We are delighted to announce that Theresa Eisele has been awarded this year’s Leo Baeck Essay Prize for her outstanding essay, ‘“With a gesture, a smile, a glance”: Felix Salten performing Vienna and decoding acculturation’. Her essay was selected for its original contribution to the understanding of cultural assimilation and performance in early 20th-century Vienna.
In her article, Eisele explores how Felix Salten, author of Bambi and popular journalist in fin-de-siècle Vienna, developed an understanding for the performative qualities of society through his sensibility as a theatre critic, and how he positioned his Jewish experiences within this performative framework as thoroughly corporeal. Linking Jewish Cultural Studies with theatre theory, Eisele argues that Salten chronicled and negotiated social role performances in Vienna, thereby decentering acculturation as a merely Jewish practice, while also unravelling a praxeology of belonging via attention, gaze, and posture.
Theresa Eisele is a university assistant (postdoc) at the Department for Theatre, Film, and Media Studies at the University of Vienna and an associate research fellow (senior researcher) at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Digital History. She received her PhD from the University of Vienna in 2021 (awarded with the Max Herrmann Dissertation Prize of the Society for Theatre History and published in 2024 by Wallstein). Her research has been supported by the Leibniz Institute for Jewish History and Culture – Simon Dubnow, the Austrian Ministry of Education, the German Ministry of Science, Research and Culture, and the Kulturstiftung Schloss Wiepersdorf.
The winning essay will be published in the Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 2025. As part of her award, Dr. Eisele will receive a complimentary subscription to the Year Book for 2025.
We extend our warmest congratulations to Theresa Eisele on this remarkable achievement.
A new Essay Prize call for 2026 will be published shortly.
