Botstiber Visiting Professorship

The Austrian Studies Program at the UC Berkeley Institute of European Studies is pleased to welcome faculty applications for the position of Visiting Professor, to teach the newly created Botstiber Compact Seminar in Austrian Studies, established with the generous support of The Botstiber Institute for Austrian-American Studies (BIAAS). 

The next Botstiber Compact Seminar in Austrian Studies at UC Berkeley will be offered at the beginning of the Spring 2028 semester for a duration of 5 weeks, beginning January 17 and ending on February 18, 2028.

We invite seminar topics related to Austrian literature, history, politics, or culture, in the broadest sense. Interdisciplinary approaches and themes are encouraged.

Eligibility: Any associate or full professor with a permanent teaching position in the Humanities or Social Sciences and with expertise in Austrian Studies. The Visiting Professorship is also open to professors from universities outside of Austria.

Details: The compact seminar will take place over 5 weeks, with three hours of instruction per week, plus three hours of office hours per week for meetings with students. All classes are in person. Selected professors are expected to remain in Berkeley for the entire 5 weeks teaching period. We prefer the course to be taught in German, with reading materials in German, tailored to undergraduate (BA) students with upper-intermediate (B2)-level knowledge of the German language. We give preference to survey-type courses about a topic that is of interest to a broad range of students.

UC Berkeley is a premier university, located in the San Francisco Bay Area. The Visiting Professor will receive a salary of $12,000 to cover teaching, travel, and accommodation costs.  The salary will be subject to both California state and United States federal taxes, in accordance with the UC Berkeley employment and payroll practices. Upon arrival in Berkeley, visiting professors will need to apply for an American social-security number. Visiting professors must organize their own travel, accommodation, and health insurance coverage during their stay at Berkeley. The visa application and hiring process will be coordinated by the UC Berkeley Department of German, where the visiting professor will be based.

During their stay, the selected Visiting Professor will also give a public lecture—the “Botstiber Lecture”—at the Institute of European Studies and will do so in English. In accordance with the mission of The Botstiber Institute for Austrian-American Studies (BIAAS), the public lecture should refer to the historic relationship between the United States and Austria, including lands of the former Habsburg Empire.

Application Instructions: Applicants must submit the following materials (in English):

• a CV (max 2 pages)
• a course description and syllabus with weekly course content and bibliography. Please write the syllabus in English, but add a short summary (one-paragraph) of the course in German, with the course title in German  (max 2 pages)
• a brief description of up to three possible topics for the Botstiber Lecture (max 1 page)

Please submit application materials as a single PDF file to the Austrian Studies Program Director Jeroen Dewulf: jdewulf@berkeley.edu

Deadline: May 31, 2027

Proposals will be evaluated by a board composed of UC Berkeley faculty that will announce the selected candidate by June 30, 2027. The board will include a representative of The Botstiber Institute for Austrian-American Studies (BIAAS) in the discussion on the topic to be chosen for the Botstiber lecture.

For further information, please contact Jeroen Dewulf at jdewulf@berkeley.edu

2027 Botsiber Visiting Professor Birgit Lang (University of Melbourne)

Birgit Lang is Professor in German at The University of Melbourne and has published extensively on the cultural history of sexuality and psychoanalysis, on exile literature and on translation. Birgit’s contribution to Austrian studies span across all fields of specialization, including the visual turn in sexual science in the early twentieth century, the ways in which the case study genre contributed to the formation and dissemination of knowledge, in thinkers from Sigmund Freud to Leopold von Sacher‑Masoch, and the role cultural memory plays in émigré culture and beyond. Birgit currently works on two new projects: the queer early history of psychoanalysis, based on Otto Rank’s unpublished works, and a cultural history of translation focusing on translatory futures, which examines the translation practice and legacy of British cultural mediators Eden and Cedar Paul. Birgit has held a range of visiting fellowships at the University of Oxford, Duke University, the International Research Center for Cultural Studies (IFK), Vienna, and the Paris-Lodron-University Salzburg.

As Botstiber Visiting Professor at UC Berkeley Birgit will teach a course on the cultural history of gender and sexuality in Austria. The course interrogates how sex and gender were theorized, represented, performed and remembered in Austria from the fin de siècle to the present. It traces continuities and ruptures in artistic, medical and public cultures of modern sexualities in Austria, combining histories of sexology and psychoanalysis, interwar sexual‑education cinema, queer artistic microhistories of the Nazi and Austro-fascist periods, feminist avant garde practices and contemporary trans* film and media. Students will engage directly with a wide range of primary sources and media to trace this long and complex history, placing Austrian debates in Central European and global contexts. This approach enables students to connect local developments with wider historical processes. Birgit will also deliver a public lecture as part of the Botstiber program.