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. She is also Vice-Chair of the ECREA Communication History Section, a member of the Management Committee of the “Tensions of Europe” network, and General Secretary of the Society for the History of Media (SPHM). She is involved in the projects Esch 2022 at 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 she is one of the co-PI of the WARCnet project (supported by the Independent Research Fund Denmark | Humanities (grant number 9055-00005B)). She is also the PI of the AWAC2 cohort (Analysing Web Archives of the COVID Crisis through the IIPC Novel Coronavirus dataset, 2021-22) which is engaged in collaborative activities with the Archives Unleashed Project and benefit from its support and mentorship. She leads 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 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 (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 is a Mercator Fellow at the university of Siegen in 2021 (Teilprojekt A01 and A02 in the project Medien der Kooperation).
Her most recent 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).