Verena Radner

Verena Radner is a doctoral student at the Department of Economic and Social History at the University of Vienna. During her previous studies at the University of Vienna, the Rothberg International School in Jerusalem and the Central European University in Vienna, she focused primarily on various aspects of women´s and gender history. In her master’s thesis, she explored court cases involving divorce and marriage annulments in mid-19th century Linz, Upper Austria. For her dissertation, she has shifted her focus to marriage networks, labor relations, kinship and gender dynamics within influential innkeeper families in 18th-century South Tyrol, with a particular emphasis on the role of widows in these families.

Research interests: Women's and Gender history, biographical research, history of marriage and divorce, legal and social history of contracts concerning wealth and inheritance

Current research project: In her PhD project, Verena Radner examines the marriage networks of influential innkeeper families in Innichen and Niederdorf. While both of these places are today small and seemingly unimportant villages in the South Tyrolean Puster Valley, they were once crucial hubs along trade routes that connected Southern Tyrol with Southern Germany and Italian cities like Trieste and Venice. Through her dissertation, Verena Radner aims to combine aspects of gender, social history, legal history and materiality in order to provide a broader understanding of how these influential inns and innkeeper families operated as "multifunctional hubs" and accumulated their significant wealth.