Verena Stern

2016-2017

Verena Stern, PhD candidate, Austria

Verena Stern is a political scientist with a focus on political sociology, protest and social movements. She is currently working on her PhD, tentatively entitled “Putting the Move in Social Movements: Protesting against Deportations and for Refugees’ Right to Stay.” She is particularly interested in deportations as a means to reconstruct nation-state sovereignty, in the people affected by this practice and in protests against it. Before taking up the position as Doctoral Research Fellow in Edmonton, Stern was working as a researcher on a project called “Taking Sides: Protest against the Deportation of Asylum Seekers.” The study compared anti-deportation protests in Austria, Switzerland and Germany and was funded by their respective national science funds (FWF, SNF and DFG).
In 2013-2014, Stern served as the Center for Austrian Studies’ BMWFW Doctoral Research Fellow at the University of Minnesota. Additionally, Stern served as an undergraduate teaching assistant and a graduate research assistant in the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Vienna. Stern´s graduate thesis, which was later published as “Bodies That Splatter: Feministische Anrufungen, Performativität und Körper in Quentin Tarantinos Death Proof,” attempted to read film politically and test it on feminist theoretical approaches, such as feminist interpellations, performativity, and the body. After receiving her degree in Political Science in Vienna, she taught an M.A. class on feminist theory at the University of Graz’s Department for Gender Studies, as well as B.A. classes on political science, academic writing and Austrian and EU politics at the University of Vienna’s Department of Political Science.

Anna Windisch

2011-2012

Doctoral candidate at the Institute for Theater, Film and Media Studies, University of Vienna, Austria 

After receiving my masters degree in Theatre, Film and Media Studies from the University of Vienna in 2010, it proved difficult to find the appropriate funding for my doctoral dissertation or get a position at my department. I started my doctorate nonetheless and in my dissertation project I examine national and international phenomena of Early Cinema and Silent Film exhibition. My main hypothesis evolves around a cultural transfer in silent film music between Austria and the United States.

My successful application for the Wirth fellowship provided me with a research assistant position that comes with many benefits. The most obvious one is the amount of time that I can dedicate to my dissertational project, and I am currently focussing on North American practices of Silent Film exhibition. Furthermore, I make use of the local resources and library services specialized in my field of research that I cannot find to this extent in Vienna. The library at the University of Alberta has a vast selection of literature on my topic, and, in addition, it proved simple to request items from universities worldwide via the interlibrary loan.

Beside my academic work, Edmonton turned out to be a cultural experience in many ways. The so-called ‘culture-shock’ is not a major one, yet, experiencing the areal distances of Canada, living in a remote place for a full year and being confronted with a ‘North American way of life’ to some degree, leads me to re-examine my own lifestyle and certain values and forms a valuable personal experience.