The Centers for Austrian Studies in North America present an joint event collaborative for the Fall 2020 semester:
Austrian Identities:
Against the World: The Collapse of Empire and the Deglobalization of Interwar Austria
Tara Zahra, University of Chicago
September 21, 2020 | 10AM PT - 12PM CT - 1PM ET | Register here
Sponsored by the Center for Austrian Studies, University of Minnesota
For decades leading up to the First World War, the world seemed to be shrinking, in a form of globalization that many internationalists linked to progress, peace, and prosperity. These illusions were shattered in 1914, when the First World War ushered in a quarter century of anti-global retrenchment. Austria-Hungary, once the largest free trade zone in Europe, became a laboratory and emblem of interwar deglobalization as the ties of mobility and trade that knit the Empire together and linked it to the world were ripped apart. This talk will examine the relationship between imperial collapse and anti-globalism in interwar Austria, focusing on popular movements that arose on the right and left to achieve greater individual and national self-sufficiency, as well as new forms of internationalism that aimed to reimagine and revive transnational relationships.
Tara Zahra is a professor of history at the University of Chicago. Her research focuses on the transnational history of modern Europe, migration, the family, nationalism, and humanitarianism. She is currently working on two book projects: a history of deglobalization in interwar Europe and, with Pieter Judson, a history of the First World War in the Habsburg Empire. Zahra is most recently the author of The Great Departure: Mass Migration and the Making of the Free World (Norton, 2016) and, with Leora Auslander, Objects of War: The Material Culture of Conflict and Displacement (Cornell, 2018). Her previous books include The Lost Children: Reconstructing Europe's Families after World War II (Harvard, 2011) and Kidnapped Souls: National Indifference and the Battle for Children in the Bohemian Lands (Cornell, 2008).
Identity Matters in the Former Yugoslavia
Wolfgang Petritsch, Austrian Marshall Plan Foundation
Tuesday, October 6, 2020 | 12PM PT - 2PM CT - 3PM ET | Registration details to follow
Sponsored by the Austrian Studies Program, UC Berkeley
Lux et Silesia: Silesian Identity in the Art of Ireneusz Walczak
Ewa Wylężek-Targosz, University of Silesia, Poland
Wednesday, October 14, 2020 | Pre-recorded lecture available to stream on the Wirth Institute website and Wirth Institute YouTube Channel | Watch here
Thursday, October 15, 2020 | Live Q&A via Zoom | 9AM PT - 11AM CT - 12PM ET | Register here
Sponsored by the Wirth Institute for Austrian and Central European Studies, University of Alberta
Silesia is a place in southern Poland located in the historic region known as the Upper Silesia (in Polish: Górny Śląsk) that was once one of the world’s greatest producers of coal. This peculiar position of the Silesian region, on the one hand, has undoubtedly enriched its inhabitants in cultural and historical ways but, on the other, has enclosed them in a so-called hajmat – a term that is understood as a private homeland. Hajmat is based on both a tangible stratum such as cuisine or card games, as well as on an abstract stratum, such as language and collective memory. Since people think in the language they speak, one can presume that Silesian language expresses highly personalized reality that is inaccessible to non-Silesians, so called gorols. This lecture’s objective is to examine ways in which Silesia communicates with the outside world and how the imagined Silesia may be/is translated into the non-Silesian Poland. In order to do so, I want to present works by one of the most prominent Silesian painters, Ireneusz Walczak. His canvasses, even though beautifully colored, revolve around linguistic signs. He transmogrifies English, Polish, and Silesian into a peculiar, vibrant communique sent from the very heart of the region – a mine.
Ewa Wylężek-Targosz is a lecturer at the Institute of Literary Studies in the Faculty of Humanities, University of Silesia, Katowice, Poland. She studied English Philology with major in Culture and Literature of English-Speaking Countries at University of Silesia as well as at Rovira i Virgili University in Catalonia, Spain. Her main academic interests are carnival, modernism, art history, and film studies. In 2019 she was a guest lecturer at the University of Eastern Finland. Currently, she teaches Introduction to American Film, Art History and Creative Writing, as well as Writing for the Media. She has recently published her first book titled Tropes of Tauromachy: Representations of Bullfighting in Selected Texts of Anglophone Literature. She is also a certified brewer (postgraduate course at University of Agriculture, Cracow).
South Tyrol - Amore Mio: Identity and Ethnonationalism in a European Borderland
Gerald Steinacher, University of Nebraska
Monday, November 2, 2020 | 9AM PT - 11AM CT - 12PM ET |
Watch recorded lecture here | Join Q&A on Zoom here
Sponsored by Center Austria, University of New Orleans
The province of South Tyrol, a borderland long the subject of territorial disputes between Italy and Austria, is mostly known for its beautiful Dolomite mountains. After a tumultuous history of war, ethnic cleansing, and dictatorships, the province today is an affluent Italian autonomous region with three official ethnic/linguistic groups. As such, it is also a fascinating case study of (national) identities. What role does ethnonationalism still play there? And what can the case of South Tyrol tell us about the “United States of Europe” project?
Gerald J. Steinacher is James A. Rawley Professor of History at the University of Nebraska. Dr. Steinacher’s research focuses on 20th Century European History with an emphasis on Holocaust, National Socialism, Italian Fascism, and intelligence studies. Dr. Steinacher is currently writing his next monograph with the working title Forgive and Forget? Catholic Responses to the Nuremberg Trials and Denazification, 1945-1950. In it he explores profound questions of guilt and responsibility, which allows him to compare and contrast competing models of transitional justice. Dr. Steinacher teaches classes on the Holocaust, Modern Jewish History, Modern German History, History of Immigration, and Intelligence and Espionage History.
