Rath Prize

J John Rath Prize

The R. John Rath Prize is given annually for the best article published in the Austrian History Yearbook (AHY). It is funded by the estate of the longtime Habsburg scholar and founding editor of the AHY, R. John Rath (1910-2001), and by contributions in his memory.

Congratulations to the 2023 winner, Corenten Gruffat, for his article, “The Beautiful Public Danube: Water Uses, Water Rights, and the Habsburg Imperial State in the Mid-Nineteenth Century" (Vol. 54).  Read the article here
Previous winners of the Rath prize include:
  • 2022: Joshua Shanes, “The ‘Bloody Election’ in Drohobycz: Violence, Urban Politics, and National Memory in an Imperial Borderland" (Vol. 53)
  • 2021: Nóra Veszprémi, “Whose Landscape Is It? Remapping Memory and History in Interwar Central Europe” (Volume 52)
  • 2020: Julie M. Johnson, “The Other Legacy of Vienna 1900: The Ars Combinatoria of Friedl Dicker-Brandeis” (Vol. 51)
  • 2019: Rita Krueger, “The Many Lives of Franz von der Trenck" (Vol. 49)
  • 2018: Peter Haslinger, "Dilemmas of Security: The State, Local Agency, and the Czechoslovak-Hungarian Boundry Commission, 1921-25" (Vol. 48).
  • 2016-17: Stephen A. Walsh, "Liberalism at High Latitudes: The Politics of Polar Exploration in the Habsburg Monarchy" (Vol.​ 47).
  • 2015: Bálint Varga, "The Rise and Fall of an Austrian Identity in the Provincial Historiography of Bukovina" (Vol. 46).
  • 2014: Michael O'Sullivan, "A Hungarian Josephinist, Orientalist, and Bibliophile: Count Karl Reviczky, 1737-1793." (Vol. 45).
  • 2013: Werner Telesko, Richard Kurdiovsky, and Dagmar Sachsenhofer, “The Vienna Hofburg between 1835 and 1918—A Residence in the Conflicting Fields of Art, Politics, and Representation.” (Vol. 44). Second Prize: James Tracy, “The Road to Szigetvár: Ferdinand I’s Defense of His Hungarian Border, 1548-1566.” (Vol. 44)
  • 2012: Madalina-Valeria Veres, “Putting Transylvania on the Map: Cartography and Enlightened Absolutism in the Habsburg Monarchy.” (Vol. 43). Second Prize: Pamela Ballinger, “History’s ‘Illegibles’: National Indeterminacy in Istria.” (Vol. 43)
  • 2011: Matthew Rampley, "Peasants in Vienna: Ethnographic Display and the 1873 World's Fair." (Vol. 42) Honorable Mention: Dominique Kirchner Reill, "A Poet's Struggle for a New Adriaticism in the Nineteenth Century." (Vol. 42)
  • 2010: Tara Zahra, "'Prisoners of the Postwar': Expellees, Displaced Persons, and Jews in Austria after World War II." (Vol. 41)
  • 2009: Alison Frank, "The Pleasant and the Useful: Pilgrimage and Tourism in Habsburg Mariazell." (Vol. 40)
  • 2008: Patrice M. Dabrowski, "Constructing a Polish Landscape: The Example of the Carpathian Frontier." (Vol. 39)
  • 2007: David Gerlach, “Working with the Enemy: Labor Politics in the Czech Borderlands, 1945-48.” (Vol. 38)
  • 2006: Alexander Maxwell, “Why the Slovak Language Has Three Dialects: A Study in Historical Perceptual Dialectology.” (Vol. 37)
  • 2005: Jaroslav Miller, “Early Modern Urban Immigration in East Central Europe: A Macroanalysis.” (Vol. 36)
  • 2004: Peter Urbanitsch, “Pluralist Myth and National Realities: The Dynastic Myth of the Habsburg Monarchy—a Futile Exercise in the Creation of Identity?” (Vol. 35)
  • 2003: Cathleeen M. Giustino, “Municipal Activism in Late-Nineteenth-Century Prague: The House Numbered 207-V and Ghetto Clearance.” (Vol. 34)
  • 2001-02: Catherine Albrecht, “The Rhetoric of Economic Nationalism in the Bohemian Boycott Campaigns of the Late Habsburg Monarchy.” (Vol. 32)