Rivers do not merely provide crucial resources for trade, agriculture and development, but also offer equally important identifiers for collective belonging and national heritage. Since they constitute liminal meeting points for different linguistic, ethnic and religious populations, they are also subjected to a political power dynamic which continuously seeks to disentangle their inherent hybridity.
The advent of the Anthropocene has turned the relationship between humans and natural habitat even more unpredictable and volatile despite increased river engineering that had previously accompanied industrial development. This interdisciplinary, multilingual, and transnational project examines the interplay between imagined and real river transgressions, and the resulting experiences of crisis and conflict across the river network of the rivers Danube, Drava and Drina, waterways that historically link Austria and the Western Balkans. While the cultural heritage of the Danube has been widely researched since the end of the Cold War within the context of a renewed east-west dialogue along old Habsburg networks, the cultural, ecological, and political legacy of its connecting or subordinate rivers has been relatively neglected. As both life-giving and destructive forces to the local population, figuring as routes of economic prosperity on the one hand and sites of conflict and natural disaster on the other, these three rivers have inspired literary and artistic reflections across shifting borders and political regimes. 
Spanning a period of roughly 100 years, from the end of the First World War until the present, a team of scholars from literary and cultural studies will create a cultural cartography of crisis narratives involving the Danube, Drava and Drina rivers, including novels, travelogues, folk tales, poetry, and film. The principal investigator will address Austrian and South Slavic literary writings since 1945, while a junior postdoc will investigate the Habsburg legacy of the river network, focusing on ties between ecology, national identity and economy in literary texts from the interwar period (1918-1939) onward. To visualize the project output and make it publicly accessible, a research assistant from the digital humanities will implement an online interactive river map not just for the Austrian component of the HERA project, which will bring together author’s biographies, crucial historical events, and ecological data, but also tying together the collaborator projects in London, Marseille, Lisbon and Zagreb. In cooperation with the Akademie Graz, a film and photo artist residing in Graz will create a comparative river art piece that will accompany the project at large.