The Austrian Marshall Plan Chair
The Relationship with the Austrian Marshall Plan Foundation
The University of New Orleans’ (UNO) Center Austria relationship with the Austrian Marshall Plan Foundation started when it organized a big conference on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Marshall Plan in May 1998. Günter Bischof has been pursuing a deep personal interest in the Marshall Plan’s workings in Austria since his graduate student days at Harvard University.
He noticed in 1997 that the memory of the Marshall Plan was quite shallow in Austria, after having attended conferences elsewhere in Europe. This absence of cultivating the memory of the Marshall Plan in Austria inspired Bischof to organize the New Orleans conference. The top experts on the Marshall Plan in Austria attended the New Orleans meeting. Kurt Löffler and Hans Fußenegger, the leaders of the Austrian ERP-Fonds (ERP = European Recovery Program), attended the meeting and gave a notable paper on the history of ERP-Fund since its foundation in 1962. Ferdinand Lacina, a former Minister of Finance and long-term government official, also attended the New Orleans meeting. Gordon “Nick” Mueller and Günter Bischof presented the case to Löffler, Fußenegger and Lacina that a donation from the ERP-Fonds could start an Austrian Chair program at UNO.
The Marshall Plan Chair program was started in 2001 and the Austrian gift complimented UNO for its long-term partnership with the University of Innsbruck. The New Orleans conference papers were published in both German and English. In order to make the donation to UNO, a mechanism needed to be set up in Vienna to legally transfer the funds abroad to UNO. Under the auspices of the ERP-Fonds the Austrian Marshall Plan Foundation was set up in 1999 to transfer the funds. With the vigorous lobbying of the ERP-Fund in Vienna, the Austrian Cabinet under Chancellor Viktor Klima passed a resolution to endow the new Marshall Plan Jubiläumsstiftung (MP Foundation). After signing an agreement with UNO in January 2000, the new MP Foundation transferred the funds to UNO.
Under the auspices of the Louisiana State University Board of Supervisors matching funds program, UNO received additional funding from the State of Louisiana for the newly endowed Austrian Marshall Plan Chair to be annually filled with a young Austrian scholar to come and teach at UNO. To jump start the program, the first Austrian MP Chair was appointed for the spring semester of 2001. Since then, an additional 15 Austrian scholars from the fields of history, finance, economics, political economy, political science, urban studies, geography, diplomacy, and visual studies have come and taught at UNO for a year. Untold numbers of UNO students thus have profited from their expertise and knowledge. The program’s focus was changed in 2016 with the appointment of a permanent MP Chair at UNO.
Center Austria has continued to engage in programming with the MP Foundation in Vienna. For the 60th anniversary of the Marshall Plan in 2007, Center Austria and the MP Foundation organized a conference in Vienna on the “Selling of the Marshall Plan” with top scholars in the field. The papers of the conference were published by Günter Bischof and Dieter Stiefel, who coedited the volume Images of the Marshall Plan in Europe: Films, Photographs, Exhibits, Posterswhich appeared in the TRANSATLANTICA series and was published by StudienVerlag in 2009.
In addition, in 2007, on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the Marshall Plan, the Austrian Minister of Economics Martin Bartenstein and U.S. Ambassador Susan McCaw decided to start a scholarship program for Austrian and American students to study abroad. 1,000 such scholarships have been funded since 2007. Austrian students have studied at UNO, while UNO students have studied in Austria.
In the fall of 2013, Center Austria and the MP Foundation organized a workshop on a comparison between regional economic development in the U.S. South and the European Union. The papers were edited by Günter Bischof and published as Regional Economic Development Compared: EU-Europe and the American South with innsbruck university press in 2014. With the move of Center Austria into the new International Studies Center at UNO in February 2016, the decision was made to rename Center Austria as “Center Austria: The Austrian Marshall Plan Center for European Studies.” MP Foundation officials were present at the opening and made the announcement to upgrade the Marshall Plan Chair program with an additional gift.
The Austrian MP Foundation has commissioned Günter Bischof to write a book on the Marshall Plan in Austria, published on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of Secretary of State George C. Marshall’s iconic speech at Harvard University, announcing the Marshall Plan. Thus the close cooperation of the Austrian MP Foundation with UNO’s Center Austria as one of its principal partners in the U.S. (next to UC Berkeley and the Wilson International Center for Scholars) is continuing.
Günter Bischof
Director
Center Austria
The Marshall Plan Anniversary Chair 2000 - 2016
2000-2001 FIRST CHAIRHOLDER
Professor Thomas Albrich
Leopold-Franzens University of Innsbruck
Dr. Albrich is Professor of History at the University of Innsbruck and a noted authority on 20th century Jewish history in Central Europe in general and on post-World War II displaced persons (DPs) and Jewish refugees in particular. He has also written on the continuity of prewar and postwar Austrian anti-Semitism, the Allied bombing war in Western Austria during World War II, and the diplomacy of postwar restitution of Jewish property.
2001-2002 CHAIRHOLDER
Dr. Eric Frey
Der Standard, Vienna
Dr. Frey was born in 1963 in Vienna. He is married to the television journalist Katinka Nowotny and has two children (Isabelle and Gideon). He holds a B.A. in International Affairs from Princeton University, an M.P.A. from Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School, and a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Vienna. His career has been in journalism. He was a reporter and Bureau Chief of AP-DOW Jones News Service in Frankfurt, Germany. Since 1991 he has worked for Der Standard, a leading Austrian daily paper. Starting out as a deputy foreign editor, he was foreign director (1995-98) and economics director (1998-2001); and editor-in-chief (present). Since 1995 he has also acted as the Vienna Correspondent for The Financial Times (London).
2002-2003 CHAIRHOLDER
Peter Berger
Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration
Peter Berger, born in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, earned his Ph.D. from the Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration. Since 1983 he has been a member of that university's Economic History Department. In 2000 and 2001 Dr. Berger taught courses in Central European Hhistory and economic history at thhe University of Leiden in Holland. Among Dr. Bergers publications are two-volume study of the Habsburg Empire's successor states in the early 1920's, and ja histrory of the League of Nations' loans to Austria in 1922 and 1931.In fall 2000, the latter book was awarded the prestigious “Boehlau” prize for historical monographs. Dr. Berger is currently working on a concise history of Austria in the 20th century. It is scheduled to appear in the summer of 2003 in German and Dutch editions.
2003-2004 CHAIRLHOLDER
Andrea Grisold
Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration
Professor Grisold authored Regulierungsreformen am Mediensektor – der Fall Österreich [Regulatory Reforms of the Media Sector: The Case of Austria] and Zum Wechselverhältnis von Ökonomie und Kulturindustrien [Interactions Between Economics and Cultural Industries] and edited a few books on gender discrimination in labor markets. Her main fields of research include the international political economy of the media, the changing economic and regulatory environment of culture industries, media policies in small countries, and gendered labor markets. She was a Visiting Professor at Trinity College in Dublin , Ireland .
2004-2005 CHAIRHOLDER
Thomas Froeschl
University of Vienna
Thomas Froeschl grew up in Steyr, Upper Austria. He studied History at the University of Vienna and also held a prestigious fellowship at Johns Hopkins University. He taught as a guest lecturer at the Universities of Leiden (the Netherlands) and Georgetown University. His research interests are in German Reichsgeschichte (history of the Holy Roman Empire), Austrian cultural history and more recently American and Atlantic history. He is the only lecturer at the University of Vienna to regularly teach courses in American History. His survey of U.S. history is soon to be published. While at UNO he taught courses on Austrian Cultural History and a graduate proseminar on Atlantic History.
2005-2006 CHAIRHOLDER
Peter Gerlich
University of Vienna
Professor Gerlich received a M.C.L. in Comparative Law form Columbia University's Law School, and earned a doctorate in law from the University of Vienna. Professor Gerlich served as Dean of the School of Social and Economic Sciences a the University of Vienna, as well as Chair of the Political Science department. He previously taught at Smith College, MA, Nuffield College at the University of Oxford, Stanford University, and Webster University, Vienna, among others.
2006-2007 CHAIRHOLDER
Professor Martin Heintel
University of Vienna.
In the 2006 Fall Semester, Professor Heintel taught GEOG 3390: Special topics class: Regional development in the European Union
2007-2008 CHAIRHOLDER
Dr. Andreas Pribersky
University of Vienna
Since march 2003 senior researcher at the Institute of Political Sciences, Vienna University
1996 - 2003 head of the Social Sciences Department of the Austrian Institute of East- and Southeast European Studies (OSI)
1990 - 1996 director of the Budapest office of the OSI
1985 - 90 research fellow at the Gesellschaft für politische Aufklärung, Vienna
1982 - 85 research fellow at the Institute for Medical Sociology, Vienna
Visiting professor at the Institut d´Études Politiques, Lyon (march 2006)
2008-2009 CHAIRHOLDER
Dr. Elisabeth Springler
University of Vienna of Economics and Business Administration
Dr. Springler earned her Ph.D. in Economics at the Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration. Since 2003, she has been serving as Assistant Professor in the Department of Monetary and Fiscal Policy at Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration, as well as lecturer at BFI Vienna University of Applied Sciences.
Dr. Springler was a Visiting Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley and a Post-Keynesian Economics Workshop Fellow at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.
2009-2010 CHAIRHOLDER
Ambassador Dr. Peter Moser
The tenth annual Marshall Plan Chair for Austrian and European Studies in the academic year 2009-2010 for the first was a diplomat-in-residence. Dr. Peter Moser, a retired diplomat and distinguished former Austrian Ambassador to the United States, Japan and Korea served as Marshall Plan Chair and taught courses as UNO’s first diplomat-in-residence.
2010-2011 Chairholder
Dr. Mariam Irene Tazi-Preve
University of Vienna
The eleventh annual Marshall Plan Chair Mariam Irene Tazi-Preve, born in Innsbruck, Austria, has a PhD in Political Science from the University of Innsbruck. She teaches in the UNO Summer Program and is an awardee of the Daugherty Foundation. She has longstanding research experience in Vienna at the largest research institutions (Austrian Academy of Science, University of Vienna, Ludwig Boltzmann Institute). She was a visiting professor at the Australian National University in Canberra and the Universitat Pampeu Fabra in Barcelona.
Her areas of research are political and feminist theory, theory on civilization, politics and reproduction, and women and Islam. She encourages students to explore the world with new eyes by “decolonizing” civilization from common perspective. She is author, coauthor and editor of several books and numerous scientific articles. Among those of Motherhood in Patriarchy (2013), Fathers Aside (2007) and Family Policy – National and International Perspectives. In 2015 she co-launched Boomerang. Journal of Critique on Patriarchy (Austria, USA) and was in charge of its first volume. Mariam’s recent book The Failure of the Nuclear Family. Capitalism, Love and the State (in German) was released in May 2017 and receives great public attention (interviews, reviews). She is an international lecturer at conferences in Europe and North America, often with an invited presentation and involved in numerous international networks and associations (e.g. Network on the Gift Economy, American Political Science Association, Network of Societies of Peace, Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement).
Website: www.mariamtazi-preve.com
2011-2012 Chairholder
Dr. Monika de Frantz
University of Vienna
2012-14 CHAIRHOLDER
Dr. Berthold Molden
Berthold Molden is a contemporary historian from Vienna, Austria. His interests include the politics of history and memory, the intellectual history of the Cold War, particularly in Latin America, the USA, and Europe, as well as political networks of the Global South in the 20th century.
Berthold received his doctorate at the University of Vienna in 2005 and has since worked as a project director for Cold War Memory Studies at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for European History and Public Spheres (2005-2010) and as visiting professor and university lecturer at the University of Vienna (since 2006, visiting professor for Global History in 2010), the University of Chicago (visiting assistant professor, Mellon Scholar 2011), the University of California, Santa Barbara (visiting scholar 2008), and the University of Innsbruck (2010). He also worked for the Austrian Historical Commission (2000-2001) and was a Research Fellow at the Asociación para el Avance de las Ciencias Sociales, Guatemala (2001-2003).
Research at UNO:
an intellectual biography of late Vienna-born Mexicanist Friedrich Katz (in cooperation with the Katz Center for Mexican Studies at the University of Chicago and generously supported by the Bostiber Foundation);
the internationalist activism of African American movements in New Orleans in the 20th century (Pan-Africanism, solidarity with the Third World, etc.);
and an essay on Günther Anders as a transnational intellectual in the Cold War, based on a contribution to a conference organized by Center Austria at UNO.
Classes taught at UNO:
Fall 2013: “The Black Atlantic and the Global South in History and Theory” (World History Seminar)
Spring 2013: “Fascism – A Global History”
Spring 2013: “History and Memory of the Holocaust”
Fall 2012: “Central America in the Twentieth Century: From Authoritarian Regimes to Democracy?”
2014-15 CHAIRHOLDER
Dr. Karin Liebhart
Department of Political Science
University of Vienna
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2015-2016 Chairholder
Dr. Hans Petschar
Austrian National Librar