Ingo Zechner Explained

Ingo Zechner (born 24 December 1972 in Klagenfurt, Austria) is a philosopher and historian. He is the Director of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Digital History (LBIDH) in Vienna.

Research topics: time and memory, aesthetics (especially visual culture), film, digital media and Holocaust Studies. Further research on the concept of modernity in the fields of Cultural Studies and Post-structuralism (Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida etc.).

Life

From 1991 until 1997 Zechner studied history and philosophy at the University of Vienna; from 1997 until 2001 he completed a PhD Program in philosophy at the University of Vienna supervised by Hans-Dieter Bahr.

Zechner served as a historian at the Jewish Community Vienna from 2000 until 2008. At the Holocaust Victims’ Information and Support Center of the Jewish Community Vienna, headed by Zechner from 2003 to 2008, he dealt with various kinds of National Socialist Deprivation of Property and Restitution. His fields of activity were the restitution of works of art and the restitution of real estate, research on the property of the Jewish organizations in Austria, the reconstruction of the Archive of the Jewish Community Vienna and the planning of the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies (VWI). He was also a member of the Austrian Commission for Provenance Research from 2002 to 2008 and of the Viennese Restitution Commission from 2003 to 2008. Until November 2009 he was the Business Manager of the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies (VWI).

From 2010 to 2011 Zechner was a researcher at the Association for the History of the Labour Movement (VGA) in Vienna. Since 2011 he has been an academic staff member at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for History and Society in Vienna, since 2015 the institute's director. The institute was transformed into the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Digital History in 2019. From 2013 to 2016 Zechner was the Associated Director and Research Coordinator of the IFK International Research Center for Cultural Studies in Vienna.

Various teaching activities, from 1997 to 2000 at the Institute for Philosophy of the University of Vienna (together with Hans-Dieter Bahr), since 2003 at the Institute of Contemporary History of the University of Vienna.

2004 he was a BTWH/IFK-Visiting Scholar at the German Department of the University of California, Berkeley, 2013 the Raab Foundation Fellow at the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum) in Washington, D.C.

He is a participant and project leader at various research projects and holds lectures in Austria, Germany, Switzerland, France, Greece, Sweden, Iceland, Poland, Russia, Israel, Canada and the United States.

Publications (selection)

Monographs
Anthologies
Journals
Sourcebooks
Exhibition catalogs
Articles

External links