The Contemporary History of Europe (EHI) team works at the intersection of institutional, political, cultural and social aspects of European integration, while developing approaches centred around the C²DH’s areas of expertise, particularly digital history. The EHI team consists of some 20 researchers, half of whom are early career scholars. While the EHI research area is broadly committed to fostering research and collaboration in the field of European integration, this year we would particularly like to highlight two dimensions: first, activities related to training, teaching and public history; and second, research at the intersection of digital history and historical perspectives.
History of European integration
Some key research was further developed in 2023, including a project exploring the gendered dimensions of European integration. On 20 and 21 April 2023, the University of Luxembourg hosted the conference Women’s Narratives and European Integration History organised by Elena Danescu, ED-UNILU and the C²DH, in connection with the oral history research project “The role of women in European and international relations of Luxembourg”, led by Elena Danescu. Another project looking at “hidden” dimensions of European integration is the BUREU project, for which a workshop was held in November on “Perspectives on Uses and Users in the History of Office Buildings”, inviting researchers to delve into the stories of 20th-century office buildings. An edited volume is in progress for 2025.
Public history and teaching
The team regularly organises events on European integration, including the activities of the Robert Schuman House, participation in the European Parliament’s network of Political Houses and Foundations of Great Europeans, the activities of Elena Danescu within ED-UNILU and the “Winter Online Lecture Series on Europe”. The latter is organised by Elena Danescu in connection with the Bachelor and Master’s courses she teaches and is also open to a wider audience. The EHI team provides teaching at Bachelor and Master’s level, covering a wide range of topics related to European history (History of European Memories, New Narratives in the History of Europe, etc.), and the team is also involved in teaching and training in other contexts. As head of the management committee (2022-24) of the Tensions of Europe Network, Valérie Schafer coordinated a mentoring programme for PhD early scholars and organised a remote conference on Surprising Sources in May to investigate whether historians in the network have a particular relationship with archives, sources and their research materials. This gave PhD students an opportunity to discuss their research with more advanced scholars. The EHI team is very sensitive to this need. In 2023, it co-organised two summer schools for early scholars. The first was the International Summer School “Oral History Meets European Studies. Sources, Tools and Methods in the Digital Age”, held from 3 to 6 July 2023 at the Robert Schuman House. Co-organised with the European University Institute (Florence), the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory (Frankfurt am Main) and other C²DH research teams and attended by 18 PhD students from all over Europe, it explored oral history methods and offered hands-on sessions on digital tools, while looking at how digital sources can shape narratives in contemporary European history.
The second summer school focused on the topic of media reception. After Panthéon-Assas University in 2022, the C²DH hosted the second edition of the Doctoriales internationales francophones en études des medias (DIFEM). This interdisciplinary summer school was held in September and was attended by 17 PhD candidates from more than seven European and Canadian universities. The programme was centred on media reception, audience, participation and influence, in connection with the FNR-funded HIVI project on the History of Online Virality. Discussions explored aspects related to digital and social media and the concepts of media convergence and entanglement.
The EHI team is also strongly committed to opening up debates on European history to the general public, as it did with the conferences “L’Europe à l’heure des défis: réalités et perspectives”, with Jean-Claude Juncker as a keynote speaker, and “Robert Schuman et sa Déclaration (9 Mai 1950): Histoire, actualité et perspectives” organised by Elena Danescu. The film about the history of Robert Schuman was officially launched at the Europe Day event at the Robert Schuman House on 9 May, with a presentation by Victoria Mouton to almost a hundred visitors.
Strong commitment to digital history
Another key feature of the EHI team is its commitment to digital history. As well as our involvement in existing research projects on web archives, especially the European network WARCnet (2020-23) and the FNR-funded HIVIproject on online virality (Feb. 2021-Feb. 24), various new projects were launched in 2023. Gerben Zaagsma is exploring the history of digital humanities in the “Towards Histories of Digital History” (TOHODH) project, which looks at the history and genealogies of digital history within the broader context of how new technologies have shaped historical research practices and knowledge production since at least the late 19th century. TOHODH is part of a broader Histories of Digital Humanities project infrastructure to be launched and carried out with Prof. Dr Julianne Nyhan (University of Darmstadt).
The CulturHIST project further investigated historians’ implicit research practices in the digital age. After several study days since 2018, a research seminar was organised by Frédéric Clavert and Caroline Muller (Rennes 2 University) in November on search engines and historians. As ChatGPT and similar systems are becoming increasingly widespread, there is no doubt that such generative AI systems will influence our relationship with the past. To investigate these challenges, the AI & Collective Memory project was launched, a CfP was published in April for a special issue of Memory Studies Review, and an article by Frédéric Clavert and Caroline Muller on historians’ digital practices and the future influence of AI systems on the writing of history has been accepted in the journal 20&21 (Sciences Po).
The FNR-funded Letterbox project led by Benoît Majerus is researching the historical role of shell companies in global tax chains through the case study of Luxembourg. A round table discussion on the role of legal experts in the development of the country’s financial centre was held in February. Letterbox combines recent questions in financial history with cutting-edge digital history, which was demonstrated at a C²DH seminar on digital history as a tool to shed light on global networks and local infrastructures. The project was also discussed at the RESAW 2023 conference, a European conference on web archives, with contributions by four EHI members on several aspects of web archives during a highly transformative age.
This dual emphasis on teaching and training and on digital history emphasises the team’s commitment to exploring multiple dimensions of European integration and history, combining hands-on engagement and educational initiatives with digital approaches and current challenges.