Robert Groß is an environmental historian, working on the interface of economic history and social ecology as well as the history of infrastructure and technology. He holds a doctoral degree in environmental history from the Klagenfurt University. In his thesis, he investigated the environmental history of the winter tourism industry in Western Austria from 1920–2010. After finishing his doctoral studies, he received a fellowship in 2017 from the Botstiber Institute for Austrian-American Studies in Washington, D.C., to carry out archival research on the environmental history of the Marshall Plan. After that, he received a scholarship at the Research Institute for the History of Science and Technology at the Deutsches Museum, where he worked on the entanglement of forestry as well as the wood-based industries in Germany and their influence on Austria from 1933 to 1952. Since 2018, he has been a postdoctoral assistant for economic and social history at the Institute of History and European Ethnology at Innsbruck University. He also works as research assistant in the project Understanding the Role of Material Stock Patterns for the Transformation to a Sustainable Society (MAT_STOCKS), funded by the ERC and carried out at the Institute of Social Ecology at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna. In his current project his focus is on large infrastructure projects of mobility and energy provisioning that were carried out all over Europe after 1948 in the course of the Marshall Plan.
RCC Research Project: The Marshall Plan and the Great Acceleration of Europe
Selected Publications:
- Die Beschleunigung der Berge. Eine Umweltgeschichte des Wintertourismus in Vorarlberg/Österreich, 1920–2010. Umwelthistorische Forschung 7. Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2019.
- "Uphill and Downhill Histories. How Winter Tourism Transformed Alpine Regions in Vorarlberg/Austria 1930 to 1970." Zeitschrift für Tourismuswissenschaft 9, no. 1 (2017) (special issue: Tourism and Transformation– Regional Development in European History): 115–139.
- "Damüls, Vorarlberg: 100 years of Transformation from Meadows to Ski-Routes in an Alpine Environment." In Challenging Ideas: Theory and Empirical Research in the Social Sciences and Humanities, edited by M. Lytje, T. K. Nielsen and M. O. Jørgensen, 178–198. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015.
- With Verena Winiwarter. "Commodifying snow, taming the waters. Socio-ecological niche construction in an Alpine village." Water History 7, (2015): 489–509.
- With Verena Winiwarter. "How Winter Tourism Transformed Agrarian Livelihoods in an Alpine Village. The Case of Damüls in Vorarlberg/Austria." Ekonomska I Ekohistorija 11, no. 1 (2015) (special issue: History and Sustainability): 46–63.