CENTER AUSTRIA
UNIVERSITY OF NEW ORLEANS
CenterAustria at the University of New Orleans (UNO) celebrates its ten-year anniversary with a series of conferences and art/music events in the academic year 2007/08. CenterAustria was launched in the fall of 1997 to administer UNO’s proliferating activities with its partner university – the Leopold-Franzens-Universität Innsbruck -- and to increase contacts with other Austrian universities and institutions. It was also designed to promote Austrian culture and commerce in the U.S. Gulf South region. CenterAustria replaced the Institute for the Comparative Study of Foreign Policy at UNO.
HISTORY: The University of New Orleans signed a partnership agreement with the Leopold-Franzens-Universität in Innsbruck in 1983. UNO had launched the very successful UNO Innsbruck International Summer School in 1976. This program will conduct its 34th session in the summer of 2008, bringing some 250 students and 25 faculty members from Southern universities to Austria.
As a result of this highly successful summer school, UNO began offering graduate fellowships to Innsbruck students (see Appendix I) -- complimented since the mid-1980s by Innsbruck stipends for UNO students. In 1982 the Austrian Student Program (ASP) was started for Innsbruck students at UNO -- a four-week long introduction to the American university (a “Schnupperstudium).
This has experienced a hiatus since Hurricane Katrina due to a housing shortage. In 1982 the two universities organized their first annual symposium on comparative transatlantic topics, organized by a new Institute for the Comparative Study of Public Policy at UNO (see Appendix II). This has led to a regular publication of the conference papers (see Appendix III).
Faculty exchanges were added in the 1980s. In 1992 the two universities began to publish the joint annual publication Contemporary Austrian Studies (see Appendix IV). When the number of Innsbruck students studying at UNO grew by leaps and bounds, CenterAustria was opened to function, among other activities, as a hub for Austrian students, easing their coming to and stay at UNO (housing, visas, advising etc.). In 1997 Center Austria initiated an Academic Year Abroad (AYA) program for semester/year-long study in Innsbruck, with students signing up from all over the United States.
CenterAustria was founded to administer all these activities and also develop new programs. Most notably, in 1998 a conference was organized commemorating the “50th Anniversary of the Marshall Plan in Austria” in cooperation with the “European Recovery Program-Fund” in Vienna.
This exciting conference inspired the ERP-Fonds to provide seed money for the “Austrian Marshall Plan Anniversary Foundation.” The brand new Vienna-based Foundation then agreed to endow the Marshall Plan Chair for Austrian and European Studies at UNO in 2000. UNO will welcome the 9th Marshall Plan Chair for the academic year 2008/09 (see Appendix V).
Additionally, in 2002 the Austrian Ministry of Science and Research agreed to fund an annual scholarship for an Austrian doctoral student at UNO (see Appendix VI). The Austrian Fulbright Commission has sent an annual language teaching assistant in German to UNO since the fall of 1998 (see Appendix VII).
The cities of New Orleans and Innsbruck signed a sister city agreement in 1995, on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the UNO Innsbruck International Summer School. In the fall of 2000 an Arts Exchange program was established between the City of Innsbruck and UNO. Tyrolese artists have displayed their art every fall at the UNO Fine Arts Gallery.
Austrian Art Exchange
UNO student artists exhibit their work every summer at the City of Innsbruck’s Andechs Gallerie. Short artists-in-residence stays are added to familiarize visiting artists with the artistic communities in both cities. The UNO Department of Fine Arts partners with CenterAustria in organizing these arts exchanges.
Since 2000 three “Satchmo Meets Amadeus” programs have been staged with the University of Salzburg and the Mozarteum Salzburg. Academic conferences, coupled with concert performances were organized to better contextualize these famous “musical cities” and their prodigal sons with global star power.
Since the devastating impact of Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans and UNO measure time before and after Katrina. The most devastating disaster in American history has slowed down some of the Center’s programs – for example the fall 2005 symposium had to be cancelled. Immediately after the storm, 40 of 44 Austrian students at UNO found new host institutions in the United States to continue their year of study.
The University of Minnesota was particularly generous in accepting two Innsbruck business students and provide a home for the 2005/6 Marshall Plan Chair. The February Austrian Student Program was cancelled twice since Katrina due to an acute housing shortage in New Orleans. The program, however, will resume in February 2008 with 24 students coming to New Orleans.
The University and City of Innsbruck communities were very generous by collecting private donations to help UNO faculty and staff who had lost houses in the flooding after the storm. They also funded a dozen UNO students to study for a semester in Innsbruck. The University of Graz also offered 8 free semesters to UNO “Katrina students”. The ERP-Fonds of Vienna made a one-million dollar donation to UNO for student exchanges and the building of an International Studies Center. Altogether Austrian friends and partners extended some 1,15 million dollars of donations in various forms to the University of New Orleans – remarkable acts of Austrian generosity to UNO’s recovery!
PUBLICATIONS: Regular volumes of the annual symposia papers represented the first scholarly publications within the partnership agreement (see Appendix III). In 1992 Anton Pelinka, a political scientist at the University of Innsbruck, and Günter Bischof, a historian at UNO, started Contemporary Austrian Studies (CAS) as an annual publication published by Transaction of New Brunswick, New Jersey.
Volumes are dedicated to a specific theme chosen annually, with non-topical essays, forums, historiography, roundtables, review essays, book reviews and annual review of Austrian politics complementing each volume. To date 15 volumes have been published. With Anton Pelinka’s retirement in Innsbruck, Fritz Plasser, a fellow political scientist, took over the Innsbruck editorship. Vol. XVI on “The Changing Austrian Voter” will be published in early 2008; “Austria(ns) in World War II” is currently in the making, and the “Schüssel Era in Austria” in the planning stages (see Appendix IV). Contemporary Austrian Studies is an interdisciplinary social studies journal that covers Austria since 1918 and is designed to complement the older Austrian History Yearbook, which concentrates more on Habsburg history.
Contemporary Austrian Studies
In 2002 the series Studies in Austrian and Central European History and Culture was initiated with Transaction Publishers (see Appendix VIII)
In 2006 the new series TRANSATLANTICA was launched with the StudienVerlag in Innsbruck (see Appendix IX).
A CenterAustria Newsletter has been published once a semester. Since 2006 it is being posted electronically on the CenterAustria homepage.
STAFF: Initially, the Institute for the Study of Comparative Public Policy carried on the partnership agenda with Innsbruck. The political scientist Werner Feld, the economist Nicholas Mercuro, and the historian Gordon Mueller directed it respectively. It was succeeded by CenterAustria in 1997. Its staffing has been remarkably stable since its inception. Gordon “Nick” Mueller, a UNO diplomatic historian of Europe and originator of the Summer School in Innsbruck, served as the founding director. Günter Bischof, a native of Vorarlberg, graduate of the University of Innsbruck, and diplomatic historian, first served as associate, then as executive, and since Mueller’s retirement in 2002 as director.
Gertraud Griessner, a native of Salzburg who studied foreign languages at the University of Innsbruck, has been the office manager and the heart and soul of CenterAustria’s student exchanges from the beginning.
Assistant Director Margaret Davidson, who holds a PhD in German languages, has directed the AYA program in Innsbruck since 1997.
Hannes Richter has maintained the CenterAustria homepage since 2000.
Since 1979, each year one University of Innsbruck student has received a UNO graduate assistantship. These students are graduate fellows in CenterAustria (see appendix I) and work on Innsbruck and Austrian projects. The Ministry of Science Fellow is also based in CenterAustria and acts as the assistant to the editor of CAS. CenterAustria also regularly appoints short term “junior” and “senior fellows” from Austrian universities who visit UNO to conduct research in American Studies and comparative topics. CenterAustria was in Metropolitan College under the able leadership of Dean Robert Dupont since its inception. In a recent post-Katrina reorganization of UNO, CenterAustria was transferred to the College of Liberal Arts under Dean Susan Krantz. On the University of Innsbruck side, Anton Pelinka, Erich Thöni, and Franz Mathis acted as the Senate representatives for programs with UNO.
STATISTICS: Since its inception, some 9,000 young Americans have attended the UNO Innsbruck International Summer School organized in Innsbruck since 1976 (since 1990 every year up to 50 Innsbruck students also attend Summer School classes free of charge).
Over 300 Austrian students have studied at UNO for a year, many of them finishing degrees (MAs, MBAs, MSs and a couple of PhD’s). Almost 1,000 Austrian students have attended the ASP in February. About 150 American students have participated in the AYA program in Innsbruck. To date twelve “transatlantic” marriages with fifteen children have resulted from these exchanges. Some three dozen faculty members profited from faculty exchanges and scores of UNO faculty have taught in the Innsbruck Summer School (the record holder taught 18 times).
2007 Student Group at UNO
There have been numerous mutual visits by university and city officials as part of the partnership agreements. Few transatlantic university partnerships maintain a denser web of contacts than the Innsbruck – New Orleans one. The net benefit of such active and intense “citizen diplomacy” between Austria and the U.S. is incalculable.
TEN YEAR ANNIVERSARY: CenterAustria is celebrating its 10-year anniversary throughout the academic year of 2007/8. In early September a reception at the Claudiana in Innsbruck on the occasion of the joint conference with the Canada Center of the University of Innsbruck on “Acadiens and Cajuns: The Politics and Culture of French Minorities in North America” opened the festivities with our Innsbruck partners.
In February Erhard Busek, the former Vice Chancellor of Austria and current coordinator of the Stability Pact in the Balkans, gives a lecture on “Nation Building in the Balkans in the 21st Century.” Ambassador Eva Nowotny and Karlheinz Töchterle, the new Rektor of the University of Innsbruck, as well as Franz Mathis, the coordinator of UNO activities in Innsbruck, and Fritz Plasser, the coeditor of CAS are visiting.
In late February 2008 a workshop on “Slavery and Abolition” is conducted and in March 2008 comes the visit of the Innsbruck Ensemble für Modern Musik for concerts and workshops. In early April a joint conference on “The Prague Spring and the Soviet Invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968” is being held in New Orleans in cooperation with the Ludwig Boltzmann Institut für Kriegsfolgen-Forschung in Graz and the Eisenhower Center for American Studies at UNO.
In mid-May in Vienna, a joint-symposium is being organized in cooperation with the Austrian Marshall Plan Anniversary Foundation and the Schumpeter Society of Vienna on “Representations of the Marshall Plan in the Media.” It will be an intense year of academic conversations, art and music programs, and good fellowship with CenterAustria’s numerous Austrian friends and institutional partners. What better way to celebrate almost 35 years of UNO’s contacts with Austria and ten years of CenterAustria then by continuing to intensify our transatlantic networks and friendships?
