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C²DH Alumni Event

Organised by "C²DH "

C²DH Alumni Event 2025

Inspire and Be Inspired!

Join us for the C²DH Alumni Event 2025 on Thursday 2 October 2025 at the Blackbox, Maison des Sciences Humaines, University of Luxembourg.

The day will be all about reconnecting, sharing stories and celebrating the amazing community we have built together.

We can’t wait to welcome you back and celebrate together!

 

14:00 - 16:00 I Session 1

Alumni networking: one centre, many futures – and even more friends

Reconnect with colleagues and friends at C²DH! Celebrate alumni journeys, from past memories to future paths. Reflect, engage, and rediscover your place in the C²DH community.

 

14:00    Welcome by Andreas Fickers, Director of the C²DH

 

14:10   Lightning talk by Andy Adams, Alumni relations specialist, University of Luxembourg   

 

14:30   Roundtable 1 - Looking Back: Our Alumni Memories

            Alumni share personal stories, memories, and reflections on how their time at C²DH shaped their journeys

            and sense of community. 

 

            Chair: Inna Ganschow

 

            Speakers: Max Kemman, Dominique Santana, Fabio Spirinelli, Ira Plein, Tim der Heijden

 

15:30   Coffee Break

16:00-18:00 I Session 2

Exploring pathways: turning digital and public history into job opportunities

Connect with leading employers and experienced alumni, explore diverse career paths in digital and public history and gain valuable insights from those who have walked the path before you. Build your professional network – all over a good cup of coffee.

 

16:00   Roundtable 2 - Looking Ahead: Exploring Professional Pathways 

            Alumni discuss career development, transferable skills, and employer perspectives, offering insights into building meaningful

            professional futures. 

 

            Chair: Valérie Schafer & Camilla Portesani

 

            Speakers: Blandine Landau, Christopher Morse, Maxime Derian, Alvin Sold, Pit Péporté

 

17:00  Coffee Break & optional activities

    • Campus tour: the 45-min walk reveals secret places with vanished traces of former forced labor camps on the Belval campus during World War II.
    • Your Stories, Your Needs: brainstorming to shape the future of the C²DH Alumni community together, by understanding your needs and exchanging ideas
    • Coffee & Connections: Prefer something informal? Grab a coffee and enjoy catching up with old colleagues or meeting new faces in the alumni community. 

       

       

 

18:00-19:30 I Session 3

Donor Recognition & Award Ceremony, followed by a cocktail reception

Celebrate the power of giving with donors and alumni who are helping to shape our mission. Join us in expressing our gratitude towards those supporting research, innovation and outreach at the C²DH. Witness the success of our researchers at the award ceremony, and, at 7pm, let's conclude and raise a glass together at the cocktail reception.

 

18:00     Welcome and acknowledgments by Andreas Fickers, Director of the C²DH and Philippe Lamesch, Head of Office of Fundraising at the University of Luxembourg

 

18:20   Presentation of the project "Threads" by Sandra Camarda

 

18:30  "C²DH Thinkering Award" by the Lydie Schmit Foundation

 

19:00   "C²DH Best PhD Thesis Award" by the Dr Roswitha and Hermann Zeilinger Foundation

 

19:15  Closing remarks

 

19:20  Cocktail reception 

 

Thursday 2 October 2025
14h00 - 20h00 (GMT +2)
Registration deadline : 25th September
Black Box - Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C²DH), Maison des Sciences Humaines, University of Luxembourg,
11, Porte des Sciences
4366 Esch-sur-Alzette
Luxembourg

Registration closed
Guests
Kemman Max
Executive Secretary and Senior Policy Advisor - Applied and Engineering Sciences
Dutch Research Council

Max was the first PhD candidate to begin under the supervision of Andreas Fickers in 2014. He completed his dissertation in 2019, exploring how historians and computational researchers collaborate and negotiate their approaches. He subsequently worked as a policy researcher and consultant, advising the Dutch government on matters related to science, higher education, and the digitalisation of education. Since this year, Max has worked at the Dutch Research Council (NWO) as Executive Secretary and Senior Policy Advisor for the domain of Applied and Engineering Sciences. He lives in Culemborg with his wife and their three children.

Landau Blandine
Postdoctoral Researcher
University of Luxembourg (C²DH)

Blandine Landau holds graduate degrees from the Ecole du Louvre and the University Paris Sorbonne (France), and she also studied in Leuven (Belgium) and Berlin (Germany). After a career in museums, as a curator and a museum director, she started a first PhD in 2016 focusing on the history of the art market (Duke University, USA - University Lumières - Lyon II, France). From 2020 to 2024 she conducted a PhD. about the dispossession of people considered as Jews in Luxembourg during World War II (C2DH - EHESS, France), followed by a postdoctoral project to collect and index testimonies of Shoah survivors linked to Luxembourg (Zentrum fir politesch Bildung - EHESS, France). Since september 2025 she is back at C2DH for her second postdoctoral project, linked to the Digital Memorial of the Shoah in Luxembourg. 

Christopher Morse (Docteur en Psychologie, 2021)

Christopher Morse is a computational linguist whose work bridges digital cultural heritage and language technology. He earned his PhD at the University of Luxembourg with the dissertation Museum Meaning-making: Experience Design for Digital Cultural Heritage, which combined human–computer interaction with cultural heritage studies to explore how meaningful, emotionally resonant experiences can be designed into digital museum platforms. He now works at the Zenter fir d’Lëtzebuerger Sprooch (ZLS), where he develops AI-assisted resources for the Luxembourgish language, including large-scale text corpora, speech recognition systems, and natural language processing models.

Van der Heijden Tim
Assistant Professor of Media Studies
Open University of the Netherlands

Dr. Tim van der Heijden is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies at the Open University of the Netherlands. He obtained a PhD degree in media history from Maastricht University. His dissertation "Hybrid Histories: Technologies of Memory and the Cultural Dynamics of Home Movies, 1895-2005" explores the home movie as a twentieth-century family memory practice from a long-term historical perspective. In April 2017, he started working for the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C²DH) at the University of Luxembourg as a post-doctoral researcher and coordinator of the Doctoral Training Unit "Digital History and Hermeneutics" (DTU-DHH). From September 2019 until July 2021 he worked as a postdoctoral researcher within the research project "Doing Experimental Media Archaeology: Practice and Theory" (DEMA). His research interests include the history of amateur media, experimental media archaeology, and digital film historiography. He recently published the books Doing Experimental Media Archaeology: Practice (co-authored with Alexander Kolkowski, 2023) and Doing Digital Film History: Concepts, Tools, Practices (co-edited with Sarah-Mai Dang and Christian Gosvig Olesen, 2025).

Fabio Spirinelli

Fabio Spirinelli holds a PhD in history from the University of Luxembourg. His past research focused on the history of cultural policy in Luxembourg. From 2022 until 2023, he was collaborating as a post-doctoral researcher on the development of an online exhibition on Luxembourg during the Second World War at the C2DH (University of Luxembourg). He has contributed to various projects and published academic and non-academic articles on topics related to contemporary history. In July 2023, Fabio joined the research service of the Chamber of Deputies of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg as a historian. Since April 2025, he has been heading the parliamentary history service.

Ira Plein

Ira Plein is teaching in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Trier since summer 2019. Her academic interest focuses on the history of visual media, on the history of public relations/propaganda and on visual media analysis.

 

After training as a photographer and media designer, followed by work experience, she studied art history and media studies at the University of Trier. Her thesis in art history (Magistra Artium, M.A., 2013) deals with the politically motivated works of the Berlin artist Alice Lex-Nerlinger around 1930. From 2014 to 2019, Ira Plein was a research assistant at the University of Luxembourg. Here she worked on the project FAMOSO: Fabricating Modern Societies. Industries of Reform as Educational Responses to Societal Challenges (ca. 1880-1930), funded by the Luxembourg Fonds national de la Recherche, under the supervision of Karin Priem, and completed her interdisciplinary doctoral studies (history and art history). Her dissertation was supervised by the University of Luxembourg and the University of Trier within the framework of a bi-national joint supervision (cotutelle du thèse). Thesis: "Propaganda for steel and nation. Images and counter-images to economic and social progress in Luxembourg media of the interwar period". Main supervisors: Prof. Dr. Karin Priem (Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History, C2DH) and Prof. Dr. Dr. Andreas Tacke (Art History, University of Trier).

Péporté Pit

Pit Péporté is founder and managing director of Historical Consulting. He is a historian by training, having received his MA (2002), MSc (2003), and PhD (2008) at Edinburgh University. He has worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Luxembourg (2008-2013) and continues to teach there as an adjunct. His past research include late-medieval politics and identity, the memory of the Middle Ages, as well as historiography and nation-building. His current projects focus on the transmission of history to a variety of audiences. 

Santana Dominique

Dominique Santana is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Luxembourg’s Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C²DH). She leads the transmedia project “Radio Luxembourg – The station that changed our world“, which explores the fascinating stories of Europe’s most powerful commercial radio station and its formative influence on generations of listeners.

As a public historian and creative filmmaker specialised in digital media and immersive storytelling, Dominique has been bridging the gap between the creative worlds of filmmaking, transmedia storytelling and historical narratives, as with her recent transmedia documentary project “A Colônia Luxemburguesa” (2022). Her work has been selected to international festivals and was granted the FNR Award for “Outstanding Promotion of Science to the Public”.

Dominique holds a Ph.D in History from the University of Luxembourg’s Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C2DH). She holds a bachelor’s degree from the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) and a master’s degree from the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, both in History and Art History.

 

Sold Alvin

Alvin Sold, born in Luxembourg City in 1943. After a classical education, Alvin started his  professional career in journalism in 1963.  In 1974, he became Editor-in-chief of Tageblatt, than Director General of Tageblatt and Editpress (1977–2011), and until 2018 served as Managing Director of the Editpress group (430 employees) . Alongside these responsibilities, he held leadership roles (President, Treasurer) in European and world  press associations, including ENPA and  WAN-Ifra.

At the age of 75, after retiring from executive functions, he began an academic journey at the University of Luxembourg. He obtained a Master’s degree in Contemporary European History and is now a fourth-year PhD candidate, focusing on how the ECSC unexpectedly established itself in Luxembourg in 1952.

This rather unusual path makes him neither a “typical” student nor a conventional alumnus. He is pleased to share with you some practical reflections on professional networks and interview preparation, drawn from both  academic and professional experience.

Maxime Derian

Dr. Maxime Derian is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Heruka-AI Consulting, specializing in AI ethics and digital transformation. He obtained a PhD degree in socio-anthropology from the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne in 2013. His dissertation "Le métal et la chair : anthropologie des prothèses informatisées" (Metal and Flesh: Anthropology of Computerized Prostheses) explores the anthropological impact of digital medical devices and human-machine hybridization from an interdisciplinary perspective.
 
From September 2019 to July 2022, he worked as a Research Associate in Digital Anthropology & Environmental History at the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C²DH) at the University of Luxembourg. During this period, he contributed to research projects examining the intersection between digital technologies and historical methodologies. Prior to his tenure at C²DH, he held postdoctoral positions at CNRS, conducted research at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, and worked with Télécom Paris Tech.His research interests include digital anthropology, AI ethics and regulation, human-machine interfaces, and the societal impact of emerging technologies. He is co-founder of the Technoréalisme movement, promoting responsible AI development.
 
He is also a research associate with the interdisciplinary French ANR CulturIA collective, supervised by CNRS and the Sorbonne University, and collaborates internationally with everyone.AI on AI safety for children. He published "Les prothèses cognitives du corps humain" (ISTE éditions, 2018) and is about to publish a book related to social and technological impact of IoT. He contributes to ongoing debates on AI governance and digital sovereignty at IASEAI.

Location

Black Box - Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C²DH), Maison des Sciences Humaines, University of Luxembourg,

11, Porte des Sciences
4366 Esch-sur-Alzette
Luxembourg

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Thursday 2 October 2025
14h00 - 20h00 (GMT +2)
Registration deadline : 25th September
Black Box - Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C²DH), Maison des Sciences Humaines, University of Luxembourg,
11, Porte des Sciences
4366 Esch-sur-Alzette
Luxembourg

Registration closed
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