Current position
Moritz Feichtinger is principal investigator of the SNSF-founded research project “Computing the Social”, situated at the University of Basel’s History Department. The project investigates computer and database systems developed and operated by the US army during the war for South Vietnam for the purpose of population control and anti-guerilla warfare. To analyse these early digital systems and obsolete data formats, the research employs experimental approaches from digital forensics, media archaeology, and data science.
Research
After the PhD-project in the field of the history of decolonization and violence, Feichtinger’s research is focused on the history of information technology, computational research methods, and the analysis and preservation of “born digital” objects.
Teaching
Moritz Feichtinger has taught courses at Universities in Basel, Bern, Lausanne and Zürich, spanning a wide range of topics from the fields of contemporary and global history, colonial history, computational methods, and theory of history.
Outreach
Moritz Feichtinger has served as scientific consultant and reviewer for numerous public institutions in the areas of digital preservation, digital research methods and their implementation in academic education, and open science.
Work experience
Feichtinger has gained experience in the field of digital humanities and digital history as researcher and lecturer at University of Lausanne’s Department of Language and Information Sciences (SLI), and as the coordinator of the University of Zürich’s Digital History Lab. Prior to that, he worked as postdoctoral researcher and lecturer for global and contemporary history at the University of Berne.
Educational background
Moritz Feichtinger studied History, History of Science and Technology, and Philosophy in Berlin from 2002 to 2009. In 2016, he earned a PhD from the University of Bern with a dissertation on population control and forced relocation during the violent decolonization in Algeria and Kenya (supervised by Prof. Dr. Christian Gerlach and Prof. Dr. Martin Thomas).
