About the Author

   Paula Sutter Fichtner received her B.A. from Bryn Mawr College, her M.A. from Indiana University, and her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. She studied in Vienna on a Fulbright Fellowship. She has also held grants and fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the American Association of University Women, the City University of New York, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. A member of the history faculty of Brooklyn College of the City University of New York for 36 years, Fichtner chaired the department from 1983 to 1986 and from 1989 to 1995. She also was on the executive committees of the Conference Group for Central European History, the Society for the Study of Austrian and Habsburg History, and the Sixteenth Century Studies Association. She also served on the editorial panel of the Austrian History Yearbook.

   Dr. Fichtner has written extensively on several aspects of Austrian history, the history of the Habsburg Empire, and the history of early modern Germany. Protestantism and Primogeniture in Early Modern Germany, published by Yale University Press in 1989, won the American Academy of Religion Prize for the Study of Religion in the Historical Category. Fichtner has written two biographies of Habsburg rulers, Emperor Ferdinand I and his son, Emperor Maximilian II. Her study of the latter, Emperor Maximilian II, also published by Yale, received the prize of the Austrian Cultural Forum for the best book published on the history of the Habsburg Empire and Austria in North America in 2002. Her most recent books are The Habsburg Monarchy 1490–1848: Attributes of Empire and Terror to Toleration: The Habsburg Empire Confronts Islam, 1526–1850. She is currently at work on a full study of the dynasty.