Vienna Academic Press/Wiener Verlag für Sozialforschung is the further development of a traditional publishing house, the Wiener Verlag, which was founded in 1899 and initially existed until 1929. Political turmoil meant that it was not until after the end of the Second World War efforts could be made to revive the publishing house, which were ultimately successful. In 1998, the focus shifted to academic works and non-fiction books when - one hundred years after the Wiener Verlag was first founded - the European University Press was established. The new Wiener Verlag für Sozialforschung emerged from this as an imprint in 2012. In 2016, it was spun off together with the internationally oriented "Vienna Academic Press". Since then, the publishing house has operated as an independent unit and specializes in the humanities, social sciences and cultural studies. The company enjoys a reputation for publishing high-quality books that are both informative and appealing, and thus remains an important player in the Austrian publishing industry.

People all over the world associate the Austrian capital with music and fine arts. But Vienna is also a city that has provided groundbreaking theories for science. The scholars of the "Vienna Circle" gave empiricism the structures of logic in order to better grasp reality. Others such as Sigmund Freud, Paul Lazarsfeld, Konrad Lorenz, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Buber and Joseph Schumpeter helped to shape the way we look at the world today. In order to keep our finger on the pulse of the times and cushion the radical upheavals in the field of reproducible knowledge, we place people at the center of our cross-media research journey. Following a new takeover by Therese Bauer in 2023, more experimental forms of social science literature were introduced alongside the classic academic focus.These include anthologies on socially relevant topics and (contemporary) historical biographies based on the model of history workshops in cooperation with civil society. As a publishing house, we are facing up to future challenges and consciously build bridges from science and tacit knowledge to wisdom and embodied knowledge. Of course, an international and intercultural exchange of ideas should not be missing, either.