Dr. Tim van der Heijden is a media historian with a special interest in the history of amateur media technologies and practices. He holds a Ph.D in media history from Maastricht University, an M.A. in media studies (research-master) from the University of Amsterdam, and a B.A. in cultural studies from Erasmus University Rotterdam.
His dissertation Hybrid Histories: Technologies of Memory and the Cultural Dynamics of Home Movies, 1895-2005 explores the home movie as a twentieth-century family memory practice from a long-term historical perspective. Specifically, it investigates how changes in technologies of memory (from film via video to digital media) have shaped new forms of home movie making and screening. It was written in the context of the research project Changing Platforms of Ritualized Memory Practices: The Cultural Dynamics of Home Movies (2012-2016), funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO).
In April 2017, he started working for the C²DH as a post-doctoral researcher and coordinator of the Doctoral Training Unit (DTU) Digital History and Hermeneutics, an interdisciplinary digital history project funded by the Luxembourg National Research Fund (FNR). From September 2019 until July 2021 he worked as a postdoctoral researcher within the FNR-funded project Doing Experimental Media Archaeology: Practice and Theory (DEMA). In July 2021, he started a position as assistant professor at the Faculty of Humanities of the Open University in the Netherlands.