Prof Machteld VENKEN

Machteld Venken is a Full Professor / Head Scientist 1 in Contemporary Transnational History and Head of the Research Group ‘Contemporary History of Luxembourg’ at the Centre for Contemporary and Digital History of the University of Luxembourg.

Her main research interests are transnational, transregional and comparative histories of Europe, migration, borderlands, oral history, the history of families and children, and citizen science. She has been a Principal Investigator of nine research projects funded in five European countries. Ongoing research projects are: Social Politics in European Borderlands. A Comparative and Transnational Study, 1870s-1990s (Sociobord). She currently supervises the following PhD candidates: Johanna Jaschik, Véronique Faber, Nicolas Arendt, Ira Yeroshko, Joanna Urbanek, Alex Relicovschi and Christelle Al Haddad.

Machteld Venken currently teaches the MA course ‘History of Cross-Border Cooperation’ and the PhD Strand Colloquium ‘Transnational History and Digital Methods’. She also offers MA thesis supervision: Alma Sabotic (2022), Endrita Avdimetaj (2023), Benjamin Juchem (2024), Dany Rodriguez Goncalves (2025) and Alessio Nardecchia (2025).

Recent outreach activities include: Prof. Machteld Venken explains why she became a mentor, Interview about her second monograph ‘Peripheries to the Centre. Borderland Schooling in Interwar Europe’: Intervista, European University Institute, 11.11.2021, ON AIR – Border Temporalities by ON AIR – UniGR-Center for Border Studies (spotify.com)

Machteld Venken has been awarded research funding as Principal Investigator from the Polish Ministry of Sciences and Higher Education, The Austrian Science Fund, the Imre Kertesz Kolleg / Institute of Advanced Studies of the Friedrich Schiller University, Innoviris (Belgium), and the Luxembourg National Research Fund.

Venken joined the University of Luxembourg in November 2019 after a Visiting Scholarship at the Imre Kertesz Kolleg / Institute of Advanced Studies at the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena (Germany) and an Attract Brains for Brussels Fellowship at the Vrije Universiteit Brussels (Belgium). Before, she worked at the University of Vienna and the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for European History (Austria, the College of Europe Natolin Campus, the German Historical Institute in Warsaw and the University of Warsaw (Poland) and the Catholic University of Leuven (Belgium).

Machteld Venken studied Slavic Languages and Cultures, European Studies and History in Belgium, Poland and Ukraine. Venken earned her PhD in 2008 at the Catholic University of Leuven (Belgium) and her habilitation in 2018 at the University of Vienna (Austria).