Ursula Rack

Ursula Rack
Alma mater
  • MS - Institute for Roman Catholic Theology, Austria (1996)

PhD - University of Vienna, Austria (2003–2006), Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research, Germany (2006–2009)

SpouseWolfgang Rack
Awards
Scientific career
FieldsPolar History, Environmental History, Geopolitical History, Roman Catholic Theology
Institutions

Ursula Rack is an Austrian-born Aotearoa New Zealand-based historian who specializes in researching the social and environmental conditions of polar expeditions from the 19th and early 20th centuries using archival sources as data. Currently Rack is teaching Antarctic Studies as an Adjunct Fellow of Gateway Antarctica at the University of Canterbury.[1][2][3] She also has multiple peer-reviewed works on the topic in textbooks/academic journals published in both English and German.[1][4][5] Over her career, Rack has received two competitive fellowships for her research, and was bestowed the Harriette Jenkins Award by Graduate Women New Zealand in 2019.[1][4][5]

Education and teaching career

After beginning her teaching career in 1989, Rack graduated the University of Vienna with a master's degree in Roman Catholic Theology and History during 1996.[1][6] She taught at Rudolf Steiner School in Pötzleinsdorf, Vienna, until 1992, when she moved to Vienna Business School to teach History and Religious Education for the next 10 years.[6] In 2002, Rack began teaching history, Religious Education, and Social Sciences at the Edith-Stein School in Bremerhaven, Germany.[6] From 2003 to 2009, she completed her PhD at the University of Vienna and the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Bremerhaven, Germany on the subject: “Social conditions on German and Austro-Hungarian polar expeditions from 1868 to 1939”.[1][5][6]

Scholarly career and impacts

As demonstrated by her PhD topic, Rack's research is primarily anthropological analysis of human history at the poles during the Heroic Era and its 19th-century prelude. She later expanded the scope of her studies to extrapolate historic polar meteorological conditions from primary sources.[4][5] Rack's integration of environmental sciences and humanities lead her to receive a CONMAP (Council of Managers of National Antarctic Programs) Research Fellowship in 2012 for her project “Reconstructing historic Antarctic climate data from logbooks and diaries of the Heroic era”.[1][4][5] Three years later, Rack was contracted by NIWA (National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research) to do similar work for the Deep South National Science Project E6476, where she used primary sources to reconstruct historic climate patterns in the Southern Ocean until 2017.[1][2][4]

Rack's subsequent 2018 project, Frozen History: “How different countries research, collect and communicate their Antarctic history”, took her to polar museums around the world, and earned her a New Zealand Winston Churchill Memorial Fellowship for its first-hand investigation into the differences between key nations’ (UK, USA, Aotearoa/NZ, and Germany) history in Antarctica.[1][4][5][7] She presented the findings of this project at the University of Canterbury two years in a row (2018–2019), and to the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR) at their 2018 international conference in Davos, Switzerland.[2] As she stated in an interview with Women in Polar Sciences: “Research and sharing the results are what keep me going”,[3] so these represent only a fraction of the public talks on polar science history Rack has attended and organized.[2]

Around this time, she also started working for the luxury cruise line Silversea as an expedition staff member and Antarctic history lecturer – sharing her passion for polar history on voyages to the Antarctic Peninsula and sub-Antarctic Islands.[1][3][6] As of 2019, she has been working on a project similar to Frozen History, but with the specific goal of studying the involvement of women and Māori in Antarctic history.[1][7] Funded by a scholarship from Graduate Women New Zealand, this project took Rack to a variety of national and international polar history museums and archives – like the Te Ūaka/Lyttleton Museum in Lyttleton, where she is currently a volunteer with certification for Museum Practice, Level 4, as of 2021.[1][2]

Awards

  • 2012: first humanitarian/historian to receive CONMAP Research Fellowship for “Reconstructing historic Antarctic climate data from logbooks and diaries of the Heroic era”.[1][4][5]
  • 2018: New Zealand Winston Churchill Memorial Fellowship for Frozen History: “How different countries research, collect and communicate their Antarctic history”.[1][4][5][7]
  • May 2018: Austrian Honorary Consul for the South Island of New Zealand.[1][6]
  • May 2018: Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society in London.[2][4][6][7]
  • Oct 2018-2022: Institute Associate at the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge, UK.[1][2][4][7]
  • 2019: Harriette Jenkins Award from Graduate Women New Zealand to continue Frozen History project with an Aotearoa-focus.[1][2][4][7]

Selected works

Rack, U.; (2021). “Jose Maria Sobral – an Argentinian on a Swedish Expedition”. Antarctic. 38 (1–2): 20–21.

Rack, U.; (2021). “Wilhelm Filchner – hierarchy and insufficient leadership on the Second German Antarctic Expedition”. Polarforschung. 89 (1): 25–30. https://doi.org/10.5194/polf-89-25-2021

Rack, U.; (2019). “The way to the Antarctic Treaty: System of rules in times of global conflict”. Polar Record. 55 (5): 320–322. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0032247419000731

Rack, U.; (2014). ""Blizzard blowing again and considerable discomfort on board as usual“ – Personal accounts of weather as scientific data, and the weather’s influence on expedition members during the Heroic Age". The Polar Journal. 5 (1): 113–127. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/2154896X.2015.1030159

References

  1. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p "Discovery". profiles.canterbury.ac.nz. Retrieved 2026-06-01.
  2. ^ a b c d e f g h "Ursula Rack". Churchill Fellowship NZ. 2025-08-20. Retrieved 2026-06-01.
  3. ^ a b c "Ursula Rack, PhD – Women In Polar Science". Retrieved 2026-06-01.
  4. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k "Ursula Rack - Volunteer Profile". SCAR.org. 30 May 2026. Retrieved 30 May 2026.
  5. ^ a b c d e f g h "Ursula Rack | Graduate Women New Zealand". gwnz.org.nz. Retrieved 2026-06-01.
  6. ^ a b c d e f g "About Dr Ursula Rack". Dr Ursula Rack. 2013-10-30. Retrieved 2026-06-01.
  7. ^ a b c d e f "Gateway Antarctic city Christchurch leads polar education | The UC Science Blog". 2019-02-14. Retrieved 2026-06-01.
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