During the visit, the collaboration between Katherine Kwa and Gertraud Medicus continued, with a recent journal paper published and another paper submitted to Geotechnique Letters, currently under review. The focus of their collaboration is on using the Hypoplastic constitutive model to analyze embedded anchoring systems for floating offshore renewable energy infrastructure. They employ two numerical approaches, one at an element scale in Matlab and another as a boundary value problem in Plaxis 2D. The visit involved discussions on the design of numerical models and benchmarking for consistency, as well as planning a new workflow between the models for future simulations.

Gertraud Medicus is an expert in Hypoplasticity, and Ms. Kwa expressed pleasure in working with her and learning more about offshore geotechnical applications. A guest lecture was delivered in person, attracting approximately 15 viewers, followed by a Q&A discussion. Katherine Kwas's future plan involves creating 2D-maps of changing soil strength around an anchor to understand the evolving soil response and anchor capacity, leading to another journal paper.

Ms. Kwa highlighted the productivity and value of meeting and discussing in person after two years of virtual collaboration with Gertraud Medicus. 

Read the full report here

The writer and critic, Professor David Herd (University of Kent), participated in "Telling Encounters," an event at the University of Innsbruck devoted to the theme of forced migration. In his lecture titled "Refugee Tales and the Politics of Welcome: Walking Against the Expulsive Environment," he discussed immigration detention as a measure of migration control used in no other European country except the UK.
He outlined the rationale underlying Refugee Tales (www.refugeetales.org/), an internationally acclaimed initiative against the detention of asylum seekers involving high-profile writers, aid-workers, volunteers, and refugees.
In an interview with FREIRAD (to be aired on 23 May), he addressed the danger of immigration policies contravening human rights and the need for international collaborations to work towards a more constructive way of negotiating the forced displacement than is currently prevalent. His stay in Innsbruck served also to plan precisely such a collaboration between Refugee Tales and ARENA (Archive of REfugee NArratives), a project developed by Professor Helga Ramsey-Kurz at the Department of English of the University of Innsbruck.

As a part of this collaboration, two public 'Walks in Solidarity with Refugees' will take place simultaneously in Kent and Tirol on 17 June (for more information, please visit https://www.uibk.ac.at/anglistik/arena/news-events/).

Invited by Prof. Kerstin Neumann and supported by BritInn, in March 2023 Prof. Reinhard Bachmann visited Innsbruck University’s research group of Corporate Sustainability at the Faculty of Business. Reinhard Bachmann is Professor of International Management and Director of the Center for Trust Research at SOAS of the University of London, UK. His research focuses on issues of strategic management, organizational analysis and comparative management. Being an internationally renowned expert in trust research, specifically, the role of social mechanisms (trust, power, etc.) and societal influences (institutional arrangements, cultural traditions) on the structure and strategic organization of business relationships are emphasized in his work. Reinhard Bachmann has published in leading journals such as Organization Studies, Cambridge Journal of Economics, British Journal of Sociology, Journal of Managerial Psychology, Journal of Trust Research, and co-edited various Handbooks and Special Issues of leading journals.
 
At March 29, he gave a brown bag research seminar on the topic “Trust and Institutions”, which was well-attended by faculty and PhD students. In his talk, he analysed trust as a means to coordinate interorganizational relationships. It was argued that, depending on institutional environments, trustbased relationships play out in distinct patterns in different business systems. He further showed that institutions have a crucial influence on the form, amount and intensity of trust building processes in inter-organizational relationships and, hence, shape the quality of relationships between organizations. The arguments and supporting empirical examples were drawn on and at the same time informed Systems Theory, Structuration Theory, New Institutionalism, and Political Economy literature.
 
Beside his interesting talk, Reinhard Bachmann’s visit allowed PhD students to discuss with him their research projects and gain important insights for developing them further. Moreover, his visit opened the possibility to discuss further future research collaboration with University of London.

The mid-term review of this semester’s Masters Design Studio led by Maria- Elena Patru and Florina Pop took recently place at the Institute of Architectural History and Heritage Preservation (Institut für Baugeschichte und Denkmalpflege) of the University Innsbruck.

The participating students were offered the opportunity to gain insight and feedback from the world of practice, by inviting London-based architect Adrian Hill from ‘Hill Patru Architects’ to join as an external guest critic with experience in working with listed buildings in the UK. Architect Hill´s stay was funded by BritInn. The subject of the studio was the re-use of a Grade I listed building, that happens to be the oldest working theatre in the United Kingdom, St. George’s Guildhall in King’s Lynn, Norfolk. The Guildhall of St George in Kings Lynn is a Grade I listed building, dating from 1428. It has, remarkably, worked as a performance venue almost continuously ever since. It is also the only theatre that can claim with solid evidence that William Shakespeare has performed in it as an actor, back in 1593 when the London venues were closed by the plague. Its success as a playhouse peaked in the 1770’, but in the 19th century the Guidhall has suffered a decline, being used as warehouse and then as stage set wokshop with an Arts Centre being inaugurated on site in 1951 by the queen mother. With the closing of the Arts Centre in 2016 St’George’s guildhall now faces an uncertain future. The Shakespeare Guildhall Trust has formed and a creative director, Tim FitzHigham has been appointed in 2022, with a mission to draft a vision for the site of the back of its unique heritage and secure funding for redevelopment.
Students had the opportunity to gain insight from practice which benefited their understanding of the UK planning system as well as the listed building legislation. Adrian Hill was familiar with both the challenges raised by the studio brief and the particularities of the site which enabled him to quickly engage in the discussion and bring new perspectives that had previously been missed. Being an outsider to the studio has offered the students the chance of the exercise in producing a first impression and gauge the reactions of an expert. Students acknowledged and expressed their appreciation for Adrian Hill’s contribution to the design studio and their work.
The collaboration with Adrian Hill was very fruitful for students, lecturers and PhD students of the institute, who had the opportunity to exchange views with him, as an expert from practice, on topics related to preservation of the built heritage in Europe and the UK.

This collaboration is hopefully the first in a series of future collaborations between the University of Innsbruck’s Faculty of Architecture and experts from the field of architecture in the United Kingdom.

Dr. Bauer-Zetzmann from the Department of Classical Philology and Neo-Latin Studies at the University of Innsbruck visited his research colleague Dr. Philip Booth at the Manchester Metropolitan University to discuss their shared research interest in the use of classical learning in Medieval travel accounts. Over and above this, the BritInn-Fellowship was intended to facilitate the planning of future collaborative enterprises which would serve to provide further opportunities for joint research outputs in the years to come.

Before the research visit, Dr. Bauer-Zetzmann and Dr. Booth had already independently collected data on classical references and classical learning in Medieval Latin pilgrimage accounts. Therefore, their first goal during the visit was to discuss the next steps for analysing the data. "This will become a joint publication, a journal article which will serve to investigate the use of classical texts and authors within Latin travel accounts of the late to high middle ages." says Dr. Bauer-Zetzmann.

Moreover, discussions about setting up an interactive database to map the biographies of leading medieval thinkers, teachers, travellers, and pilgrims onto a world map in order to identify possible encounters more easily and systematically, were held during Dr. Bauer-Zetzmann's stay in Manchester. This may evolve into a bigger funding bid in the future. In addition, they explored the holdings of travel accounts in Manchester’s beautiful historical libraries.
The BritInn-Fellowship also served to enhance the academic environment of the department, through the discussions that were held at various moments during the week, but also through Dr. Bauer-Zetzmann’s guest talk on the public of historiography. The guest lecture was held in hybrid format and well-attended by staff and students not only from Manchester Metropolitan University, but also from the University of Manchester and an audience from around the world.

Read the full report here:
BritInn Fellow Report

"My stay at Durham University was a great experience. I applied for this fellowship with the aim of running high-resolution trace element analyses on speleothems using the facility lead by Prof. Baldini", says Dr. Gabriella Koltai about her research visit to Durham University in September 2022.
Dr. Koltai from the Department of Geology at the University of Innsbruck spent five days at the Department of Earth Sciences at Durham University, working on cave deposits in the laboratory.
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She and her research colleagues analysed a stalagmite from an Austrian cave that was deposited at during the last deglaciation, a very interesting period characterized by large climate swings. They were interested in whether this stalagmite retains a volcanic signal related to the Laacher See volcanic eruption. Furthermore, they performed high-resolution trace element analyses of cave deposits, cryogenic cave carbonates to gain further insight into their formation mechanisms.

Moreover, Dr. Koltai gave a public lecture about her ongoing research on cryogenic cave carbonates that was followed by inspiring discussions with other members of the faculty which may lead to future collaborations. They will present these results at a conference (EGU 2023) and continue this research collaboration.

Dr. Koltai summed up her research visit by saying: "Prof. Baldini was extremely helpful and supportive; I had a very inspiring time at the University of Durham. I appreciate the financial support provided by the BritInn, the Faculty of Geology and Atmospheric Sciences, and the Research Center Geodynamics and Geomaterials."

Read the full report here:
BritInn Fellow Report

On 8 - 9 September 2022, the conference "Gender, Society, and Networks between 1750 and 1820: Maria Carolina of Naples-Sicily, a Prism of her Times?" took place at the University of Innsbruck.

"In this conference, we saw Queen Maria Carolina of Naples-Sicily as a prism, or more precisely as an intersection of overlapping crossovers that enables us to contextualise broadly defined social, economic, and political developments of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. This crossover was to be analysed both vertically – through social hierarchies – as well as horizontally across geographic regions throughout Europe in this period. In this context, Maria Carolina of Naples-Sicily served as a primary starting point and as a model for wider considerations of rulership, gender, societal change, familial status, and political participation as well as geopolitical shifts and dynastic integration and competition." says Dr. Ellinor Forster about the event.
Dr. Forster works at the Department of History and European Ethnology at the University of Innsbruck and co-organized the conference. BritInn was pleased to contribute with a fund.

Read the full report by Dr. Forster here:
Conference „Gender, Society, and Networks between 1750 and 1820: Maria Carolina of Naples-Sicily, a Prism of her Times?“, 8th/9th September 2022

Supported by "Förderkreis 1669"

"Austrian Habsburg history tends to be conceived within a European framework with events, people, and places of particular importance centred on the dynasty’s longstanding influence within central Europe." writes Dr. Jonathan Singerton, organizer of the international conference "Global Approaches to Habsburg History: Perspectives, Potentials, Payoffs, and Pathways" in his report.
On 2-3 June 2022, the two-day conference occurred at the University of Innsbruck to discuss the global potential for Habsburg history among a community of leading expert scholars. In total, eighteen papers were presented on themes ranging from transimperial encounters such as Austrian Jesuit imaginaries of Japan to Austria’s role in the definition of the Australian continent to orientalism in the Austrian expeditions to Turkestan or the materiality of museum collecting and royal gift exchanges to the emergence of economic ties from Ostend—once a part of the Austrian Netherlands—and the Atlantic slave trade.
Two keynote speakers, Dr. Alison Frank Johnson from Harvard and Prof. Walter Sauer from the University of Vienna, provided exemplary talks on the Austria’s role in Indian cocaine epidemics and in European colonials respectively. A former host partner of BritInn, Dr. William O’Reilly from the University of Cambridge was invited to present a paper on political economic ideas between Spain and Austria during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

"The aim as we go forward is to continue the dialogue on Habsburg Global history as we fashion a new, wider appreciation for the worldwide impact from and on the Habsburg lands in central Europe." summarises Dr. Jonathan Singerton.

BritInn supported this event with a fund and is happy to have helped making this important dialogue among scholars possible.

Read Dr. Singerton's report here: Report on the International Conference - Global Approaches to Habsburg History: Perspectives, Potentials, Payoffs, and Pathways