Lisa Kirchner

Lisa Kirchner is a historian and currently receives a DOC fellowship of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. She holds a bachelor’s degree in history and political sciences from the Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena and a master’s degree in history from the University of Vienna. As part of her master’s program „Matilda – European MA in Women’s and Gender History“, she spent a term at the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary.

Besides internships in various memorial sites in Germany, she has worked as a project assistant for Erasmus+ exchanges in Italy, for the EuroPride 2019 in Vienna and as an administrative assistant at the dean’s office of the Faculty of Catholic Theology of the University of Vienna.

Research interests: women’s and gender history of the 20th century, history of violence and war, research on ego documents, new military history

Current Research Project:

By using diaries and autobiographical texts written by Austro-Hungarian combatants and noncombatants, Lisa Kirchner investigates in her PhD project experiences of violence during the First World War. With a particular interest in acts of violence applied by the k.u.k. army against civilians, she examines the discursive patterns of what was reported about these atrocities and how gender concepts shaped their representation in personal accounts. The project focuses on low-ranking soldiers and noncombatants such as nurses and female auxiliaries whose voices had little impact on public discourses of wartime violence. In general, public discourses during and after the war ignored, concealed and tabooed the violence that the k.u.k. army actively committed (e.g. massacres, lootings and sexual violence) between 1914 and 1918.