Mobile Women/Theatres/Lifes. Female Theatre Managers in the Habsburg Monarchy, 1850–1914
This dissertation project examines female theater entrepreneurs and follows their mobile biographies.
https://www.ruralhistory.at/en/projects/since-2022/mobile-women-theater-life-female-theater-managers-in-the-habsburg-monarchy-1850-1914
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This dissertation project examines female theater entrepreneurs and follows their mobile biographies.
Funding
Förderschiene FTI-Dissertationen 2021, Fördergeber: Gesellschaft für Forschungsförderung Niederösterreich (GFF NÖ)
Duration
November 2022 – October 2025
Project Supervison at IGLR
Oliver Kühschelm
Researcher
Magret Berger
Description
This dissertation project examines female theatre entrepreneurs in the 19th century. It focusses on female actors who were often active in small towns and rural areas of the crown land of Lower Austria and traces their mobile biographies from a transregional perspective. The stage life of the female theatre entrepreneurs studied had its venues throughout the Habsburg Monarchy and beyond.
The project will show that women were often active in leading positions on theatre stages. However, the intensive involvement of women in theatre management in the past has received little attention, which is why there is a lack of well-founded knowledge about it. Research on theatre in small towns and rural areas is of particular importance in that preliminary studies indicate that women in the 'provinces' were particularly often able to take on managerial roles.
In order to make the actors and their practice visible, the project first reconstructs the life and professional practice of selected female theatre entrepreneurs. In doing so, it strives for micro-historical subtlety. In a second step, the study will systematically compare the results. It will also supplement the qualitative analysis with a quantitative survey based on the evaluation of a digitised inventory of theatre almanacs. The project will utilise digital humanities tools, e.g. the knowledge potential of GIS, to depict mobile biographies on maps.
The project combines theoretical concepts and methodological approaches from different research perspectives and disciplines: theatre historiography, women's and business history, biography and mobility research.