political activist, journalist and writer, his father Leo Katz moved the family to Berlin in 1930. From there, they had to move to Paris after the Nazis’ rise to power and in 1940 continued their escape from Nazism, first to New York and then to Mexico. In Mexico City the Katzs finally found a safe haven. Friedrich Katz, who became fluent in his fifth language by the age of 14, lived among one of the most fascinating and active exile communities of the time. 

In 1949, Katz returned to Vienna, then a hot spot of the early Cold War, where he joined the Austrian Communist Party while writing his dissertation on the national economy of pre-Colombian Aztecs. Despite the high praise for the quality of his work, his peers made it clear that there was only one place they would write him a recommendation for: East Berlin. For over a decade, Katz worked at Humboldt University in East Berlin, establishing himself as a celebrated Mexicanist and discovering the second great topic of his oeuvre, the Mexican Revolution. Only after the repression of the Prague Spring in 1968 he left both Berlin and the Communist Party behind.

After a short stop-over in Mexico, where he witnessed the brutal suppression of the 1968 student movement, he received his first appointment in the USA at the University of Texas in Austin. In 1971, the former Communist Katz became part of the University of Chicago faculty. There he reached the height of his international fame as the most renowned scholar of the Mexican Revolution and made the University of Chicago a national hub for Latin Americanists.

This lecture will fathom the volte-faces and contradictions of one of the most fascinating academic biographies of the 20th century.

Berthold Molden is the 2012-2014 Austrian Marshall Plan Chair at UNO, where he teaches European and Global History of the 20th century. He has published on different aspects of Cold War intellectual and political history. From 2005 to 2010, he directed an international research project on everyday history and memory in Central European border towns. Among his publications is an edited volume of essays on the life and work of Friedrich Katz: Friedrich Katz. Essays on the Life and Work of a Transnational Historian, ed. by Martina Kaller, David Mayer and Berthold Molden (Wiener Vorlesungen - Forschungen, Volume 6), Vienna: Peter Lang 2012.

Lecture

 

Dr. Michael Freund is head of the media department at Webster University Vienna (affiliated with Webster St. Louis) and writer and editor at the Viennese daily Der Standard. He studied psychology and sociology in Vienna, Heidelberg and at Columbia University, N.Y. (Ph.D. in 1978). After returning to Vienna, he worked on “Marienthal 1930 – 1980”, the follow-up of a classic sociological study of unemployment. He contributed to Austrian Public Radio ORF as writer and producer and started teaching at Webster in 1984.

He was responsible for the weekend supplement of Der Standard from 1989 to 2004 when he assumed the media department position. His main interests include media and cross-cultural comparisons, especially between the United States and Europe. He recently published journal articles and a book chapter on the political and social significance of the Doonesbury comic strip. At Der Standard, he continues to write primarily on cultural matters.

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