In January 2024, Fulbright Austria's board welcomed two new members: Alexandra Ganser-Blumenau and Margitta Mätzke. We asked them to share a short biography with our community. We look forward to working with the new and returning members of our board!
Introducing the new members of the 2024 board
9 January 2024Fulbright Austria welcomes two new members to its board in 2024.
Alexandra Ganser-Blumenau
Alexandra Ganser holds the chair in North American studies (literatures and cultures) at the University of Vienna, where she also heads the research platform and "Mobile Cultures and Societies: Interdisciplinary Studies on Transnational Formations" FWF-doc.funds PhD program and co-directs the Centre for Canadian Studies (ZKS). She has been an FWF Elise Richter Fellow and is author of Crisis and Legitimacy in Atlantic American Narratives of Piracy, 1678-1861 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) as well as co-editor of the "Maritime Literature and Culture" book series with Meg Samuelson and Charne Lavery (Palgrave Macmillan). A Fulbright alum and former Daniel Christoph Ebeling fellow at the American Antiquarian Society, Alexandra’s research interests currently focus on American astrocultures and astrocolonialism. Other book publications in the field of mobility studies include Mobile Kulturen und Gesellschaften / Mobile Cultures and Societies, ed. With Annegret Pelz (University of Vienna Press, 2020); Pirates, Drifters, Fugitives: Figures of Mobility in American Culture and Beyond, ed. With Katharina Gerund and Heike Paul (UV Winter, 2012), and Roads of Her Own: Gendered Space and Mobility in American Women’s Road Narratives, 1970-2000 (Rodopi 2009).
Margitta Mätzke is a professor of politics and social policy at Johannes Kepler University Linz (JKU). She holds a PhD in political science from Northwestern University (2005) and the venia legendi from the Georg August University of Göttingen (2012). Her research interest is in decision-making and institutional dynamics in liberal democracies, specifically focused on comparative health and social-policy analysis as well as questions of governance and federalism from a policy perspective. Her research is published in a range of international academic journals, such as the Journal of Policy History,the Journal of Public Policy, Social Policy & Administration, the German-language journal Leviathan,the Journal of Comparative Public Policy Analysis,the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law, and the Journal of European Social Policy. She was also part of a COST Action on social services and in this context co-edited the volume of Social Services Disrupted. Changes, Challenges and Policy Implications for Europe in Times of Austerity.
At JKU, Margitta is chair of the Institute for Politics and Social Policy, head of the Social Sciences and Humanities Section in the Faculty of Social Sciences, Economics & Business, and the academic director of the Comparative Social Policy and Welfare international MA program. She is currently deputy chair of the Austrian Political Science Association.
Margitta has had the opportunity for international academic mobility and has benefited tremendously, both professionally and personally, from one year as a graduate exchange student at the University of California, Berkeley, the PhD program at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, the postdoc experience at the Georg August University of Göttingen as well as shorter research stays at the Max-Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne, the Bremen International Graduate School of Social Sciences and the International Institute at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is committed to sharing these benefits and excited about the chance to now play a part in ensuring that others also have the opportunity for international academic mobility.
