Doctoral candidate (PhD student) in the field of contemporary history/history of technology

The University of Luxembourg is an international research university with a distinctly multilingual and interdisciplinary character. The University was founded in 2003 and counts more than 6,700 students and more than 2,000 employees from around the world. The University’s faculties and interdisciplinary centres focus on research in the areas of Computer Science and ICT Security, Materials Science, European and International Law, Finance and Financial Innovation, Education, Contemporary and Digital History. In addition, the University focuses on cross-disciplinary research in the areas of Data Modelling and Simulation as well as Health and System Biomedicine. Times Higher Education ranks the University of Luxembourg #3 worldwide for its “international outlook,” #20 in the Young University Ranking 2021 and among the top 250 universities worldwide.

The Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C2 DH) is a research centre for the study, analysis and public dissemination of contemporary history of Luxembourg and Europe with a particular focus on digital methods and tools for doing innovative historical research. It serves as a catalyst for innovative and creative scholarship and new forms of public dissemination and societal engagement with history.

Historians have only recently started to investigate the period “after the boom”. Western societies experienced dramatic economic, societal and cultural changes since the industrial crisis of the 1970s and the following massive structural changes. In 1975, Luxembourg was hit by the steel crisis and the country’s largest employer, the steel company ARBED, threatened to cut back production and jobs at large. In the following decades, the country was oscillating between the management of industrial decline and a new boom in finance and service economy. The envisioned project will take Esch-Belval as a point of departure to investigate Luxembourg’s history after the boom. The former iron and steel works of Belval, built in 1909/11, largely refurbished and expanded after the Second World War, was partly closed in the late 1990s and transformed into a new urban district. Today, it hosts the campus of the University of Luxembourg. The project will investigate the structural changes in the country since the steel crisis, taking the entangled regional, national and transnational developments into its focus.

The project will collaborate with the research group “Confronting Decline: Challenges of Deindustrialization in Western Societies since the 1970s” (CONDE) at the Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History (IfZ) in Munich. Joint workshops and conferences are planned.