Priv.-Doz. Dr. Tamara Scheer; Visiting Fellowship 2023/24
I am a historian teaching at the University of Vienna, Institute for Eastern European History, and a fellow of RECET. I acquired my venia docendi in 2020 with a thesis about Language and Loyalty in the Habsburg Army, 1867-1918. Since completing my doctoral thesis in 2007 about the state of emergency during First World War, I have been working at several institutions in Austria and abroad, among them my early post doc project about the Austro-Hungarian presence in Sanjak Novi Pazar, 1879-1908 at Andrássy University in Budapest, and with a Dobrovský Fellowship at the Masaryk Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague. Currently, I am also heading a research project entitled Turning a forgotten Burial Place of 450 Austro-Hungarian Soldiers from First World War in Rome into a 21st Century Memorial at the Pontifical Institute Santa Maria dell'Anima in Rome.
Visiting Fellowship in December 2023
I will use my fellowship at INZ to conduct academic exchanges and gather information to complete a project proposal aimed at examining the relationship between the Roman Catholic Church and the late Austrian Habsburg state in terms of language diversity. There are a number of images and depictions that show Emperor and King Franz Joseph kneeling before a Roman Catholic cleric. Such images were intentional representations. The monarch described his position as given by God's grace with the corresponding task: for God, Emperor and Fatherland. He thus placed himself under God, but not under Roman Catholic institutions, for he possessed a number of prerogatives. In many matters of Roman Catholic church institutions he had the last word. How these prerogatives were administered in dualistic Austria has rarely been addressed in historiography. As in many other matters of state, Francis Joseph governed his law through a bureaucracy subordinate to him, from the ministries down to the provinces, which overlooked the many municipalities. Roman Catholic Church authorities had to follow this bureaucratic process when something needed state approval. The scholars working at INZ have excellent expertise on many aspects of my planned research focus, and there are also numerous archives and libraries in Ljubljana. Both will contribute to the substantiation of my hypotheses and research questions.
Publications
Die Nationalitäten- und Sprachenvielfalt in der österreichisch-ungarischen Armee (1867-1918), Wien: BMLV, 2022. [Language Diversity and Loyalty in the Habsburg Army, habilitations thesis, available open access: https://utheses.univie.ac.at/detail/57914#
with Clemens Ruthner, Österreich-Ungarn und Bosnien-Herzegowina, 1878-1918: Annäherungen an eine Kolonie. Tübingen: Francke, 2018.
with Rok Stergar, Ethnic Boxes: The Unintended Consequences of Habsburg Bureaucratic Classification, in: Nationalities Papers: The Journal of Nationalism and Ethnicity, 46, 4 (2018), 575-591.
The Non-Uniformity of the Church: Language Diversity and the Roman Catholic Dioceses in late Habsburg Austria, in: Annales, Series Historia et Sociologia (will be published 2023).
Find all publications in full text here:
https://univie.academia.edu/TamaraScheer
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Tamara-Scheer
