After 18 years of research and teaching at Princeton University in the United States, historian Helmut Reimitz is returning to Austria. He has been appointed Professor at the Institute of Historical Research at the University of Vienna and designated Director of the Institute for Medieval Research at the Austrian Academy of Sciences (OeAW), a position he will take up in January 2027.

ÖAW President Heinz Faßmann says: “With Helmut Reimitz, we are gaining an internationally highly regarded historian. The fact that a leading scholar is returning to Vienna after many years at a top university such as Princeton is by no means a matter of course and sends a strong signal about the attractiveness of Austria as a research location. At the same time, it shows what can be achieved when the University of Vienna and the Academy pool their respective strengths.”

From Vienna to Princeton and back to Vienna

“It is a great privilege to return to Vienna,” says Helmut Reimitz. He adds: “With the Academy’s Institute for Medieval Research and the University of Vienna’s Institute of Austrian Historical Research, Vienna has been and remains one of the internationally most recognised centres in my field. Both institutions, the Academy and the University, share an impressive vision of promoting scientific excellence and communicating the relevance of academic research to society. This is also an important motivation for establishing the SCOOP Network, which was launched in Princeton, as a new hub and central platform in Vienna.”

SCOOP (Source Codes of the Past) is an international network dedicated to the automatic transcription and analysis of handwritten historical sources. It brings together people from very different corners of the scholarly world: historians, philologists, and palaeographers; archivists and librarians; computer scientists, machine learning researchers, and software engineers. On 7 and 8 September 2026, the network will meet in Vienna at the invitation of Reimitz. More than one hundred experts will discuss different aspects of AI-assisted digitisation, including the further development of AI models, technical architectures for the recognition of handwritten texts, and the use of big data in historical research.

About Helmut Reimitz

Helmut Reimitz was born in Vienna in 1965 and received his doctorate from the University of Vienna in 1999 with a dissertation on the “Codex Vindobonensis”, a Carolingian history book. After several years of research at the OeAW’s Institute for Medieval Research, he was a Visiting Fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies before joining Princeton University as an Assistant Professor in 2008. In 2013, he was appointed Full Professor in Princeton’s Department of History.

His research stays and visiting professorships have taken him, among other places, to the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris and the University of Tübingen. His research, which focuses, among other things, on the transformation of Europe in the Early Middle Ages as well as questions of identity and diversity during this period, has been recognised through major awards and memberships, including membership in the Medieval Academy of America.