Birgit Knauer

Birgit Knauer studied history of art as well as romance languages and literature at the Universität Wien and received her doctorate in 2018 at the TU Wien on the subject of “Die Assanierung der Stadt Wien 1934-1938”. From 2013 to 2019, she worked as a university assistant at the Research Unit for Monument Preservation and Building in Existing Structures of TU Wien. Since March 2020, she has been a research assistant at the Kompetenzzentrum Denkmalwissenschaften und Denkmaltechnologien (KDWT) at the Otto Friedrich Universität Bamberg and conducts research on the war damage assessment of the Second World War in German cities (project by DFG). Since November 2020 she has been researching the reconstruction and transformation process of Austrian cities during and after the Second World War as Senior Scientist at the Research Unit for Monument Preservation (TU Wien). The publication of her revised dissertation will be published by Birkhäuser - De Gruyter in autumn 2021.

In cooperation with the UMM-project, she will examine for the first time the transformation of war-damaged old towns in Austria from the perspective of heritage preservation, thus closing a major research gap that still exists in Austrian architectural and urban history.

Main research areas: History and theory of heritage preservation, (urban) heritage preservation and urban planning in the 20th century, preservation and architecture of post-war-modernism