A Note from the Director
Marc Landry
The academic year 2023-2024 was quite an eventful one in the Big Easy. In August 2023, longtime director Guenter Bischof retired from UNO after over three decades of service. In the fall, Center Austria marked the occasion with a celebration, where Bischof’s children and family revealed an especially fitting surprise: the generous funding of the Guenter J. Bischof Endowed Scholarship for Research and Travel at UNO. It will support Austrian and American students who, like Bischof once himself, want to enhance their studies through international travel. Bischof also received a prestigious order from Austrian Ambassador Petra Schneebauer in recognition of his service. As Bischof stepped down, I took over as director.
Also related to Bischof’s retirement came a highlight in the form of teaching innovation. Together with Eva Pfanzelter, professor in the contemporary history department at the University of Innsbruck (LFUI), I launched a new a “COIL” (“collaborative online international learning”) course. This public history course, done collaboratively with Pfanzelter’s own seminar in Innsbruck, explored oral history and history podcasting. The goal was to establish a platform, called History Exchange, in which UNO and LFUI students could regularly research and produce historical podcasts. The first season of History Exchange was dedicated to the life and work of Guenter Bischof through interviews with friends and colleagues. Interviewees spoke about their relationship with Bischof, but also their own careers. In this way it became a sort of “digital Festschrift.” New episodes, which come out on a monthly basis, will eventually be on the Center Austria website and can also be found here: https://www.uibk.ac.at/zeitgeschichte/historyexchange/index.html.en
Center Austria’s student numbers are recovering after the normalization of international travel. This year we had 16 LFUI students, 2 Marshall Plan Scholars, and 1 pre-doctoral fellow. Center Austria sponsored one of our Innsbruck students to take part in this year’s Model United National competition in New York City. She won several prizes for her participation. With the help of our sponsors the Deutsches Haus and the Deutsch Foundation, we were also able to fund Center Austria scholarships to two UNO students to participate in the UNO-Innsbruck International Summer School.
In terms of programming, we once again had a busy schedule. Highlights included a public discussion of author Bernadette Conrad’s debut novel What Divides You, a class visit from the Irish Consul, and a talk by Rosamund Johnston on her book Red Tape about radio in communist Czechoslovakia. In March Center Austria brought an international photography exhibition on the work of Japanese-American photographer Yoichi Okamoto to UNO’s Fine Arts Gallery. Done in conjunction with Hans Petschar from the Austrian National Library and Hannes Richter at the Austrian Embassy in the US, the event showcased Okamoto’s postwar photography of Austria and his influential work as Lyndon Johnson’s presidential photographer.
On the research front, Center Austria published volume 32 of Contemporary Austrian Studies in the fall. Covid-19 and Pandemics in Austrian History (edited by Marc Landry and Dirk Rupnow and printed jointly by UNO and innsbruck university press) examined historical epidemics in contemporary Austria, with a particular focus on Covid-19. Looking forward to next year, my first book Mountain Battery: The Alps, Water, and Power in the Fossil Fuel Age, will be published in January 2025 by Stanford University Press.
I want to take the opportunity to thank Guenter Bischof for his hard work and dedication in service of Center Austria over the years and to congratulate him on his retirement. He is a tough act to follow, but I’m hopeful that I can build on the strong foundation that he created.
Marc Landry