Doctoral project: Between reporting and commentary. Jewish periodicals and the formation of a political-Jewish public sphere in the late Habsburg Empire, 1867 - 1914.

The doctoral project aims to describe the significance of the Jewish press for the genesis of the Jewish public sphere(s) in the Austrian Empire. Their reporting and commentaries on the crystallisation points of political action, such as legislative processes in the Reichsrat and Reichsrat elections, opened up the possibility of informing the Jewish population throughout the empire about these events from a Jewish perspective. The different Jewish currents are reflected in the diversity of the Jewish press landscape, which means that it can be assumed that the thematic treatment and topic setting differed greatly. Against this background, the main question is whether the Jewish periodicals nevertheless or precisely because of this succeeded in influencing the formation of an independent political-Jewish public sphere and what opportunities they had to shape and influence political debates. The aim of the doctoral project is thus to draw an overall picture of the factual and commentary articles on legislative activities and Reichsrat elections and to examine the opportunities for influence through and on the press organs (parliamentarians, Reichsrat debates) on a structural and individual level.

Short CV

After graduating from high school in 2010, Kristin Obländer attended an international language school in Boston/USA before studying History, Political Science and English/American Studies at the Otto-Friedrich University of Bamberg, where she graduated with a Bachelor's degree in 2014. She then went on to complete a Master's degree in History, specialising in "Transcontinental European History in the Modern Age" at the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, which she successfully completed in 2017. As part of her Master's programme, she spent a semester at the Univerzita Karlova v Praze/Czech Republic. She is currently working on her doctoral project on "Jewish Public Spheres in the Habsburg Monarchy" supervised by Prof Dr Malte Rolf at the University of Oldenburg.