Cordula Schnuer: The C2DH initially pooled existing resources from within and outside the university. How has it grown together over the last five years?
Andreas Fickers: It was indeed quite a challenging process to start this new structure and integrate some old institutions with their own traditions and legacies. My role at the beginning of the centre, as director, was to do a lot of expectation management, to make sure that people are finding their role and that they feel comfortable in being part of that new vision.
Luxembourg’s national research strategy has four priorities: industrial and service transformation, sustainable and responsible development, personalised healthcare and 21st century education. Where does the C2DH fit into this?
I find these four priorities a bit reductionist when you see the whole research landscape here in Luxembourg. The National Research Fund (FNR) has a wider view, and there, contemporary history and digital humanities are clearly identified as research priorities.
What we do, of course, has to do with education in the 21st century. It's about training our students in the field of digital literacy, which is key for not only historians but for all humanities disciplines.
What we do at C2DH very much radiates to the broader field of education in digital literacy, not only for students but also for the professors and teachers. That, for me, is the biggest challenge: how to train the trainers; how to make ourselves, as university professors, fit for the job in in this 21st century.
All of our research projects on Luxembourg and European history have a digital dimension. We encourage everybody to experiment.
You have a triple mission--being a national centre for history, an international centre for digitalisation and to promote research and teaching to the public. How do you balance this?
We have two thematic pillars on which the centre is built: Luxembourg contemporary history and European history. But in a kind of horizontal layer, we have these two other dimensions. One is public history outreach. And the second layer is the digital. All of our research projects on Luxembourg and European history have a digital dimension. We encourage everybody to experiment with new infrastructures, new tools, data, in order to see how the digital can help us in promoting that scholarship.
How has the centre helped Luxembourg address some of the darker chapters of its history, such as the Holocaust or its role in colonialism?
We have started quite a number of important research projects, especially on the history of the Second World War, but also the post-war period. We are now in the midst of preparing a larger virtual exhibition on the Second World War in Luxembourg--which will integrate the many research activities we have been doing on this topic--as we did for the First World War.
There is a certain way in which Luxembourg sees itself and its history. What has been your feedback from people about the research that you do?
That's exactly the field of tension in which contemporary historians work. On the one side, the public discourse, which is very much framed by commemorative events and also institutions that do this kind of work. And on the other side, historians, who really have to deconstruct some of the myths and legends, which have been circulating now for many generations, in the country. That was at the very origin of creating the centre. And it's sometimes very difficult to keep those two fields of memory and history apart.
What scope is there for you to cooperate with other research institutes in Luxembourg?
Thanks to the digital priority, there is lots of common ground with other research centres, both within and outside the university. One good example is a project called Luxembourg Time Machine, which is about bringing together historical data from very different kinds of fields.
So, for example, Emma Schymanski, an LCSB colleague and environmental chemist, is looking at data that tells us something about the pollution of the ground here in Belval. A colleague at List, Laurent Pfister, who is a hydrologist, looks at how water pollution has developed over the past hundreds of years. We as historians then add the more contextual data coming from the archives of the Arbed, newspapers reporting on air pollution, and bring together those very different kinds of datasets that generally don't speak to each other.
With a focus on Luxembourg, how do you cooperate internationally and compete for funding?
Nearly 40% of our budget comes from external funding. At national level there is genuine interest in promoting research on Luxembourg. But even on European level, Luxembourg very often is an interesting case of comparison.
To give you an example, the ‘70s and ‘80s were very much about the shock of the post-industrial era. In most of the countries surrounding Luxembourg--the Ruhrgebiet, Wallonia or France--this is a story of decline. For Luxembourg, it's a very different history of transition, which questions the big narratives that colleagues in France or Britain or Germany produce.
It’s always a difficult question to answer, but what have been your top three highlights of these last five years?
We’ve done more than 100 projects, so it's really difficult.
One mission is being an actor in the country for a critical debate on history. We invented a new format called Forum Z. Four or five times a year we go places to discuss relevant topics on contemporary history with people in the country. This forum has become a trademark of the C2DH and a new way of engaging with the public.
Another important mission is education. We have had a doctoral training unit funded by the FNR with 13 PhD students. We have just been granted the follow-up doctoral training unit with 18 PhD students, which is all about creating what we call a trading zone between data science and history.
We are in a very highly competitive ecosystem... This very often comes at the cost of innovation and creativity
And as a third element which is more linked to the scientific output, last year we launched the Journal of Digital History. This is the first scientific peer-reviewed open access journal in the field of digital history, which has created and invented a completely new platform for data driven publishing, together with De Gruyter, one of the biggest professional publishers in the field of humanities.
What are your priorities moving forward?
The one thing that I really would like to promote is encouraging PhD students and postdoc researchers to be more risk-taking, experimental or creative in the way they produce their scientific outputs.
We are in a very highly competitive ecosystem, in the universities and in the sciences in general. And there are certain standards. This very often comes at the cost of innovation and creativity.
I see the C2DH as a kind of laboratory, as a hub for doing such experiments in a safe environment, where people can write a PhD dissertation that is not a 500-page manuscript, but a web documentary or graphic novel or a series of podcasts, breaking new ground within the academic institutions for such innovative formats, which are not less scientific.