Mesner began her career in 1986 as a research assistant at the . She was promoted to head the
Social Sciences and Documentation Department in 1996, working in that capacity until 1999, when she went to New York to attend
The New School for Social Research as a
Fulbright visiting scholar. Returning to Austria, she was hired to head the
Bruno Kreisky Archives in 2000 and the following year began working as co-editor of the journal
Österreichischen Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaften (
Austrian Journal for Historical Studies). Completing her
habilitation in 2004, Mesner began lecturing at the
University of Vienna and was promoted to senior lecturer in 2012. Since 2015, she has headed the department of gender research at the University of Vienna and in 2016 became the assistant director of the university's Institute for Contemporary History. Mesner's research focuses on the effect of gender on politics, reproductive history, and
denazification. She has evaluated the abortion laws in Austria to examine how a women's problem became appropriated by male-dominated political systems, in an attempt to preserve archaic social norms as a mechanism to provide political stability. She has also compared the use of laws in Austria to those in the United States and other countries to evaluate differences in reproduction history, as well as the changing effects of political and scientific thought, such as
Nazism,
eugenics, and
assisted reproductive technology on policies governing reproduction. ==Selected works==