Universities in Imperial Austria 1848?918 ― A Social History of a Multilingual Space

Combining history of science and a history ofuniversities with the new imperial history, Universitiesin Imperial Austria 1848–1918: A Social History of a Multilingual Space byJan Surman analyzes the practice of scholarly migration and its lastinginfluence on the intellectual output in the Austrian part of the HabsburgEmpire.

The Habsburg Empire and its successor stateswere home to developments that shaped Central Europe's scholarship well into thetwentieth century. Universities became centers of both state- and nation-building,as well as of confessional resistance, placing scholars if not in conflict,then certainly at odds with the neutral international orientation of academe.

By going beyond national narratives, Surmanreveals the Empire as a state with institutions divided by language but unitedby legislation, practices, and other influences. Such an approach allowsreaders a better view to how scholars turned gradually away fromstate-centric discourse to form distinct language communities after 1867; theseinfluences affected scholarship, and by examining the scholarly record, Surmantracks the turn.

Drawing on archives in Austria, the CzechRepublic, Poland, and Ukraine, Surman analyzes the careers of several thousandscholars from the faculties of philosophy and medicine of a number of Habsburguniversities, thus covering various moments in the history of the Empire forthe widest view. Universities in ImperialAustria 1848–1918 focuses on the tension between the political andlinguistic spaces scholars occupied and shows that this tension did not lead toa gradual dissolution of the monarchy’s academia, but rather to an ongoing developmentof new strategies to cope with the cultural and linguistic multitude.