2008 Project Conference:



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In the autumn of 2008 the Vienna Café project hosted a major two-day international conference at the Victoria and Albert Museum and Royal College of Art, entitled The Viennese Café as an Urban Site of Cultural Exchange.

A book featuring essays by selected speakers from the conference and member of the project team will come out in 2010 with Berghahn Books.

Although the Viennese coffeehouse has long been recognised as a site of importance, there has as yet been no in-depth scholarly investigation of how it functioned in relation to the broader culture of Vienna at this time. The cultural significance of the café provides a central theme for scholars from the fields of visual, social, literary and cultural history to meet and explore the similarities, differences and shared points of interest in recent research into Vienna 1900. The programme examines the café from a variety of perspectives, with the aim of deepening our understanding of the nature of this urban space, and the cultural exchanges and performances that went on there.

arches

Registration RCA mapV&A map

Friday 17th October
At the V & A Museum - The Lecture Theatre
10.00 Welcome - Introduction of the Project and the Conference
10.15 Christoph Grafe and Franziska Bollerey - Technische Universiteit Delft
Cafés and bars: places for sociability
10.45 Jill Steward - Northumbria University
The Viennese café, the media and urban tourism before 1914
11.15 Robert Lemon - The University of Oklahoma
Haus Blends: Literary Atmospheres and Neo-Empiricism in the Viennese Café
11.45 Gilbert Carr - Trinity College Dublin
Time and Space in the Café Griensteidl
12.30 Lunch
14.00 Nur Ayalp - Cankaya University, Ankara
Developing the Design Criterior for the Contemporary Image of the Traditional Turkish Coffeehouse.
14.30 Shachar Pinsker - University of Michigan
From the "House of Study" to the Kaffeehaus: The Viennese Café as a Site of Hebrew and Yiddish Modernism
15.00 Ines Sabotic - Institut of Social Sciences Ivo Pilar, Zagreb
The Café in Zagreb at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries: similarities and differences with the Viennese café
15.30 Kasia Murawska-Muthesius - Birkbeck, University of London
Michalik's café in Krakow: Artists' café and caricature as media of modernity
16.00 Up to the RCA for Coffee break in the exhibition's Viennese café
17.00 Keynote : Edward Timms - University of Sussex
Coffee-Houses and Tea Parties: Creative Dynamics in Freud's Vienna and Woolf's Bloomsbury.
18.00 Conference Reception at the RCA

Saturday 18th October

At the Royal College of Art - Lecture Theatre 1
10.30 Introduction to day two
10.45 Geoffrey Howes - Bowling Green State University 
Nihilism and Authenticity: The Café Museum In Viennese Culture 1899-2000
11.15 Diane Silverthorne - RCA
Alfred Roller's notebooks, the Café Victoria and the founding of the Vienna Secession - from café table to 'total work of art'
11.45 Richard Kurdiovsky - Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften
The cliché of the Viennese café as an extended living-room - formal parallels and differences
12.15 Lunch
14.15 Frederic Schwartz - UCL
Strategies of Publicity in Fin-de-siecle Vienna: The Café and the Production of 'Cases'
14.45 Bharain Mac an Bhreithiun - Bath Spa University
Eszpressókultur: Readings of the Viennese Café and the ezspresso bar in Communist and Post-Communist Budapest
15.15 Mary Costello - University of Plymouth
An alternative to the café: the Loos Bar (1908) and its reproduction in Trinity College, Dublin (1986)
15.45 Ingeborg Hoesterey - Indiana University
Café Elektric - a 1927 performance space
16.15 Coffee Break
16.45 Keynote:  Steven Beller
"A Jew belongs in the coffeehouse":  Jews, Central Europe, and modernity.
18.00 Concert of Austrian pieces by the Kreutzer String Quartet and reception

Places fof the concert need to be reserved separately.
E: viennacafe@rca.ac.uk

REGISTER HERE Registration Form

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