Dr. Elana Shapira, Privat Dozentin
Elana Shapira is a cultural and design historian and lecturer at the Cultural Studies department at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. She has organized and co-organized international symposiums and workshops on the topics of Austrian émigrés in the United States and in Britain, the cultural legacy of Viennese modernism, Jews and cultural identity in Central European modernism, and women artists, designers, architects, and patrons. Her recent co-organized workshop is "Wissen gegen Hass und Antisemitismus" (Human Rights Office of the City of Vienna, 2024). She is the author of Style and Seduction: Jewish Patrons, Architecture, and Design in Fin de Siècle Vienna (Brandeis University Press, 2016). Her recent publications include the co-edited anthologies Émigré Cultures in Design and Architecture (Bloomsbury, 2017), Freud and the Émigré (Palgrave, 2020), and Gestalterinnen: Women, Design and Society in Interwar Vienna (De Gruyter, 2023), as well as the edited anthologies Design Dialogue: Jews, Culture and Viennese Modernism (Böhlau, 2018) and Designing Transformation: Jews and Cultural Identity in Central European Modernism (Bloomsbury, 2021).
Her forthcoming books are the edited volume Austrian Identity and Modernity: Culture and Politics in the 20th Century (Bloomsbury, 2025), co-edited with Daniela Finzi, It Hurts! Violence against Women in Art and Psychoanalysis (De Gruyter, 2025), co-edited with Despina Stratigakos, Finding Ella Briggs: The Life and Work of an Unconventional Architect (Princeton University Press, 2025), and edited volume A Viennese School in Berlin 1900-1933 (De Gruyter, 2026).
Major publications:
Style and Seduction. Jewish Patrons, Architecture, and Design in Fin-de-siècle Vienna, (Boston: Brandeis University Press, 2016).
Edited Volumes
E. Shapira (ed.,) Austrian Identity and Modernity: Culture and Politics in the 20th Century (Forthcoming, Bloomsbury, 2025).
D. Stratigakos and E. Shapira (eds.,) Ella Briggs: The Life and Work of an Unconventional Architect and the Global Quest to Find Her (Forthcoming, Princeton University Press, 2025)
E. Shapira and Anne-Kathrin Rossberg, Gestalterinnen: Frauen, Design und Gesellschaft in Wien der Zwischenkriegszeit. Women, Design and Society in Vienna in the Interwar (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2023)
E. Shapira (ed.,) Designing Transformation: Jews and Cultural Identity in Central European Modernism (London: Bloomsbury, 2021).
E. Shapira and Daniela Finzi (eds.), Freud and the Émigré. Austrian Émigrés, Exiles and the Legacy of Psychoanalysis in Britain (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).
E. Shapira (ed.) Design Dialogue: Jews, Culture and Viennese Modernism (Vienna: Böhlau 2018).
A. J. Clarke and E Shapira (eds.), Émigré Cultures in Design and Architecture, (New York and London: Bloomsbury 2017).
QUALIFICATION
2017-2022 Project Leader FWF research project Visionary Vienna: Design and Society 1918-1934, Design Institute, University of Applied Arts Vienna
2022/23 Researcher, project Image + Platform for Open Art Education, Cultural Studies, University of Applied Arts Vienna
2013-2016 Senior Researcher in the Austrian Science Fund Project: Émigré Cultural Networks and the Founding of Social Design, University of Applied Arts Vienna
EVENTS
2024 co-organizer with Anne-Katrin Rossberg (MAK) Central European Symposium “Crossing Borders: Central European Women in the Arts ” (MAK - Museum of Applied Arts Vienna, Forthcoming January 25-26).
2023 organizer Internationales Symposium „Eine Wiener Schule in Berlin“ (IFK, Forthcoming November 22-24).