Maria Mesner heads the Bruno Kreisky and the Johanna Dohnal Archives, she teaches at the Department of Contemporary History at the University of Vienna and is co-editor of „Austrian Journal of Historical Studies“. Her main research focus is on 20th century political culture in comparative perspective, gender history and the history of the body.
She is Study Program Director of History, deputy head of the Department of Contemporary History and Head of the Gender Research Office at the University of Vienna.
She coordinated numerous research projects, for example on the De-Nazification of the Social Democratic Party of Austria. Currently she is working on economic and social crises of the 1970s and 1980s in Austria. She received national and international awards and grants, for example the Käthe-Leichter-Award for Women’s and Gender Studies, endowed by the Austrian National Bank, and a Fulbright Research and Teaching Grant at the History Department at New York University in 2007.

Prof. Dr. Helga Nowotny (* 1937 in Vienna) is an internationally recognized scientific researcher and professor emerita of ETH Zurich.
She was a founding member and Vice President of the European Research Council (ERC), established in 2007, and its President from 2010 to 2013.
She is currently Chair of the ERA Council Forum Austria and a member of the Austrian Council for Research and Technology Development.

After having completed her Law studies, she worked as Assistant Professor at the Institute of Criminology before moving to New York, where she studied under Paul F. Lazarsfeld and earned her Ph.D. in Sociology from Columbia University.
Back in Vienna, she headed the Department of Sociology at the Institute for Advanced Studies. She then completed a sabbatical at King’s College Cambridge, taught and received a post-doctoral lecturing qualification in Sociology with a focus on Science Studies at the University of Bielefeld. She was Founding Director of the European Centre in Vienna before joining the newly established Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin in 1981/82 as Fellow of the First Year group.
Before being appointed to ETH Zurich in 1995, Helga Nowotny was professor and head of the Institute for Theory and Science Studies at the University of Vienna, founded in 1986. At ETH Zurich, she headed the interdisciplinary Collegium Helveticum in addition to her professorship in Philosophy and Social Studies of Science.

In 2018, Nowotny was awarded the Leibniz Medal of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities.

Barbara Prainsack is a Professor at the Department of Political Science at the University of Vienna, and at the Department of Global Health & Social Medicine at King’s College London. In Vienna she directs the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Solidarity (CeSCoS), as well as the new Research Platform “Governance of Digital Practices”. Her work explores the social, regulatory and ethical dimensions of biomedicine and bioscience, with current research projects focusing on personalised and “precision” medicine, on citizen participation in science and medicine, and the role of solidarity in medicine and healthcare. Her latest books are: Personalised Medicine: Empowered Patients in the 21st Century? (New York University Press, 2017), and Solidarity in Biomedicine and Beyond (with Alena Buyx, Cambridge University Press, 2016).
Barbara is a member of the Austrian National Bioethics Committee advising the federal government in Vienna, of the European Group on Ethics in Science and New Technologies advising the European Commission, and she chaired the European Science Foundation’s (ESF) Forward Look on Personalised Medicine for the European Citizen (2011-2012, with Stephen Holgate and Aarno Palotie). She is also a member of the British Royal Society of Arts, an elected foreign member of the Danish Royal Academy of Sciences and Letters, and an elected member of the Academia Europaea (AE). She is an affiliate of the Centre de recherche en éthique (CRE), University of Montreal, Canada, and of the Centre for Health, Law, and Emerging Technologies (HeLEX) at the University of Oxford.

Oliver Rathkolb (* 1955 in Vienna) is Professor at the Institute of Contemporary History at the University of Vienna. Since 2004 he has, inter alia, been managing editor of the specialised journal “zeitgeschichte” (contemporary history). The numerous awards he has earned include the 2005 Donauland-Sachbuchpreis Danubius and the Bruno Kreisky Prize for the Political Book in the same year (title: Die paradoxe Republik. Österreich 1945-2005, published by Zsolnay Verlag). In 2012, he was awarded the Prize of the City of Vienna for Humanities, followed in 2015 by the Decoration of Honour in Gold of the Province of Vienna, and in 2016 the Grand Decoration of Honour in Silver for Services to the Republic of Austria.

He is also chairman of the jury of the Theodor Körner Prize for Science and the Arts, a member of the international scientific advisory board of the House of European History, European Parliament/Brussels and the Jewish Museum Vienna as well as chairman of the international scientific advisory board of the House of Austrian History.

Research and publication activities:

8 monographs (1 in English), editor of 7 anthologies (4 in English), co-editor of 32 anthologies (3 in English, 2 in Czech); some 200 scientific contributions in Austrian and international specialised papers as well as anthologies.

Focus on:

European history of the 20th century, Austrian and international contemporary and current history in the context of political history, the history of the Austrian republic in the European context, as well as international relations, history of Nazi perception, cultural and media history, economic history (industrial and banking sector), National Socialism and legal history.

Arnold Schmidt (* 1938 in Vienna) studied Physics at the University of Vienna. From 1962 onwards, he contributed towards establishing the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Solid State Physics in Vienna.

From 1966 to 1971, Schmidt was active at the Physics Department of the University of York/England and from then until 1975 at the Physics Department of the University of California/Berkeley.
Since 1986 he has taught as a full university professor at the Institute of General Electrical Engineering and Electronics, and since 2001 at the Institute of Photonics at the Vienna University of Technology.
Arnold Schmidt is a Fellow of the Optical Society of America and the American Physical Society.
From 1994 to 2003, he was President of the Austrian Science Fund, from 2005 to 2009 Chairman of its Supervisory Board.

Arnold Schmidt curated the Science Talks at the Bruno Kreisky Forum.

Arnold Schmidt passed away on July 5, 2024.

Ruth Wodak is Emerita Distinguished Professor of Discourse Studies at Lancaster University, UK, and affiliated to the University of Vienna. Besides various other prizes, she was awarded the Wittgenstein Prize for Elite Researchers in 1996 and an Honorary Doctorate from University of Örebro in Sweden in 2010. She is past-President of the Societas Linguistica Europaea. 2011, she was awarded the Grand Decoration of Honour in Silver for Services to the Republic of Austria, and 2018, the Lebenswerk Preis for her lifetime achievements, from the Austrian Ministry for Women’s Affairs. She is member of the British Academy of Social Sciences and member of the Academia Europaea. In March 2020, she became Honorary Member of the Senate of the University of Vienna.

She is member of the editorial board of a range of linguistic journals and co-editor of the journals Discourse and Society, Critical Discourse Studies, and Language and Politics. She has held visiting professorships in University of Uppsala, Stanford University, University Minnesota, University of East Anglia, and Georgetown University. 2008, she was awarded the Kerstin Hesselgren Chair of the Swedish Parliament (at University Örebrö). In the spring 2014, Ruth held the Davis Chair for Interdisciplinary Studies at Georgetown University, Washington DC. In the spring 2016, Ruth was Distinguished Schuman Fellow at the Schuman Centre, EUI, Florence. 2017, she held the Willi Brandt Chair at the University of Malmö, Sweden. Currently, she is a senior visiting fellow at the Institute for Human sciences, Vienna (IWM).

Her research interests focus on discourse studies; gender studies; identity politics and the politics of the past; political communication and populist discourses; prejudice and discrimination; and on ethnographic methods of linguistic field work.

Ruth has published 10 monographs, 28 co-authored monographs, over 60 edited volumes and special issues of journals, and ca 420 peer reviewed journal papers and book chapters. Her work has been translated into English, Italian, French, Spanish, Hebrew, Portuguese,

Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Polish, Arabic, Russian, Czech, Bosnian, Greek, Slovenian, and Serbian.

Recent book publications include Sociolinguistic Perspectives on Migration Control (Multilingual Matters 2020; with M. Rheindorf); Europe at the Crossroads (Nordicum 2019; with P. Bevelander); The Routledge Handbook of Language and Politics (Routledge 2018, with B. Forchtner); Kinder der Rückkehr (Springer 2018, with E. Berger); The Politics of Fear. What Right-wing Populist Discourses Mean (Sage, 2015; translation into the German Politik mit der Angst. Zur Wirkung rechtspopulistischer Diskurse. Konturen, 2016; second revised and extended edition in press); The discourse of politics in action: ‘Politics as Usual’ (Palgrave, revised 2nd edition 2011); Migration, Identity and Belonging (LUP 2011, with G. Delanty, P. Jones); The Discursive Construction of History. Remembering the German Wehrmacht’s War of Annihilation (Palgrave 2008; with H. Heer, W. Manoschek, A. Pollak); The Politics of Exclusion. Debating Migration in Austria (Transaction Press 2009; with M. Krzyżanowski); The SAGE Handbook of Sociolinguistics (Sage 2010; with B. Johnstone, P. Kerswill); Analyzing Fascist Discourse. Fascism in Talk and Text (Routledge 2013; with J E Richardson), and Rightwing Populism in Europe: Politics and Discourse (Bloomsbury 2013; with M. KhosraviNik, B. Mral).

Website Ruth Wodak