Postdoc Day @ PhilCult: Career Development & Networking, 6 Oct 2025
All Postdoctoral Researchers are cordially invited to join us for an event organized specifically for postdocs at the Faculty of Philological and Cultural Studies. The Faculty’s Postdoc Day centers on the role of networking in career development, providing you with information, personal insights, hands-on training, as well as an opportunity to connect with the speakers and your peers across the faculty!
When? Monday 06 October 2025, 09:00-14:00h
Where? Aula am Campus, Altes AKH Hof 1.11, Spitalgasse 2, 1090 Wien
Participation in the Faculty’s Postdoc Day is free.
Registration is mandatory – please email dekanat.philkult@univie.ac.at until 12 September 2025.
Programme:
09:00h
Welcome address
Stephan Müller, Dean, Faculty of Philological and Cultural Studies
Teresa Hiergeist, Vice Dean, Faculty of Philological and Cultural Studies
Career development @ Univie
Madeleine Harbich, Postdoc Career Development Services, University of Vienna
Theresa Illés, Third-Party Funding Office, Faculty of Philological and Cultural Studies
09:30h
What does effective networking look like?
Martin Buxbaum, presentations coach, language trainer and stage director
10:30h
Coffee Break
10:45h
Get to know your peers! – Guided networking activity
11:30h
Networking as told by… (panel discussion with Q&A)
Anja-Xiaoxing Cui, Ass. Prof. in Neuromediality, Systematic Musicology
Rémi Armand Tchokothe, Assoc. Prof. in Comparative Literature with a Focus on African Literature
Hannes Fellner, Professor of Digital Corpus Linguistics
Nina Mirnig, Professor of Cultural and Intellectual History of Pre-Modern South Asia
Julia Lajta-Novak, Assoc. Prof. for Anglophone Literature and Mediality (host)
13:00h
Lunch buffet – with more time to connect
13:45h
Closing.
***
Panel speaker bios:
Anja-Xiaoxing Cui is a tenure-track professor of systematic musicology at the University of Vienna, specializing in neuromediality – the intersection of musicology and cognitive neuroscience. Her research explores how music training influences auditory perception, memory, and the neural mechanisms underlying music cognition across the lifespan. Cui holds a PhD in psychology from Queen’s University in Canada, where she also completed her MSc degree. She also studied psychology at the Ruhr University Bochum and piano performance at the Hochschule für Musik und Tanz Köln in Germany. Her postdoctoral work at the University of British Columbia was supported by a fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. During this time, she investigated the effects of opera training on neurocognitive performance and brain anatomy as part of the Peter Wall Opera Project. In addition to her academic roles, Cui has received the UNIVIE Teaching Award for her course on quantitative methods in music research and is head of the ethics committee of the German Society for Music Psychology.
Hannes A. Fellner is Professor of Digital Corpus Linguistics at the Department of Comparative Literature and Language Studies. His research connects modelling of language change with linguistic ecology, grounded in digital humanities and digital humanism. He studied linguistics and philologies at the University of Vienna and earned his PhD in linguistics from Harvard University. Following academic appointments at the University of Vienna and Leiden University, he returned to Vienna as principal investigator of an FWF START project on the ancient Indo-European languages along the Silk Road in present-day northwestern China. He currently serves as co-principal investigator of a WWTF-funded research initiative examining the impact of ongoing digitization on global linguistic diversity. Fellner is a member of the Young Academy of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and academic director of the (former Boltzmann) Institute for China and Southeast Asia Studies. He also serves on the boards of the University of Vienna’s research network Data Science and the Digital Humanities steering committee, as well as the Fondazione Centro di Studi Filosofici di S. Abbondio and the Society for Dialectical Philosophy.
Julia Lajta-Novak is Associate Professor for Anglophone literature and mediality at the Department of English and American Studies, literature manager, and poet. She has been a research fellow at the University of Salzburg and a visiting fellow at the Institute of English Studies, University of London, King’s College University of London, and the English Faculty, University of Oxford, as well as visiting professor of English and Anglophone Literatures at the University of Vienna. In 2015 she was awarded the University of Salzburg’s Prize for Excellence in Teaching, in 2020 the START Prize of the Austrian Science Fund for her latest project “Poetry Off the Page: Literary History and the Spoken Word, 1965-2020“, for which she also received an ERC Consolidator Grant. She has published extensively on reading groups, biographical fiction and film, and serves as an advisory board member for the Poetry in the Digital Age series at De Gruyter and as an editor of the European Journal of Life Writing. In her current research on poetry performance she develops the work begun in her book Live Poetry: An Integrated Approach to Poetry in Performance (Brill | Rodopi 2011).
Nina Mirnig has recently been appointed Professor of Cultural and Intellectual History of Pre-Modern South Asia and specializes in the cultural and intellectual history of early South Asia, with a particular focus on early Hindu traditions, Śaivism and Tantric traditions, South Asian epigraphy and manuscript cultures, and the cultural and religio-politial landscape of early medieval Nepal. She holds a D.Phil. in Oriental Studies/Sanskrit from the University of Oxford (2010). Following her doctoral studies, she held postdoctoral positions at the University of Groningen, the International Institute for Asian Studies in Leiden, and the University of Cambridge. From 2015, Mirnig was a research associate at the Institute for the Cultural and Intellectual History of Asia at the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW). In 2019, she was awarded the FWF Elise Richter Prize, enabling her to lead a project on the religious, cultural, and political landscape of early medieval Nepal. She is also Key Researcher in the FWF Cluster of Excellence Eurasian Transformations (FWF COE8), focusing on topics such as geographies of power, communication and mobility, and religious identification. In 2020 she was elected Member of the Young Academy of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. As of 2025, she will serve as co-editor of the journal Medieval Worlds and on the Editorial Board of the new series Afro-Eurasian Transformations: Ancient Worlds and Beyond (Harrassowitz Publishers).
Rémi Armand Tchokothe was appointed Tenure-Track Professor in Comparative Literature with a Focus on African Literatures (Department of African Studies and Department of Comparative Literature) in October 2020 and has recently been promoted to Associate Professor. His research interests include African Languages Literatures, African and African-Diaspora Literatures, Indian Ocean Literatures, Literature and Political Geography, African Literatures and Memory(cide), Intercultural translation, Critical African(a) Studies, and Archiving Oral Literatures and Copyrights. Before moving to Vienna, he was an Assistant Professor at the University of Bayreuth, where he completed a PhD on the Aesthetics of Transgression in Swahili Literature. He is Principal Investigator in the Cluster of Excellence Africa Multiple: Reconfiguring African Studies and an affiliate professor at the Centre Universitaire de Formation et de Recherche de Mayotte. He has taught at the Université de Sousse, Université de Lubumbashi, University of Mauritius, the Université Félix-Houphouët-Boigny d’Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, Makhanda University, and the University of Fort Hare (South Africa).