91ÒùĸÊÓƵ

Dear friends, colleagues and members of the Wirth Institute community:

My term as Director of the Wirth Institute ends on June 30.  As I share this news with you, I look back in gratitude and with pride on four extremely exciting and rewarding years.  During my first year as Director, we were still emerging from the COVID pandemic, but the Institute continued to provide robust online offerings as we worked diligently towards a return to in-person activities.  In the ensuing post-COVID years, the Wirth Institute programmed a dizzying array of events and activities, at home and abroad: from scholarly symposia and workshops to guest lectures, concerts, film screenings and exhibitions, not to mention many community-oriented events, like our annual Christmas concerts, Oktoberfest celebrations in Calgary, and our monthly Central European Cafes.  We also produced our own Central European cookbook, a number of CDs, and have two major academic book publications forthcoming. 

The Institute hosted several wonderful cohorts of doctoral fellows from Central Europe over the past four years, along with a number of short- and long-term visiting professors from Austria, Poland and Hungary, from a variety of disciplines.  Perhaps most significantly, we forged new relationships with partner institutions in Europe, negotiating and signing cooperation agreements with ELTE in Budapest, with Masaryk University in Brno, and with the University of Zagreb; and we  deepened our ties with important local and regional partners, especially the Jewish Federation of Edmonton, the Canadian Polish Congress, the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences and the Hungarian Diaspora Council.

The Institute also celebrated its 25^th anniversary while I was Director, and we marked this momentous milestone with a number of large-scale, signature events, including: the visit of American journalist and author Anne Applebaum to campus, to speak to a packed house at the Timms Centre on the question of “the future of Central Europe”; our Mahler in the Mountains musical collaboration in Calgary and Canmore, which featured musicians from 91ÒùĸÊÓƵ and young composers from Austria and Canada; and our gala Diplomatic Dialogue event in Ottawa, which included the ambassadors and deputy ambassadors from the seven Central European countries that fall under the Institute’s ambit.

These special events crystallized and confirmed what I’m sure most of us already know: that Central Europe offers a rich and fascinating past to study and enjoy, but that it is also one of the world’s most important political, economic and cultural regions today, and promises to play a key role in the future of Europe and beyond.  One of the best parts of serving as Director of the Wirth Institute has been the opportunity to celebrate and promote the richness and complexity of Central Europe, which has become a second home for me: I have traversed the region countless times, have spent time living and working there, and have friends and colleagues in many different cities across Central Europe.  During my tenure as Director, my own research interests—which focus on the musical, cultural and intellectual history of fin-de-siècle Vienna—have broadened and evolved to include alternative narratives of musical modernism, Jewish and Holocaust Studies, and issues of identity in Central European popular music.  I can happily say that, from start to finish, the job of Director has not been a job to me at all, but rather a labour of love, with my deep personal attachment to the region in perfect alignment with my scholarly pursuits.  

I will spend my final months as Director in Europe, where I will meet with institutional partners across the continent, will give a series of guest lectures on music and the Holocaust in Poland, Austria and Hungary, will co-host the conference “Modes of Modernism: Vienna 1900 and Beyond” (in collaboration with another new partner, the Ingeborg Bachmann Centre for Austrian Literature and Culture at the University of London), and will select next year’s cohort of Central European doctoral fellows. 

It has been a great honour to serve as Director of the Wirth Institute, and I would like to warmly thank my academic colleagues in 91ÒùĸÊÓƵ and Europe (especially the members of the Wirth Academic Advisory Board and the Wirth Alumni Network) and members of 91ÒùĸÊÓƵ’s Central European diaspora communities, for their many contributions to and ongoing interest in the activities of the Wirth Institute.  But I would especially like to thank the staff of the Institute—Sylvia Chrobak, Rychele Wright and Alicia Campbell: they have been instrumental in the many successes that the Wirth Institute has enjoyed these past four years and will no doubt continue to enjoy.  I could not have asked for better colleagues and friends. 

On July 1, I pass the torch to a new Director, and will return to my professorship at the Augustana campus of the 91ÒùĸÊÓƵ, from where I will I observe with great interest the next chapter of the Wirth Institute.  After four years of incredibly diverse and substantial scholarly and cultural programming and energetic community engagement, I believe the Institute is well positioned for continued success in the future, and I wish the next Director the very best of luck and all the success possible in the years to come. 

Dr. Alexander Carpenter
07 May 2025