Executive Board
Vice-President & Research Officer
Joachim Bürgchwentner serves as Treasurer & Secretary. He is a member of staff at the City Archives and City Museum in Innsbruck, Austria. Prior to that he was working at the Department of History at the University of Innsbruck, where he completed his PhD in 2017. His main research interests are on the one hand the cultural history of the First World War, in particular (visual) media, propaganda, cencorship and war relief, and on the other hand the local history of Innsbruck (such as court life in the early modern times, history of street names, sports history). He was a Research Assistant at the Wirth Institute in 2006/07 and served as Secretary (2012-14) and President (2014-16) for the Wirth Alumni Network.
Petra Sapun Kurtin serves as Meeting Chair and is a research and teaching assistant at the University of Rijeka (English Department and Master’s in translation). She is a PhD candidate in English and Comparative Literature at the University of Zagreb, and holds a dual-degree in English and German Language and Literature from the University of Rijeka, Croatia. She spent a research year in US graduate programs on a Fulbright scholarship at New York University in New York and Tulane University in New Orleans and was Wirth Doctoral Fellow in 2018/2019. She served as Co-Meeting Chair for the Wirth Alumni Network and is also the current president of the Croatian-Canadian Academic Association in Zagreb.
Eva Jarošová serves as President for the Wirth Alumni Network. She is a PhD candidate in Czech history at Charles University in Prague and spent her doctoral fellowship in Edmonton in 2018-2019. Her research focuses on the funeral culture of the early modern period, on which she recently co-edited a volume for the academic journal HOP (History-Questions-Problems, 1/2019). She also teaches national history to exchange students and is inspired by her stays at the University of Alberta and the University of Helsinki.
Jana Marešová, Ph.D. serves as Communication Officer for the Wirth Alumni Network. She completed her Ph.D. at Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic and worked as an assistant professor at the Department of English, Jan Evangelista Purkyně University in Ústí nad Labem, Czech Republic. Her main research interests are contemporary Canadian Indigenous fiction, oral storytelling, and Indigenous epistemologies and their reflections in Indigenous writing. In her publications and presentations, she explores contemporary Indigenous writing as a continuation of oral storytelling practices and the interconnections of Indigenous and Central European cultures. She has been awarded a Doctoral Research Fellowship by the Wirth Institute for Austrian and Central European Studies, University of Alberta, Canada (2014–2015), the Eccles Centre European Postgraduate Fellow in North American Studies Award, Eccles Centre, British Library (2016), and the International Council for Canadian Studies Graduate Student Scholarship (2018). In 2023, she received the Best Doctoral Thesis in International Canadian Studies Award for international scholars by the International Council for Canadian Studies Awards and Grants Committee. She currently lives in Jasper, Canada.
Emese Ilyefalvi serves as Vice-President & Research Officer and is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Folkloristics (Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary) and a research fellow at MTA–ELTE Lendület Historical Folkloristics Research Group. Her research focuses on the theoretical, methodological and technical questions of computational & digital folkloristics and vernacular, folk religiosity. She is also co-chair of the SIEF (International Society of Folklore and Ethnology) Working Group on Archives and editorial board member of Historical Studies on Central Europe (http://ojs.elte.hu/hsce).