The Institute of Culture Studies and Theatre History is a research facility of the humanities, combining basic research with innovative international theoretical approaches.
The goal of research activities at the IKT, the only exclusively transdisciplinary research unit at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, is the analysis of complex cultural systems. Investigations focus on the creation, conveyance and use of collective memory and identity by means of narrative, staging and translation. The Institute represents a research approach that meets the social challenges of our world today, characterized by increasingly heterogeneous and competing identity constructs, and contributes to the pressing issues of European identity. The IKT is thereby connected to major national and foreign research institutes.
Projects at the IKT are conceived and carried out by teams whose technical heterogeneity in transdisciplinary research not only enables the work, but is an indispensable prerequisite. Transdisciplinarity, according to Jürgen Mittelstrass, is based namely on those developments in knowledge and culture which are characterized by complexity, hybridity, non-linearity and heterogeneity. It creates new theoretical structures, methods, and forms of practice. In its research, the IKT uses region-specific resources and thus contributes to the preservation and interpretation of cultural heritage in Europe. The activities of the IKT "aim at a theory of the concrete. Therein lie its uniqueness and its success." (Gotthart Wunberg).
From the overarching perspective of Memory – Narrative, Staging, Translation – Identity, the activities of the Institute for Culture Studies and Theatre History follow the theoretical concepts of the international discourse within cultural studies and develop them further.
Within the framework of these concepts, the Institute defines its major fields of research as follows:
1. Theatre History of the Habsburg Monarchy
2. Sites of Memory – Spaces of Memory
3. Cultures of Knowledge
4. Translation
The collaboration among different disciplines – history, literature and translation; political science as well as theatre history – brings new perspectives to cultural studies.
With a broad programme of events, the IKT participates in the dialogue between the sciences and the public.
1. IKT basic research projects as defined above
2. International interdisciplinary conferences (once per annum)
3. International interdisciplinary workshops (up to three per annum)
4. Monthly ‘jours fixes’ on topics relevant to current dialogue within the cultural sciences; these more informal gatherings also serve to advance and encourage younger scholars
5. The ‘ernst mach forum’ (two panel discussions per annum to which representatives of cultural and natural sciences, medicine, and technology are invited)
6. International programme for the exchange of scholars
7. The Committee for Literary and Cultural Sciences of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (OeAW) and the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (MTA)
8. Publication of the OeAW periodical 'Sprachkunst'
9. Tutoring of advanced (M.A. and Ph.D. level) university students
With a broad programme of events, the IKT participates in the dialogue between the sciences and the public. The research of the Institute is subject to ongoing assessment by an international advisory board.
