Benedikt Stimmer is a Fellow of the Vienna Doctoral School of Historical and Cultural Studies (DSHCS) at the University of Vienna and a University Assistant at the Institute for Eastern European History. He studied history and German studies in Vienna and Warsaw and was awarded the Francis Stephen Promotion Award of the Austrian Society for the Eighteenth-Century Studies (ÖGE 18) for his master's thesis on Joseph II's language policy in Galicia. His dissertation project focuses on the significance of the language question in the context of the "enlightened-absolutist" educational policies of the Habsburg Monarchy and Prussia in the partitioned territories of Poland-Lithuania in the late 18th century.