Julia Anna Tyll-Schranz

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I am currently employed as a university assistant at the Center for Transdisciplinary Historical and Cultural Studies. I studied History and International Development at the University of Vienna and Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. For my master’s thesis, I conducted an oral history project in the field of Austrian asylum history since 1945. As a research assistant for the project “Youth in the Balkans and their Cultures of Communication, Non-Communication, and their Notions of Reconciliation” at the Department of Contemporary History (University of Vienna), I investigated regional youth encounters in South East Europe as a setting for dealing with the past and reconciliation. In my current dissertation project, I analyze the effects of the Post-Yugoslav wars on (Post-)Yugoslav migrants and their communities in Vienna. As a fellow of the Vienna Doctoral School of Historical and Cultural Studies, I am active in the school’s “Economic and Social Spaces” research cluster.

Research interests: The Post-Yugoslav wars in the diaspora Austrian asylum and migration history since 1945:; historical narratives and cultures of memory in South East Europe; oral history as a method of contemporary history

Current research project: Naher, ferner Krieg. Alltagspraktiken (post-)jugoslawischer Migrant*innen in Wien in den 1990er Jahren* (Working title)
When mass violence, forced migration and the seizure and destruction of property ensued in the wake of the Yugoslav disintegration in the 1990s, this also had an effect on (Post-)Yugoslav diasporas around the world. In my dissertation project, I am investigating these effects on (Post-)Yugoslav migrants and their ethnically-inclusive communities in Vienna, based on narrative interviews, as well as written and visual records preserved in private collections and the archives of (Post-)Yugoslav migrant organizations. I argue, that migrants from former Yugoslavia in Vienna experienced the “distant” wars as quite “near” due to their strong everyday transnational ties to their places of origin and close contacts with other migrants from the then war-torn region. Since the 1960s Yugoslav migrants living in Vienna had engaged in various transregional practices, among them investing in businesses and real-estate in Yugoslavia, communicating with and visiting friends and relatives, vacationing, recruiting Yugoslav workers for their Austrian employers, as well as forming Yugoslav clubs and businesses in Austria. While these ties to Yugoslavia, as well as the connections with other (Post-)Yugoslav migrants were surely disrupted by the wars in the 1990s, I presume they were rather transformed then cut off completely. I want to better understand migrants “lived transregionalities” and the different ways Yugoslavia’s violent collapse effected their everyday transregional practices and identifications, thus posing the following questions: How did migrants’ connections to their places of origin change in the context of geographic and mental borders being redrawn? How did the wars in former Yugoslavia effect the manifold ties and forms of organizing between migrants in Vienna? With my dissertation, I aim to contribute to (Post-)Yugoslav Austrian migration history, and in a broader sense to a differentiated understanding of transregionality within migration research. *Working title inspired by Christoph Baumgarten, „Wie ein ferner naher Krieg ins Wohnzimmer kam.“ In: Balkan Stories, 20.06.2016, online unter: balkanstories.net/2016/06/20/wie-ein-ferner-naher-krieg-ins-wohnzimmer-kam/ [14.01.2022].

Publications

  • „Macondo oder die Arche Noah. Erinnerungen an transkulturelles Zusammenleben in Simmering.“ In: Senol Grasl-Akkilic, Marcus Schober, Regina Wonisch (Hg.), Aspekte der österreichischen Migrationsgeschichte (Wien 2019) 188-214.