josef.koestlbauer(at)oeaw.ac.at
+43-1-51581-7216
Josef Köstlbauer has been working as a research associate in the research unit History of the Habsburg Monarchy since november 2025.
Josef Köstlbauer is a historian based at the Institute for Habsburg and Balkan Studies at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Previously, he held positions as a research associate at the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies (BCDSS) at the University of Bonn and as a postdoc in the ERC project “The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation and Its Slaves” at the University of Bremen. Josef Köstlbauer history, communication sciences in Vienna, Berlin and New Orleans and received a PhD (with honors) from the University of Vienna. He has held numerous scholarships, most recently a Heinz-Heinen-Fellowship at the University of Bonn (2020/21). His publications cover a broad range of topics, including forms and practices of enslavement in early modern Europe and the Atlantic World, historical semantics, 18th-century Protestant missions, colonial borderlands in North America, the history of digital games; and baroque allegorical images. He is currently finishing a book titled “Cosmopolitan Dependencies: Understanding Slavery Among the eighteenth-century Moravian Brethren.”
Period: early Modern Era, Nineteenth Century
Area: Habsburg Monarchy, Holy Roman Empire, Ottoman Empire, North America, Caribbean.
Topics: slavery studies, historical semantics, serfdom; mission history, borderlands in the early modern period; early modern concepts and ideas of Europe; digital humanities, media science and media history, history of digital games, simulation and counterfactuality
