Focus of Research

The strength of the Department of Sinology at the University of Vienna lies in its social-scientific and cultural-artistic research orientation. Research focuses on the following areas:

Politics and Law

  • Technology and regime stability
  • Political participation and protest
  • Central-local relationships
  • Public opinion and media discourse
  • China's role in the international world order
  • Environmental politics
  • Law and justice
  • Healthcare policy
Literature, Arts and Culture

  • Sinophone literary, visual, and performance cultures since the twentieth-century
  • Experimental theatre and performance
  • Transnational and intercultural theatre networks in the Chinese-speaking region and East Asia
  • Experimental art
  • Art activism
  • Gender and feminist studies
  • Colonial architecture and cultural heritage in Hong Kong and Taiwan
  • Cultural memory
  • Chinese-language cinemas
Chinese as foreign language & foreign language didactics

  • Teacher training
  • Cooperative and collaborative learning
  • Corrective feedback
  • Global database for Chinese as a lingua franca
  • Textbook for students of Sinology
  • Reading comprehension
History and Society

  • Historiography of the 20th Century
  • The Great Chinese Famine (1959–1961)
  • The Cultural Revolution (1966–1976)
  • The first phase of the Reform Era (1978–1989)
  • Coming to terms with the past in the PR China
  • Feature an documentary films
  • Chinese migration
  • Minority groups
  • History of East Asia