This archival guide assembles contributions which present different ways to read Vienna’s rich historical collections – housed in official archives, but also in museums, exhibitions, libraries, universities and private collections – as ‘global archives’. It is an invitation to researchers of all walks of life to interrogate Vienna’s archives and collections from a global history perspective. The contributions aim to encourage exploration of the city’s rich holdings, addressing all those interested in Vienna as a site of multiple and diverse global connections.

The texts assembled on this website provide basic information on the collections and exemplify which sources they contain. The authors also give specific insights and interpretations into what makes their collection global by choosing an individual source and interpreting it in its global history context. These sources range widely, from ego-documents to passports, official correspondences, images, films, works of art and everyday objects. By reflecting on these sources, the students involved in this project shed light on how global history can be written. Representing a wide range of thematic takes from the arts to military history, the goal is to demonstrate the breadth of possibilities for rethinking Vienna’s collections from a global history perspective.

The project originated in a course at the University of Vienna in spring 2025 (Global Vienna: A Guide to Archives and Collections). The course was composed of a particularly engaged group of students interested in global history, but also in public history and interdisciplinary approaches to archives including media and the arts. The students also brought a wealth of personal and professional experience to the classroom, having worked with collections in different capacities as researchers, archivists and artists. During a very busy semester, we thought about what the global archive could mean on a theoretical and conceptual level when approached from the locality of Vienna. We also visited a wide range of exhibitions, museums and archives, exploring the use of history in various settings and interacting with practitioners of history beyond the university walls.

The Global Vienna project was also integrated into the 2024-25 annual topic of the Global History Research Area of the University of Vienna (Im-)Mobilities. We thought about how the written and visual sources and objects that the collections contained had travelled and come to be held in Vienna. Who in turn could access them freely and who was excluded? Thinking in terms of multiple mobilities proved a useful way to conceptualise the global entanglement of Vienna’s global archives.

Beyond these reflections on mobility and immobility, we discussed more broadly what a global archive is or what it could be. This discussion tapped into broader debates around archival practices and preservation and connected with theoretical questions of representation and agency as well as practical questions around accessibility and its limits in the digital age.

These considerations on the nature and the scope of the global archive led us to an understanding of global history which is both broad – combining different scales, directions and perspectives, reflecting both power structures and the diversity of voices – and grounded in a specific place in time, in our case Vienna. This undertaking also resonates with the work done by others currently undertaking projects reinterpreting Austrian history in a transnational, postcolonial and global perspective.

Reading local archives from a global history perspective brought out many questions. What changes if we write global history from Vienna? What do we see and what remains hidden? Can we truly change our perspectives based on the archives we have at hand? Can we bring in different scales of enquiry, can we look at the same issue from different points of view? And how is power inscribed into these archives?

These questions also shed light on the complicated and difficult features of these collections. Many of them emerged during the era of European expansionism and their holdings relate to discussions around the ethics of restitution. Where possible, the students critically reflected on provenance and ownership in relation to their archives, an approach that could be extended in future work.

In line with these reflections, the collections featured here are consciously diverse. They range from big state archives to smaller collections. They include voices of exile and migration as well as discussions of the role of colonialism in the Habsburg past. The contributions are consciously diverse, too – and not all authors would agree with each other on every point. As a student-led project, they interrogate the global from a variety of perspectives, and approach the task of presenting their collection in individual ways. The descriptions of archives and collections represent the approaches of individual students and have only been lightly edited in the process of assembling this website. All factual errors remain the responsibility of the authors.

The archival guide is also a consciously provisional, preliminary and unfinished project that, in the future, could be taken in many different directions. It is a work in progress rather than an authoritative take on the topic. The website format allows it to be modular and expand and grow – also to consider more perspectives that might be missing from the current selection, such as narratives of migration, queer histories or histories from below. For a future expansion, it might be useful to expand the notion of the archive itself and discover global traces in more unexpected Viennese sites such as street names or cemeteries.  Let me end by thanking all the participants of the course as well as the curators and archivists who worked so hard to realise this project. The biggest thanks go to the very engaged Global Vienna project team. As an editorial collective, the team spent their energy and creativity assembling the different entries, discussing which purposes such an archival guide could serve and which methodological and theoretical challenges it could pose and, not least, thinking about an effective design to bring these points across.

Valeska Huber is Associate Professor for Contemporary History at the University of Vienna.