Vivian Virginia Zech

My thesis is dedicated to the art historian Betty Kurth and poses the question of which approaches can be used to address female biography in contemporary cultural studies, without using the biographed person* to underscore epistemological interests, monumentalizing and/or transfiguring her*. Four chapters examine the social, political, cultural and economic environments in which Betty Kurth moved during her lifetime (1878–1948). They interweave the Austro-Hungarian monarchy with the women's rights movements in the fading 19th century, the beginnings of art history as a discipline right up to popular education in the political period of so-called Rotes Wien, the global movements of persecuted and fleeing Europeans since Adolf Hitler's National Socialist party gained power and the experience of the 1930s and '40s immigration policies of Great Britain and the USA from the perspective of two single, self-confident career women.