Juliane Werner - Biography#

Juliane Werner is based at the Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities at the Austrian Academy of Sciences and is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Vienna. She has held a fellowship at the University of Chicago and, in 2023, a guest professorship at the Université de Franche-Comté in France. Her work centers on Franco-Austrian cultural relations, the literary history of psychiatric institutions, representations of intensive animal agriculture in fiction, intermediality, and narratives of transgression.

With a particular focus on Austrian literature in international contexts from the 18th to the 21st century, she leads two digital projects devoted to the global reception of Thomas Bernhard: GlobalBernhard (globalbernhard.univie.ac.at; since 2022), on Bernhard’s impact on writers worldwide, and the translation database thomas bernhard in translation (thomas-bernhard-translation.acdh.oeaw.ac.at; since 2025). Since 2024, she serves as President of the International Thomas Bernhard Society.

Werner is the author of two monographs on French existentialism - »Thomas Bernhard und Jean-Paul Sartre« (2016) and »Existentialismus in Österreich: Kultureller Transfer und literarische Resonanz« (2021) - and co-editor of »Sartre and the International Impact of Existentialism« (2020) and »Popular Music and the Poetics of Self in Fiction« (2022). She also serves as co-editor of Brill’s series International Research in General and Comparative Literature. She is currently preparing the Suhrkamp biography of Thomas Bernhard to mark his centenary.