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Elena Shapira

Elena Shapira is a cultural and design historian; She lectures at the University of Applied Arts Vienna and at the University of Vienna; She is a specialist in the study of Viennese modernism. Her research interests include Central European cultural networks and artistic avant-garde, Jews in the creative industries in Europe and in the US, women designers in the interwar period, and modern Jewish art and architecture. Shapira has organized important international symposiums and workshops on the subjects of Jews and cultural Identity in Central European modernism, émigrés and cultural transfer and women designers and architects. She published widely on design and architecture in transnational contexts, Jews in the arts and media in Vienna and Berlin, and the relationship between design and society in edited volumes, exhibition catalogues and leading art and design journals.

A recent surge of interest in Jewish patronage during the golden years of Vienna has led to the question, Would modernism in Vienna have developed in the...