Julia Lajta-Novak re-joined the Department of English and American Studies as an Elise Richter research fellow (Austrian Science Fund FWF) in 2017 and is currently working on a project (Habilitation) on biographical novels about historical women artists. 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.
For her scholarly and literary work she has received a number of prizes and awards, among them the Theodor Körner Prize, the Dr Maria Schaumayer Prize, the DOC Award of the City of Vienna, and a DOC scholarship by the Austrian Academy of Sciences. In 2015 she was awarded the University of Salzburg’s Prize for Excellence in Teaching. In 2020, she was awarded the START Prize of the Austrian Science Fund for her next project “Poetry Off the Page: British Literary History and the Spoken Word, 1965-2020“, for which she has also been awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant. “Poetry Off the Page” will be launched in September 2021.
Julia Lajta-Novak has written a book on reading groups, Gemeinsam Lesen: Die Buchgruppe als soziales Phänomen und ökonomische Triebkraft (Lit, 2007), a book entitled Live Poetry: An Integrated Approach to Poetry in Performance (Rodopi, 2011), and a book of poetry – Federwach das Vorwärts: Leichtathlyrik (Verlagshaus Hernals, 2015). She is co-editor of Life Writing and Celebrity (Routledge 2019), Experiments in Life-Writing (Palgrave 2017), Staging Interculturality (WVT, 2010), Ireland in/and Europe (WVT, 2012), and Ireland in Drama, Film, and Popular Culture (WVT, 2012), as well as editor of a collection of life-writing about Vienna, Vienna:Views (Luftschacht, 2006). She is an elected member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW Junge Akademie), the International Association for Biography and Autobiography Europe (editorial board European Journal of Life Writing), the European Gender Studies Network of ESSE (national correspondent), and Netzwerk Biographieforschung, among others.
As a literature manager, Julia Lajta-Novak is founder and artistic director of the literary society Vienna Lit and was twice artistic director of the Vienna Lit Festival. She has curated and organised literature events in collaboration with the Universities of Vienna and Salzburg, the British Council, and the Austrian Commission for UNESCO, to name just a few. Furthermore, she has been running a book group at the University of Vienna’s English Studies Library since 2005.
For a full CV & list of publications, see www.julianovak.at.