Stefan Wedrac
Stefan Wedrac, born in Judenburg/Styria in 1982, holds a doctorate in history and has worked as historian in various positions for the University of Vienna, the Compensation Fund for Victims of National Socialism, the Vienna Regional Health Insurance Fund, two FWF projects, the Institute for Modern and Contemporary History Research of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, the Institute for Contemporary History at University of Vienna and the Research Centre for Legal Source Research at the Institute for Legal and Constitutional History at University of Vienna. His research interests include Austrian-Italian history (especially Trieste), the First World War (Isonzo), Austrian brewery history (Zipf), history of health insurance funds (Vienna Workers' Health Insurance Fund) and the history of law, justice and science (especially supreme courts), which often took him to archives in Rome, Berlin and Washington D.C.
Areas of Research
- Late Habsburg Monarchy (1789-1918)
- First World War
- History of Trieste, Italy and Italians in Austria-Hungary
- History of law and justice (1700-1955)
- History of the Austrian brewing industry in the 19th and 20th centuries
Current research
Project “Trieste in the First World War”: As part of the project "Trieste in the First World War", the fate of this important port in the global conflict is to be investigated. Main focus is providing an insight into administrative problems of a city during war. These include, for example, food supply, maintaining order in a city initially flooded with refugees then depopulated, and combating epidemics such as cholera that emerged soon after the outbreak of war. The main sources are files of the governor's office and the Trieste police directorate in the Archivio di Stato Trieste. Holdings of the Ministry of the Interior and the Austro-Hungarian 5th Army in the Austrian State Archives are also used. The strong foundation of sources makes it possible to relativise or characterise as inaccurate older statements made in strongly nationalistic works on this topic about alleged national partisanship of the Trieste administration. Methodologically, the work is orientated towards the approaches of urban historiography, network analysis and systems theory. The work of military and civilian authorities will be researched, systematically analysed and scrutinised.