During the 1970s the Austrian Ministry of Science and Research supported the founding of the "Center for Austrian Studies" at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis and the Austrian chair at Stanford University in California. Nowadays there are six institutions of this kind operational, besides the U.S. also in Canada, Hungary and Israel. Their tasks are to promote Austrian and Central European studies among professors and students of their host nation and to provide Austrian students the possibility to conduct research in a foreign country and to get in touch with the respective national scientific communities. This anthology contains not only a description of the Institution's activities in the academic year 2008/2009, but also the working papers of ten of their present PhD students. Their research, which is for the most part connected to the History of East Central Europe, covers a period from the 19 th century to the present.