Austrian Visiting Associate Professor Helga Mitterbauer has returned from her trip to Europe with three recently released books, one of them the first volume of a complete edition of works by Viennese writer Elfriede Gerstl. Released this June, the volume has risen to second place on the Austrian national broadcaster (ORF)'s bestseller list.
"Elfriede Gerstl is one to watch out for among the Austrian post WW II avant-garde movement. She has been underestimated for a long time," explains Mitterbauer co-editor with Christa Gürtler, a literary critic from Salzburg. The first of the projected four volumes contains early poetry, radio plays and Gerstl's only novel.
In cooperation with András Balogh, a professor of German Studies at the Etvős Lorand University in Budapest and at the University of Cluj-Napoca (Romania), Prof. Mitterbauer published a volume of articles written by PhD students and experienced scholars from Austria, Hungary, Croatia, Romania, and Luxembourg, investigating memory and forgetting in Central Europe (Gedächtnis und Erinnerung in Zentraleuropa).
The third book is a special issue of the Yearbook in Cultural Studies (Kulturwissenschaftliches Jahrbuch Moderne) on Age/Aging. Dr. Mitterbauer founded this successful yearbook in 2005. Together with the sociologist Katharina Scherke, Associate Professor and Vice-Dean at the University of Graz, she collected articles by authors from several disciplines dealing with discourses of aging societies; thereby fulfilling the yearbook's cross-disciplinary and transcultural mandate.
In the Fall Term, Helga Mitterbauer will teach two classes on Austrian topics: GERM 274 "The Culture and Civilization of Austria: An Introduction" and GERM 476/676 on "Love, Sex, and Society: Arthur Schnitzler and the Drama around 1900."