2026 University of Vienna, Research Center for the History of Transformations (RECET)
Host Organization: University of Vienna
Website: https://www.univie.ac.at/en/ ; https://www.recet.at/
Organization Profile: The University of Vienna is Austria’s largest university with some 11,000 employees and 85,000 students. The Research Center for the History of Transformations is a research institute within the university. It currently has approx. 30 employees, mostly post- and predoctoral researchers.
City: Vienna
Internship format: In-person
Internship Department: Research Center for the History of Transformations (RECET)
Department Description: RECET is a research center that uses the post-1989 transformations in Central and Eastern Europe as a starting point for the comparative study of social, economic, and cultural transformations in the wake of deep historical caesuras at different times and in different parts of the world. It follows the concept of Comparative Area Studies. Its main focus on Central and Eastern Europe is enlarged by comparisons and the study of entanglements with other world regions, such as East Asia, and the co-transformation of Western countries. Research is clustered in five main research areas: “Transformation from Below,” “Economic Thought and Reform Politics,” “Migration and Transnationalism,” “Cultural Transformations,” and “Social Movements and Volunteerism.”
Project description:
- Project 1: The intern will help the researchers monitors the flow of goods in the Austrian arms industry and among Austrian arms dealers between 1954 and 1994. They will collate data and ultimately produce an interactive map showing the destination countries and the types of weapons sold there. The first step will involve searching through approximately 10,000 pages of scanned archive materials for the destination countries of arms deals. The second step will be to design an interactive world map using Mapbox or similar software.
- Project 2: The internship would be part of a research project on West-German transformation history conducted by Dr. Jannis Panagiotidis, the scientific director of RECET. The objective will be the digitization of archival materials, specifically lists of names from the pre- and postwar periods with additional data (mostly dates and places of birth). Some of these lists are machine-written, which should allow for relatively simple OCR readability. Others are handwritten and might require more direct engagement with transcription. Time allowing, the intern should also identify the stated places of birth and code them geographically.
- Project 3: This is preliminary research for Agata Zysiak’s ERC StG Class-Up on upward mobility under state-socialism. The tasks are related to the press query on daily press discourses about class and upward mobility in the 1940s and 1950s, based on clusters of selected terms. The query includes online available databases with OCRed papers; therefore, the query includes an automatic search for selected fragments and qualitative selection of materials for further coding and building a database under the project leader's supervision.
Number of Opening(s): 3 (One for each project)
Work Hours and Internship Start/End Dates: (Monday to Friday, June 15 –August 7, 2026): Five days, 35-40 hours a week.
Work Attire: Casual
Local language: German
Local language level needed: Intermediate reading, writing, and speaking (two-year level at Stanford) required for Project 1. Not required for Project 2 or 3
Additional desired intern qualifications:
Project 1
- Database skills, knowledge of Mapbox or similar map display software
- Good reading skills for text analysis
Project 2
- While German is not needed in principle, some knowledge of the language might be an advantage in working with the sources (which are, however, not narrative sources, so there will be no need to read longer texts in German). Ideally, the intern has some training in reading historical (twentieth century) handwriting. Some knowledge of German history is also an advantage.
Project 3
- Reading ability (from A1) in one of the following languages: Polish, Serbo-Croatian, Slovenian, or Romanian
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