People

Ansbert Baumann After studying history, art history and Romance languages and literature in Tübingen and Grenoble, he was programme officer for the German-French Master’s programme at the universities of Tübingen and Aix-en-Provence and received his doctorate in 2001 with a thesis on the cultural-political aspects of the Elysée Treaty. He has been a lecturer at the Seminar for Contemporary History at the University of Tübingen since 2003 and at Sciences Po Paris, Collège universitaire à Nancy since 2006. Since 2017, he has been a research assistant at the Chair of European Contemporary History at Saarland University.

Philipp Didion studied History and French at the Universities of Metz and Saarbrücken, 2017-2019 he was a student assistant at the Chair of Contemporary European History at Saarland University. In 2019, he wrote his magister in history on West German-French international football matches in the 1950s. Since 2020, he has been a research assistant at the Chair of Contemporary European History as well as at the France Centre at Saarland University. Since 2020, he has been doing his doctorate on ‘Football stadiums as points of social crystallisation in France and the Federal Republic from the 1950s to the 1980s. A Modern Cultural History of the Province’ (working title) under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Dietmar Hüser (Saarland University) and Prof. Dr. Paul Dietschy (Centre Lucien Febvre, Université Bourgogne Franche-Comté).

Véronique Faber is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C2DH) in Luxembourg, focusing on the national, transregional and transnational in popular fairground culture in Luxembourg, under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Machteld Venken. She holds a M. Phil. in Social Anthropology and African studies from the University of Vienna (Power and market women in Accra, Ghana (fieldresearch) and a Higher Diploma in Arts Administration from the University College Dublin.

Andreas Fickers is the director of the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C²DH) and head of the DH-Lab. He studied history, philosophy and sociology and is currently Professor for Contemporary and Digital History and chair of the Association of Professors of the University of Luxembourg. He took his PhD in 2002 at RTWH Aachen University and worked as Assistant Professor for television history at Utrecht University (2003-2007) and Associate Professor for comparative media history at Maastricht University (2007-2013).

From 2004 to 2013, Dietmar Hüser held the Chair of History of Western Europe (19th/20th century) at the University of Kassel and since then has been working as Professor of European Contemporary History at the University of Saarland. Central research axes are French history after 1945, German-French and Western European (political) relations, (social) comparisons and (cultural) transfers as well as aspects of European integration and international history. Ongoing projects address the role of popular cultural products, phenomena and practices in social and political transformation after the Second World War. Since 2017, he is director of the France Center of Saarland University, and since 2017 he is responsible for the German-French-Luxembourg Doctoral College ‘International History of Interdisciplinary. German-French-European Perspectives in the 20th Century’.

Matthias Höfer is a PhD researcher at the Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C²DH) in Luxembourg, were he works with advertisements from 1960s Germany, France and Luxembourg for technical devices like televisions, record players and radios in affiliation with the PopKult60 project. His interest mainly lies within the field of media and communication history. He obtained his master’s in history at the University of Bamberg in 2021 with a thesis about public rituals of penance in the 13th century, focusing on their role as public forms of communication and conflict-resolution in a semi-oral society. He also completed a bachelor’s in history and communication science in 2019. His bachelor’s thesis investigated a transnational media-event during the Seven Years’ War.

Sonja Kmec has studied history at the Centre Universitaire du Luxembourg, Paris IV-Sorbonne, Glasgow-Strathclyde and Durham. She did her doctoral research at the University of Oxford and graduated in 2004. As postdoc, she was part of the „Lieux de mémoire“ project led by Michel Margue at the University of Luxembourg. Since 2010, she is associate professor in history and cultural studies at the University of Luxembourg. Her fields of research are identity and memory studies, gender studies, popular and material culture.

Marie Kollek studied International Comparative Sociology (MA), Political Science (BA & MA) and Islamic Studies (BA) at the Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel, the University of Aberdeen and the Université de Bretagne Occidentale. She graduated in 2020 with a thesis on identity constructions and antifeminisms of right-wing terrorist assassins. Her focus is on discourse research, postcolonial theory, and power-critical and poststructuralist perspectives. Since 2022, she has been a doctoral candidate in the DFG/FNR project ‘Postcolonial Pop Cultures in Belgium, Germany and France. On the Representation of Sub-Saharan Africa in the Media Ensemble of the Long 1960s in the Context of Decolonisation’.

After studying music and studying medieval and modern history, musicology and art history, Gunter Mahlerwein worked for many years as a freelance music teacher and historian. Since 2009 he has been teaching at the Department of History of the University Mainz, 2011-2015 and again since 2017 he works as a research assistant at the Department of Cultural and Media History of the Saarland University. His works, which focus on social and cultural history, are often related to the theme of space (village, city, region) and cover the period from the 17th to the late 20th century. First works on media history and youth cultures focused on the spatial aspect. After a comparative treatment of children’s television series from the 1960s in Western Europe, the current project examines the revival of folk music in Europe from a transnational perspective.

Sonja Malzner, maitresse de conférence at the University of Rouen, is currently part of the popkult60 research group via a four-year postdoc attachment at the University of Luxembourg. She works on cultural history, particularly in the field of relations between Europe and (post)colonial Africa, as well as on questions of intermediality. Her current project focuses on popular expressions of tourism discourse on the Indian Ocean at the time of independence in France, Germany and Great Britain. Latest publication (with Sandie Attia): Sur les traces du colonialisme. Le Fonds Polényk en textes et en images. Saint Denis de la Réunion, PUI, février 2022

Machteld Venken is a Professor of Contemporary Transnational History at the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C²DH). She studied Slavic Languages and Cultures, European Studies and History in Belgium, Poland and Ukraine. Venken earned her PhD in 2008 at the Catholic University of Leuven (Belgium) and her habilitation in 2018 at the University of Vienna (Austria). She has been a Principal Investigator of eight research projects funded in four European countries. She joined the University of Luxembourg in November 2019 after a Visiting Scholarship at the Imre Kertesz Kolleg / Institute of Advanced Studies at the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena (Germany) and an Attract Brains for Brussels Fellowship at the Vrije Universiteit Brussels (Belgium). Her main research interests are transnational, transregional and comparative histories of Europe, migration, borderlands, oral history, the history of families and children, and citizen science.

Valérie Schafer has been a Professor in Contemporary European History at the C²DH (Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History) at the University of Luxembourg since February 2018. She previously worked at the CNRS in France and is still an Associate Researcher at the Center for Internet and Society. She is also a Mercator Fellow at the university of Siegen (2021 - Project Medien der Kooperation). She specialises in the history of computing, telecommunications and data networks. Her main research interests are the history of the Internet and the Web, the history of European digital cultures and infrastructures, and born-digital heritage (especially Web archives).She is Vice-Chair of the ECREA Communication History Section and General Secretary of the Society for the History of Media (SPHM). She is on the editorial board of the journals Le Temps des Médias, Flux and Cahiers François Viète and is a co-founder of the journal Internet Histories. Digital Technology, Culture and Society.

Sylvi Siebler studied History, French Cultural Studies and Intercultural Communication at Saarland University from 2013 to 2017 and Comparative Modern History with a focus on Western Europe at the University of Freiburg from 2017 to 2020. She wrote her master’s thesis on the topic ‘Between Résistance and Collaboration. Images of Women in the TV Series Un Village Français’. From 2020 to 2022, she worked as a research assistant at the Frankreichzentrum / Pôle France of Saarland University, as both an editor and event organiser. Her research interests include left-wing alternative milieus and the commune movement, women’s and gender history, and the representation of history in popular media, especially films and series.

Laura Steil is a cultural anthropologist (PhD, EPHE, 2015) interested in popular dance and music, social stratification, cultural memory, and migration in (sub)urban contexts. She experiments with embodied, sensory, and digital research methods. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C²DH) and examines the dance and music cultures of post-WWII Esch-sur-Alzette in the context of the FNR-DFG Popkult60 research project. She is the francophone chair of PoP Moves, an international research network on performances of the popular. Her first book entitled Boucan. Devenir quelqu’un dans le milieu afro was published in 2021 at the Presses Universitaires du Midi.

Christoph Vatter is Professor of Intercultural Business Communication with a focus on cultural theory and communication research at Friedrich Schiller University in Jena. He studied French cultural studies and intercultural communication, Romance studies and German as a foreign language at Saarland University and Université Laval (Québec/Canada). He received his doctorate in 2008 as part of a co-tutelle de thèse from Saarland University and the Université de Lorraine. From 2010 to 2017, he was a junior professor for intercultural communication at Saarland University. After a substitute professorship for Romance regional and cultural studies at Martin Luther University Halle, he has been at the University of Jena since October 2021. His research and teaching focuses on intercultural communication, diversity and interaction, cultures of memory, intercultural media analysis, Francophonie (Canada, sub-Saharan Africa), German-French cultural relations.

Maude Williams has studied history and cross-cultural studies in various Franco-German university programs. She worked at the University of Saarland in a Franco-German research project on evacuations of the border region during the Second World War, in which her thesis was supervised (Sorbonne University / Eberhard Karl Universität Tübingen). She graduate in 2016. After being interested in the Franco-German conflicts of the twentieth century and communication mechanisms in wartime, her research is currently focused on the post-war cultural history in France Germany and especially the Franco-German musical exchanges.

Clemens Zimmermann works as professor at the Historical Institute of Saarland University. In his habilitation, from 1991 in Heidelberg, he turned to basic questions of housing policy. His focus is on European urban and media history since the spring-modern era. Special attention will be paid to media cultures and media politics, journalism and cinema history as well as the mediatization of rural and urban spaces.

Jessica Burton is a PhD researcher at the Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C2DH) in Luxembourg. She specializes in Comics Studies, and obtained her Masters in the subject from the University of Dundee in 2014. She also completed a Bachelors with Honours in French Studies at the University of London Institute in Paris in 2013. Jessica remains extremely active in the field of comics production, continuing her work as an Editor for the UK´s primary publisher, Titan Comics, where she edits titles such as Doctor Who.

From 2012 to 2018, Ann-Kristin Kurberg completed the German-French bilingual teaching degree in History and French at the University of Saarland and the Université de Lorraine. From 2016 to 2018 she was a student assistant at the Department of European Contemporary History at the University of Saarland. For her exam she wrote on the topic ‘On the right path? - The local election successes of the Front National since 1995 and the impact on the German-French town twinnings Rastatt-Orange and Herne-Hénin-Beaumont’. Since 2018 she is working in the DFG/FNR research project ‘Popular Culture Transnational – Europe in the long 1960s’.

Richard Legay is a PhD Candidate at the C²DH (Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History) at the University of Luxembourg, where he is conducting research, under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Andreas Fickers, on the transnational history of commercial radio stations and popular culture in the 60s. His research interests are in Media History, especially Radio History, and in Public & Digital History. He holds a MA in Contemporary European History from the University of Luxembourg and a M.Phil in Public History & Cultural Heritage from Trinity College Dublin.

Benoît Majerus is Associate Professor of European History at the University of Luxembourg. His research focuses on the history of occupation during the two world wars and the history of psychiatry in the 20th century. He has a monthly radio show, Radio Grand Papier, on comics on Radio Campus Bruxelles.

Aline Maldener, Diplomkulturwissenschaftlerin, has studied Cultural Studies at Saarland university focusing on cultural and media history from the 19th century to the present time. She finished her studies 2012 with a diploma degree. Her diploma thesis was a comparative and transnational analysis of the young consumer’s image in contemporary youth magazines of the 1960s and 1970s in Great Britain and Germany. From 2014 to 2018 Aline Maldener has been a research associate at the chair of cultural and media history at Saarland university. Her research and publishing focuses on the history of European youth media, the history of popular culture, film and cinema history, and women’s and gender history, mainly in the twentieth century.

Antonia Schlotter studied from 2014-2021 history and archeology and got a master’s degree in history with a focus on Eastern European history at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz. In her master’s thesis she dealt with the causes and manifestations of the cholera riots in the Russian Empire in the 19th century. Since 2016 she has worked at various chairs at the university and at the Academy of Sciences and Literature Mainz as a student and research assistant and since 2020 on the conception of a museum exhibition on the topic ‘Cinema in the Countryside - Rural Media History from the early 20th century to the present day’. In addition to social, cultural and medical history, her research interests also lie in media history. Since March 2022 she has devoted herself to the transnational history of board games of the 1960s and 1970s.

Vitus Sproten is a PhD student at the Center for Contemporary and Digital History at the University of Luxembourg. He is doing his PhD on pop culture exchanges on media in the area between Maas and Rhine (Maastricht-Liège-Aachen) in the period from 1955 to 1990. He focuses on the festivals of the region as well as the emerging free radio stations. Sproten is also researcher at the Center for East Belgian History (ZOG), a regional historical research center in the German-speaking Community of Belgium.

Julia Wack studied History, Art History, Archaeology and Cultural Management in Cologne (D) and Maastricht (NL), focusing on contemporary art, communication and heritage; followed by 15 years of organising and contribution to large scale exhibition projects, publications, film series and festivals in Germany, The Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, Romania, France and Luxembourg. Most recently Régisseur des expositions at Mudam and Communication Coordinator of CinEast Film Festival (both Luxembourg), her main research interests are Popular Culture, Performance, Film and Esthetics. Within Popkult60, she is researching the work of amateur film clubs of the 1960s in the Greater Region.

Melanie Bardian studied historical cultural studies at Saarland University in Saarbrücken. She has been a PhD student at the Department of European Contemporary History at the University of Saarland since October 2015. She has been working there as a research assistant since October 2017. Under the direction of Professor Dietmar Hüser, she worked on the history of the German-American Institute in Saarbrücken in her diploma thesis. The dissertation project America at the Saar 1957-1983. Institutions, debates, perspectives builds on her thesis. Her research interests are mainly cultural transfer research and the recent history of Saarland.

Jasmin Nicklas has been a research assistant at the Department of European Contemporary History at the University of Saarland since 2015. She wrote her master’s thesis under the direction of Rainer Hudemann and Dietmar Hüser on the evacuation of psychiatric institutions in the German-French border area at the beginning of the Second World War. The work is located in the research group project ‘Evacuations in the Franco-German border area during the Second World War’ funded by the DFG and ANR. Her dissertation ‘Baby you drive my car - VW Beetle and Citroën 2CV on the way from the consumer product to a cult object. A German-French transfer history’ is directed by Dietmar Hüser and Hélène Miard-Delacroix.