Phd Theses

The press has long been a strategic tool in shaping historical narratives and public perception. This thesis aims to examine the role of newspapers as vehicles for colonial discourse and propaganda, and their influence on interactions, rivalries, and power struggles among colonial powers during the Scramble for Africa, from 1880 to 1914. Through a data-driven, large-scale study, the goal is to explore the historical context, key players, significant events, and the role of propaganda during this period. This research also delves into the evolution of the media landscape during the Scramble for Africa, and aims to verify arguments suggesting that the press only belatedly participated in colonial propaganda, and that before the end of the 1920s, the press (particularly the French one) paid very little attention to colonial issues. Additionally, through the use of NLP (Natural Language Processing), I want to analyse the prevalent colonial tropes and narratives disseminated in historical newspapers, and their potential contribution to the support of colonial power structures and policies, diplomatic negotiations, conflicts, and treaties shaping colonial rivalry. The aim is also to leverage network analysis and visualisation to identify key actors and central nodes in the dissemination of colonial discourse, to map the information flow within newspapers, to uncover potential relationships of influence and cooperation, and to track the spread of ideas and the evolution of key concepts over time and space. 

This research looks at the long-term consequences of the gunpowder trade and the use of guns in pre-colonial Africa between 1500-1900, specifically focusing on their effects on violence and trust levels within political and social institutions, with special interest in how geography and the political economy shape long-run institutions. By using innovative digital history methodologies, such as computational topic modeling, GIS, historical linguistics and semantic analysis, this research aims to provide an in-depth analysis of traveller accounts and historical sources to demonstrate the role of gunpowder in shaping African societies during this pivotal period. The study utilizes a new dataset compiled by the Time Travellers Project, encompassing over 500 years of explorer accounts with diverse linguistic, cultural, political, and geographic variation. The project aims to examine the routes of gunpowder trade, identify key traders, and explore the impact of guns on violence levels, ethnic tensions, political instability, and trust in pre-colonial Africa. This research integrates various historical sources to offer new insights into the relationships between traders, routes, and locations. GIS will be employed to visualize and analyse the spatial aspects of the gunpowder trade, identifying patterns and correlations between the spread of gunpowder and changes in violence and political stability across different regions. Furthermore, semantic analysis, such as named entity recognition, sentiment analysis, and topic modeling, will be used to study key traders, trade routes, and the impact of gunpowder on African societies from the textual data. The thesis seeks to contribute to the broader field of African economic history by filling a critical gap in the literature and developing a more comprehensive understanding of the complex forces that shaped the continent.

As part of the BUREU project, a collaborative initiative between the University of Luxembourg and the University of Leuven, this PhD research focusses on the interrelationship between interior design choices and ideas about efficient work organisation within the European institutions in Luxembourg from 1951 and 2001.Its objective is to capture the tension fields between how workspaces were designed by decision-makers and how these environments were utilised and perceived by users. Using the conceptual framework of ‘mediating interfaces’ and building upon the actor-network principles from Latour and Yaneva, as well as the insights from Foucault’s theories of power, the research will aim to bridge the void within the current historiographical debate through a transinstitutional approach. To achieve this, the methodology will utilise both visual and discourse analysis. The visual analysis will focus on photographic material and available plans, while the discourse analysis will incorporate a wide range of sources, including archival records and oral history.

This PhD project aims to examine the significance of source code as a direct historical source, shedding light on its invisible yet omnipresent role in contemporary society.

A broad spectrum of human activities, including transportation, social interactions, and academic research, are increasingly being facilitated through the use of digital artifacts. As a result, an increasing array of human activities are mediated by digital artefacts who themself are supported by their source code.

The importance of this matter is highlighted by the creation of algorithms, known as artificial intelligence, and the growing impact of software on diverse facets of social life. Whether it's software supporting the justice system or facilitating smart cities, access to and comprehension of source code is progressively becoming a substantial political and social issue. Source code is set to play an increasingly pivotal role in contemporary history.

Despite these transformative changes, the role of source code as a primary historical source remains unexplored. Consequently, this PhD project has for ambition to fully embraces source code as a primary source for history and to explore how opening the black box of source code can inform history as well as how history can inform code.

As source code would be a relatively new material for history, this project should yield fruitful methodological ideas and developments within the field of various digital history topics. Furthermore, we'll delve into the creation of a source code archive and examine the functioning of key stakeholders in the field, such as Software Heritage, GitHub Archive, and Internet Archive.

Since the 1970s, deindustrialisation has fundamentally changed Luxembourg’s economy, shifting its focus from industry to services. Beyond these major structural changes, the restructuring of the steel industry has had important consequences at the local level, both for workers and for industrial towns. The research focuses on the impact of deindustrialisation in three industrial towns in Luxembourg, Esch, Dudelange and Pétange, and aims to explore local challenges and initiatives in response to the restructuring of the steel industry. A key area of interest in the research are the local strategies implemented to address the challenges of deindustrialisation.

This interdisciplinary PhD research focuses on the history of the Kyiv Metro system from the beginning of its construction in 1949 up to the present day. A case study on the city of Kyiv will investigate events at the state level, analysing how changes in construction, development technologies, and operational rationale relate to the social and political processes in place. The thesis project is situated between three research areas approaching the metro as an infrastructure, as a symbol, and as a socio-technical system. Based on a multi-layered interdisciplinary approach, the research combines deep mapping for spatialisation and visualisation, a discourse analysis for text mining etc. It studies heterogeneous data sets including archival material, newspaper articles, maps of different types and various imagery. The novelty of the project lies in the two-fold approach of compiling a biography of infrastructure and creating deep visualisation. This PhD research is embedded in the ‘Deep Data Science for Digital History’ Doctoral Training Unit (DTU D4H) at the Luxembourg-based Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C.DH), and is located at the crossroads of historical and data sciences by applying computational methods as well as data visualisation.

The topic of the research project is the history of restitution and indemnification in Luxembourg after World War II, placing a particular focus on “jewish” victims and their treatments throughout this process. It will try to look at how the mechanisms of restitution and indemnification looked like in Luxembourg, if those being perceived as jewish were compensated and to which extend. The project may also include a comparative perspective (if feasible) to other ‘victim groups’ within Luxembourg as well as to other Western European countries and their restitution and indemnification processes and politics. Therefore the project will try to answer some of the following questions: 
- What was the legal basis for restitution and indemnification in Luxembourg? How did it envolve over time? What groups were included or excluded within this legal framework? What were the criteria according to which compensation was allocated? How did the Office des dommages de guerre put this legal basis into practice? Which arguments for accepting or denying a restitution or compensation claim were brought forward by the Office des dommage de guerre and by the one claming them? 
- How were „jewish“ victimes treated in this process? Were „jewish“ properties given back to their owners (or their descendants)? Were „jewish“ victimes compensated for the persecution and disadvantages suffered? Is there a discrepany between different ‚groupes of victimes‘? Did the legal basis and practices exclude certain groups? More specifically, have „jewish“ victimes been at a disadvantage and have they been discriminated against during this process? How many „jewish“ victimes asked for claims themselves, how many did not and why? 
- How did the luxembourgish society and luxembourgish politics position themselves towards these restitution processes and claims? Were they accepted, were they supported? Were they even demanding them? Did certain sections of society, such as certain parties, support restitution and indemnification more than others (or on the contrary hinder it)? How important was political and public representation in order to receive compensation for claims? Did representation (or the lack thereof) influence the groups‘ ability to receive acknowledgment and compensation as well as the visibility within luxembourgish society? 
In terms of sources, the project shall mainly rely on archival material, particularly from the Luxembourgish National Archives (more specifically material from the „Office des dommages de guerre“) as well as possibly using archival material from other countries such as Germany, France, Belgium, USA. In addition, the project intends to look at legal texts, parliamentary debates as well as press articles.

May Day (the First of May) is a uniquely global event. Once a year from Kirchberg to Kinshasa, from Hamburg to Hanoi workers take to the streets to protest and celebrate. But May Day did not begin this way. How did a one-day strike for the eight-hour day become the global celebration of all things left-of-center? Making Global May Day uses digital mapping and database software to trace the spread and evolution of May Day over its first fifty years (1890-1940). By mapping instances of May Day, we see not just how the day has spread but how it has evolved, struggling against wars and empire and for a better tomorrow.

As a provider of domiciliation, administration, and depository services for the financial industry, the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg hosts a strong ratio of administrative workers and offers an excellent terrain for exploring the often-overlooked actors of financial bureaucracies. Among them, compliance officers are a recent product of a long history of organizing trust in economic activities and stand at the forefront of the most critical social issues in finance: fraud, money-laundering, corruption. Imported from the United States since the 1970s, their activity has been locally reconstructed “from the top” through layers of both national and international laws, regulations, and recommendations; “from the bottom” by the compliance officers themselves; as well as “from the side” by consultants and providers of regulatory technologies. By investigating the networks, processes, materiality and individual experiences behind this local 're-creation' of a transnational occupation, this Ph.D. project aims to build a case study in contemporary work history, with a focus on the financial industry, and contributes to answering the research question: who create new professions?

Using digital methods to study the repetition patterns of rumors in historical resources (like digitised newspapers) to find out the connection between it and collective amnesia, different case studies will be included.

The transition from planned to market economy and the subsequent economic, political and social changes in the wake of the disintegration of the Eastern Bloc during and following the years of 1989/91 have recently become a prominent branch of historiography under the notion of “transformation”. Western European countries, such as Luxembourg had its own changes in socio- economic and political order, following the 1973 oil crisis. Known in German literature as “structural shift”, this period, which extends until the 2000s, was marked by economic crises, deindustrialisation and market collapses as well as the disappearance of the traditional industrial worker. These two phenomena have until now been treated mostly independently in historiography.
This project researches the history of the steel company ARBED and its steelworks in Luxembourg as well as one of its subsidiary companies the “Thüringer Stahlwerke” in Unterwellenborn in former East Germany, acquired in 1992, as two case studies to analyse both these phenomena within one single, transnational and comparative concept of transformation between the years of 1973 and 2001. Companies offer a particularly well-suited framework for analysing transformation because of their functions as both pacemakers and objects of socio-economic change and as social spaces for workers, their families, and the community around them. The hypothesis is verified, that by means of a diachronic comparison of these two different case studies, it is possible to observe similar mechanisms and dynamics of transformation beyond time periods and geographical spaces. Since the history of a company consists of more than just its economic figures, an approach that combines business and labour history is used. On one hand, by comparing written documents such as archival material, annual reports from the company and media sources, changes within corporate structures and management strategies are analysed. On the other hand, Oral History interviews are used for an analysis of changes within experiences and everyday working and living practices of workers. Furthermore, the project reveals potential transnational ties and exchanges of experience within corporate and personnel coordination between the two case studies.
By comparing similarities and differences and unraveling ties of the changes of these two Western European and Eastern European branches of ARBED, a new transnational understanding of transformation of both business and labour history is provided. The research results and the generated data such as fragments of media and archival sources and of Oral History are also presented within a multimedia online exhibition using digital tools to comparatively visualize the transformation of ARBED in Luxembourg and in Unterwellenborn.

This research project focuses on the progress and consequences of the abolition of trade corporations in the “Belgian” departments, during their attachment to France from 1795 to 1814. Carried out in a well-defined chronological and geographical framework, this innovative research project aims to examine the economic,social and psychological impact of the abolition of corporations as well as its modalities. While this is indeed a study of economic history, primarily urban, its originality lies above all in taking into account the individual level by studying the socioeconomic trajectories of former members of suppressed corporations. Individual strategies and perceptions of strengths, weaknesses, threats or opportunities, and even expressions of feelings such as worry, hope, joy or anger in the face of a new economic situation, are elements likely to partly explain the craftmen’s decision-making during a key moment in the economic history of the future Belgium.
Our objective is to try to both fill a historiographical hollow at the level of Belgian departments and to get the study of trade corporations out of the sole and dry financial and economic logic. To this end, we will rely, by mixing micro and macro-analytical approaches, on a diverse range of sources. Whether we like it or not, there are always feelings and emotions behind men: if history wants to study man in the past, it must then also take into account his daily feelings. The latter are often called upon only to understand the great revolutions: what about less important events especially when we know, from the recent work of specialists in behavioral economics, in particular those of Richard Thaler, that emotions play a significant role in our decision-making?

The doctoral thesis “Lebensläufe von Patient*innen – Heterogenität der Institutionen” studies the question of the erosion of the frontier between normality and madness in Belgium in the second half of the twentieth century through the reconstitution over long periods of time of the life paths of people interned at the Institute of Psychiatry of the Brugmann Hospital in Brussels. Through a writing of history from “below”, this project meets a triple objective: first, to record the heterogeneity of life histories, then to highlight the multiple places of care that emerge from the 1960s onwards and finally to make audible the experiences of the actors of this deinstitutionalization (patients, nurses, psychologists...), who have hardly been heard until now. The Institute's medical and administrative records are the primary archival material. However, these sources will be completed by archives of other institutions frequented by these patients (for example: social centers, establishments for the handicapped or the elderly, prisons, etc.) in order to reconstitute the prehistory and the posthistory of their psychiatric internment. The thesis "Lebensläufe von Patient*innen – Heterogenität der Institutionen " is part of a multidisciplinary research programm supported by the Luxembourg National Research Fund (FNR), the Deutsch Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) and the hospitals Uniklinikum in Düsseldorf and Charité in Berlin.

The period between the occupation of Luxembourg by Nazi Germany on May 10, 1940 and the beginning of the deportation trains to the East on October 16, 1941, marked by the constantly tightening net of Nazi persecution, was characterized by a wave of flight movements of Jewish people. While on the days following the occupation around 1500 Jewish people left the country mainly for France, during a general movement of population flight, around 1700 other Jews managed or were forced to quit Luxembourg by the time the Eastern deportations began, and an escape became nearly impossible. The reasons for this specificity are manifold and are based on the interaction of various initiatives and actors: individual efforts, collective transports of the Jewish consistory, expulsion by the Nazi authorities, ... . While many of these refugees initially found shelter in France only to fall into the hands of the Nazis and be deported from there, a minority was able to emigrate via neutral countries such as Spain or Portugal to safe havens such as the USA. These particular developments therefore lead to the following research question: How and where to could Jewish persecutees escape the Holocaust out of Luxembourg and what supportive networks existed? The question focuses thus on two mutually influencing aspects: the flight itself and the potential help behind it. In addition to the analysis of the individual actors and possible networks with various motivations, the focus is on the geographical areas of flight (mainly Luxembourg, France, Portugal, USA), which enables a multinational perspective. Furthermore, individual fates and trajectories of families will particularly be woven into the discussion in order to offer a micro-historical approach.

The topic of this research is “Historical Data Visualization” in the context of interdisciplinary projects. The research questions focus on understanding what the different disciplines need in terms of data visualization, for what purposes and what are the tools and programming languages currently available, and their limitations. 
Data visualization is very often viewed as an equivalent of statistical representation of data in all its forms. This representation serves effectively certain objectives such as abstraction, reduction, standardization, or legibility, of interest to some disciplines and use cases, namely business, engineering, and science. Numerous tools and programming languages allow to visualize data according to these principles. Other disciplines and areas of knowledge, such as history, literature, art, journalism, or education, are confronted with the need to use the same tools ignoring some fundamental principles of their own disciplines, to program from scratch new visual vocabularies and functionalities, or to use design tools that are disconnected from the data. 
As part of the research, the needs of the different disciplines and areas of knowledge are analyzed, based on their own definitions of data and data visualization, the relation between the two of them, and the expected user interaction. The meeting points between disciplines are sought and the transformation of visualizations between approaches is experimented with. All of this with the purpose of using data visualization to facilitate interdisciplinary projects, but also to open new approaches to data visualization within the disciplines themselves.
The answers to all these questions will serve to define the requirements for the development of the tools to fill some of the gaps in the existing tools.

This research is developed at the C2DH (Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History), within the context of the LuxTime Audacity Project, an interdisciplinary project in collaboration with the LCSB (Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine) in the field of environmental cheminformatics, and the LIST (Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology) in the field of eco-hydrology. 

The Luxtime will be using a local case, the industrialization of Belval and the Minette region, as a testbed for methodological and epistemological reflections on how to study historical exposomics, the impact of environmental exposures on the health of the local populations in a long-term perspective. In combining past evidence from hydrological systems, hydrological studies (containing information about water pollution, climate change, and topographic and geological transformations), medical records (describing desease patterns, mortality rates, social and psychological well-being), and history (archival sources documenting economic, social, political, and cultural changes), a new approach to studying the past is possible. The case study tests the analytical potential of a multi-layered research design.

This research project is a ‘spin-off’ of a large European initiative called the ‘European Time Machine’ that aims at creating a collective digital information system mapping European economic, social, cultural, and geographical evolution over time, using technology.

This research builds upon previous research in the fields of visual display and semiotic concepts, human-computer interaction and humanistic approaches to display and interfaces.

Johanna Jaschik is currently investigating the potential and limits of citizen science for the discipline of border studies on the basis of the project “Talking Borders. From Local Expertise to Global Exchange”, a citizen science experiment that was conducted at the Second World Conference of the Association of Borderlands Studies in Vienna and Budapest in 2018 on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the dissolution of the Habsburg Empire. This research will set the methodological basis for a new Citizen Science project in the context of transformation historiography and border research in the post-Soviet space.

In January 2020 Blandine Landau started a PhD. focusing on the spoliation of Jewish property during World War II in Luxembourg. Cofinanced by the Fondation Luxembourgeoise pour la Mémoire de la Shoah and the University of Luxembourg, it is set as a joint direction between Prof. Fickers (Center for Contemporary and Digital History, University of Luxembourg) and Prof. Backouche (Centre des Recherches Historiques, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, France), with the support of Prof. Ass. Scuto (Center for Contemporary and Digital History, University of Luxembourg) and Prof. Gensburger (Institut des Sciences Sociales du Politique, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, France). 
Using the methods of microhistory and quantitative analysis put forward in recent research , Blandine Landau will focus on study-cases to understand the mechanisms of the dispossession of people considered as Jews in Luxembourg between 1940 and 1945. Starting with an in-depth economical and sociological research on specific neighborhoods of Esch-sur-Alzette (Brill) and Luxembourg-city (Merl), she will then show how the people living and working in these areas are dispossessed of what the owned and what they were in a process designed to annihilate them socially, and then physically. The third part of her research will focus on the matter of luxury goods, especially art pieces, following specific items before, during and after World War II. 
The goal of this analysis is to study the effects of dispossession at a micro-level, revealing actions, tendencies, mechanisms, actors, impacts that did not appear in macro-studies such as the one led by the Special Commission for the study of the spoliation of Jewish property in Luxembourg during the years of war 1940-1945 . The micro-scale will allow for a case-by-case approach, following the people and the objects to give a renewed perspective on the mechanisms of the dispossession of Jews during World War II, and try to determine the specificities of Luxembourg in a broader context. 

This PhD. is part of a broader project, giving way to international conferences (study-days “Dispossess – Dispossessed”, July 5-6 2021, University of Luxembourg and National Center for Literature, Mersch; Forum Z “What is Remembered Lives – Memory of the Holocaust in the Digital Age, October 18, 2021). It is also linked to the Digital Memorial of the Holocaust in Luxembourg.

This research aims to investigate how Luxembourg adapted, appropriated, and adopted the Internet and the web from the early 1990s to the present day. The research goes back to the 1970s to dig into the "histories of networking," analyze the impact of the multiple computer networks emerging within the European context, and understand the specificities of the different paths of Internet adaptation, appropriation, and adoption within the country.

The first part focuses on the analysis of the adaptation of the infrastructure in Luxembourg, starting in the 1970s with its first steps in computerization and networking, passing through the launch of Restena (Réseau Téléinformatique de l’Éducation Nationale et de la Recherche) in 1989 and the first connection to the Internet in 1992. We will analyze the first ISPs, the leading players, and how the infrastructure evolved towards the actual situation. A second part explores the evolution of the appropriation of the web and social networks from the professionals of the web point of view by relying on selected case studies. In the last part, we will investigate domestication and reception at large. How did the users adopt the Internet and the web, and how did they contribute and shape them?

History is characterized by an immense variety of experiences and perspectives, which can often result in being conflicting or competing. This polyvocality and multitude of interpretations coexists in historical narratives, even if not all of them are equally and justly represented in historiography. Through Public History and public participation practices applied in museums, the matter of diverse historical narratives and their representations and possible inclusion in historiography and in cultural and historical institutions raises, together with multiple versions of the past. This plurality can lead to significant impacts on both, historical narrations and institutions. 
Within this framework, the research examines how the multiple and often competing public interpretations of the past can be treated, by whom, and how they can be embedded in the official historiography and in history production, with a special scope on museums.
Hence, the main research question targets how history museums can interact with the results of participatory practices, shared authority and public participation and how an appropriate stage for these multiple and often competing interpretations of the past can be provided by the institutions. Additionally, the role of the historian also needs to be reconsidered to promote a more inclusive and progressive approach and to provide a safe environment for exchange inside institutions. The historian becomes a public history facilitator, who helps structuring interpretative frameworks to collectively study, interpret and understand the past, by proposing more compound and engaging historical tasks to public participants and by involving the voices of everyone in the historical narrative portrayed in institutions.
Three museums, namely the M9 in Venice, IT, the House of European History in Brussels, BE, and the Luxembourg City Museum in Luxembourg City, LU, figure as partners and case studies to apply the methods and models elaborated during the research, measure their impacts as well as the reverberations and ramifications of the application of the discipline of Public History inside historical museums.

Creating the Urban Citizen in Hamburg and Marseille: A Trans-Urban History of Public Urban Green Spaces during the Postwar Period (1945-1973)
Public urban green spaces are mirrors of societal relations: they reflect the relationship between government officials and urban citizens, labor and recreation, private and public life. Set in the aftermath of WWII and continuing until the First Oil Shock in 1973, this study captures a time of urban restructuring and rebuilding in Western Europe. The focus lies specifically on public parks and playgrounds around the port areas of Hamburg and Marseille, thus combining the concepts of the green and the blue city.

During the Second World War the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg was de facto annexed and incorporated into the German Reich. More than 10.000 young men and women, who were born between 1920-1927, were drafted into the Wehrmacht, the Reichsarbeitsdienst (RAD) and the Kriegshilfsdienst (KHD). This doctoral thesis will focus on the social milieus of the soldiers and recruits. More precisely how and to what extent the deployment of the recruits in the German forces influenced the lives of their family members who stayed at home. What socio-economic and psychological hardships did they have to endure following the enrolments? What were their survival strategies? Which experiences of support and repression can be identified? Some families of deserters were resettled and their property confiscated. Other families knocked on the door of national organizations or the local administrations to receive financial and material aid following the loss of income. The research adopts a bottom-up perspective based on a biographical approach. It is based on the analysis of official documents and personal records from a handful families in order to reveal some key experiences on a micro level throughout the war. The gathered experiences will allow a comparison between the different regions in Luxembourg in order to establish an inner-Luxembourgish comparison and to demonstrate the multitude of war experiences in the country.

My research revolves around the investment fund industry in Luxembourg, between 1929 and 1989. The analysis is based on original quantitative sources – such as the Luxembourg Fund Data Repository of the University of Luxembourg, and the recently made available data on funds from CSSF archives – and qualitative sources – such as parliamentary acts and first-hand interviews. The innovative purpose of the research lies in individuating and describing the main determinants behind the extraordinary expansion of the fund industry in the second half of 1900 and, ultimately, evaluating the presence of external catalysts.