For the Vienna case study
Email: katalin.pataki@history.ox.ac.uk
My research interests all relate to the early modern Habsburg territories with their centre in Vienna.
After completing my MA in History at the University of Szeged in 2007, I was employed by the monument care office of Rhineland in Germany (LVR – Amt für Denkmalpflege) and then by the local museum in Hatvan, Hungary. Working with architectural heritage and deepening my knowledge on material culture made me develop a strong interest in the spatiality of historical processes in which local relations and long-distance networks can be brought together. In 2013, i continued my studies at the Central European University where I progressed from an MA program on Comparative History to the doctoral school. I received my PhD in 2020: in my dissertation I studied secular authorities’ capacities to monitor incomes and expenses directly connected to the individual members of religious orders in the Habsburg realms. I was particularly interested in the question of how the standards and criteria dictated from Vienna were constantly negotiated and modified by local actors and circumstances.
My work has been supported by the Central European University providing me the doctoral stipend, the write-up grant and the doctoral research grant, which also enabled me to study for one term at the University of Cambridge in 2017. I have held fellowships at the Charles University in Prague, at the French Research Center in Humanities and Social Sciences (CEFRES) in Prague, at the Leibniz Institute of European History (IEG) in Mainz, and at the Collegium Hungaricum in Vienna. I taught at the Charles University in Prague in 2017 and I was a global teaching fellow at the Asian University for Women in Chittagong, Bangladesh in 2020.
As a research associate for The European Fiscal-Military System project, I am focusing on the hub of Vienna. My research builds upon my former studies of records giving information about the number, skills, qualifications and bodily conditions of individual monks as military-like administrative patterns that ensured the compatibility and commensurability of data on specific groups of the male population. Directly looking at the manpower of the Habsburg armies, I still maintain my interest in individuals – may they be real or fictitious – as crucial units of calculations regarding the supply, transport, billeting and payment of troops. By investigating contracts and records of transactions informing about these activities, I explore the ways in which the demand for foreign troops and credits were determined.
