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 (CIS – CNRS UPR 2000).
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).
Professor Schafer is the Head of the Contemporary European History (EHI) research area at the C²DH since 2020, co-DET of the Master in European Contemporary History since 2018, and Chargée de mission « Archives de l’University du Luxembourg » (since mid-July 2023). She is also Vice-Chair of the ECREA Communication History Section, the chair of the Management Committee of the “Tensions of Europe” network, and General Secretary of the Society for the History of Media (SPHM). She was involved in the projects Esch 2022 at the C²DH, she participated to OPERAS-P (H2020, 2019-2021) as a task leader on innovative models of governance, She is involved in the SNF Project Web History, in the DFG-FNR funded project Popkult (2021-2024) and in the “Deep Data Science of Digital History” (D4H), a Doctoral Training Unit funded through the FNR’s PRIDE programme since autumn 2022. She was one of the co-PI of the WARCnet project (supported by the Independent Research Fund Denmark | Humanities (grant number 9055-00005B)). She was also the PI of the AWAC2 cohort (Analysing Web Archives of the COVID Crisis through the IIPC Novel Coronavirus dataset, 2021-22) which was engaged in collaborative activities with the Archives Unleashed Project and benefited from its support and mentorship. She led the BUZZ-F project, a research project supported by the BnF DataLab at the French National Library in 2022. She is the principal investigator of the HIVI project, a project running from March 2021 to February 2024, which is supported by the Luxembourg National Research Fund (C20/SC/14758148) and dedicated to the history of online virality. She is part of the steering committee for the BeCoS project (Become a Computer Scientist) of the Scienteens Lab, supported by an FNR PSP-Flagship. She is co-head with Benjamin Thierry of the working group Digital Heritages and Memories" within the GDR 2091 "Internet, AI and Society" (CNRS, Centre Internet et société). She is on the editorial board of the journals Le Temps des Médias, Flux, Journal of Digital History and Cahiers François Viète and is a co-founder and co-editor of the journal Internet Histories. Digital Technology, Culture and Society (Taylor & Francis). She is also a member of the Scientific Board of the Orange Group and of Afnic, the French domain name management company, she is part of the advisory group of HEXA-X and she was a Mercator Fellow at the university of Siegen in 2021 (Teilprojekt A01 and A02 in the project Medien der Kooperation).
Her published or co-edited books include: En construction, La fabrique française d’Internet et du Web (Ina Éditions, 2018), Penser l’histoire des médias (CNRS Éditions, 2019) and Qu’est-ce qu’une archive du Web? (OpenEditions, 2019).