Multiple views on the Grand-Duchy’s history

1 January 2024 to 31 December 2027

FNR

Coordinator: Machteld Venken

In early March 2022, loosely affiliated researchers from Ukraine, Poland, Luxembourg and the UK discussed the possibility of ethically well-grounded and methodologically reasonable emergency collecting and archiving of oral testimonies of Ukrainian refugees, IDs, and volunteers. These discussions resulted in documenting the wartime and refugee fate of Ukrainians in Ukraine, Poland, and Luxembourg. As an ad hoc initiative, we were able to prepare neither detailed research questions, nor a digital archiving infrastructure. We want to move from spontaneous data collection to well-structured empirical research. U-CORE researches the heuristic gesture of collecting, preserving, analysing and disclosing testimonies of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The project includes researchers from Luxembourg, Poland and Ukraine.
Digital Humanities are a rapidly growing field of research predominantly occupied with the development and application of new methodologies and tools. The reflection about their influence on knowledge production is often lacking. Building the digital environment for U-CORE is perceived and documented as a way of knowing. U-CORE optimises standards for metadata, data modeling, transcription, indexing and disclosure through artistic and digital storytelling in cooperation with interviewees and/or interviewers by means of a collaborative approach, and publishes reflections about the human intervention with available software for the conditions of knowledge production. An innovative feature of this project is that during a first phase of follow up interviewing interviewees are shown how their born-digitally interview has been processed in the digital database and are asked for their reaction on the basis of a newly composed questionnaire with semi-open questions, which informs the further decision making process of iterative data modelling.
The main research question is: How to build a methodological and ethical toolbox, as well as a digital environment for processing, analysing, preserving, and accessing in two stages conducted born-digital testimonies of the war by means of a digital hermeneutics of practice consisting of (digital) source criticism, tool criticism and visualisation criticism?

1 March 2022 to 28 February 2026

Fondation luxembourgeoise pour la Mémoire de la Shoah

Coordinator: Denis Scuto

Fondation luxembourgeoise pour la Mémoire de la Shoah

The Fondation luxembourgeoise pour la Mémoire de la Shoah and the C²DH have set themselves the task of building a digital Shoah Memorial as part of a research project that will last from 2022 to 2026. The Digital Shoah Memorial in Luxembourg is built in memory of people who lived in Luxembourg who were persecuted, who were victims of Nazi anti-Semitic legislation during World War II.

The Memorial pursues several objectives:

• give a face, an identity, a biography, put the spotlight on individuals and their families, show their professional, social and migratory trajectories;
• show how they lived, analyse their life – not only that of their persecution, their death – be interested in their journey before and, if they survived, their destiny after the war, not only in Luxembourg since it is often about transnational, European and global journeys;
• adopt a microhistorical, biographical and prosopographical approach by focusing not only on the deportees but on all Jewish people living in Luxembourg before 1940;explore the possibilities of digital tools to document their lives;
• involve families as well as the public in the work of memory and in the work of documentation and research.

More on memorialshoah.lu

1 December 2021 to 31 December 2031

Coordinator: Benoît Majerus, Denis Scuto

De Gruyter Oldenbourg

The book series, Transnational History of Luxembourg, offers a platform for studies about Luxembourg in a European perspective. The book series places particular emphasis on the analysis of the political, economic, social and cultural history of Luxembourg from 19th and 21st century. The aim is to produce new knowledge about the transnational history of Luxembourg by studying phenomena and processes that have profoundly affected the country and whose comparative value exceeds the national perspective. The series is published by De Gruyter Oldenbourg and edited by Benoît Majerus and Denis Scuto.

See also the publisher’s website.

Coordinator: Machteld Venken

15 January 2022 to 14 January 2026

Ministère d’État

Coordinator: Denis Scuto

The COLUX project explores Luxembourg’s colonial history – beyond the so-called decolonisation. The research project deals with Luxembourg overseas (especially in the Congo) as well as with the question of the impact in the metropole.

1 January 2022 to 31 December 2025

Coordinator: Christoph Brüll

More than 75 years after it ended, the Second World War remains a controversial and even emotional topic in Luxembourg. The virtual exhibition proposes a multimedia and multi-perspective presentation of the Occupation period and its consequences for Luxembourg. Furthermore, a PhD thesis, realised in the framework of the project, will focus on the role of local authorities in the country from the 1930s to the 1950s.

15 May 2021 to 14 May 2024

Coordinator: Inna Ganschow

The aim of the project is to fill a gap in the recent history of Luxembourg by reconstructing the life of almost 4000 Soviet men and women who were forcibly brought to Luxembourg as victims of the Nazi regime, mainly to work in the country’s steel industry from 1942 to 1944.

1 March 2021 to 29 February 2024

Ministère d’État

Coordinator: Denis Scuto

Inspection du travail et des mines

This project will investigate the history of the Luxembourgish Inspectorate of Labour and Mines from the foundation of the Administration des mines in 1869 up to the inspectorate’s 150th anniversary in 2019. It is primarily a history of working conditions, vocational health and safety, and occupational accidents in Luxembourg. One aim of the project is to create a database on fatal work-related accidents in the Grand Duchy covering the period from 1869 to 2019.

25 March 2019 to 24 March 2024

Fondation Luxembourgeoise pour la Mémoire de la Shoah

Coordinator: Denis Scuto

The will focus on the spoliation of Jewish property in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg on an individual level, focusing on the personal cases of approximately 4000 people of the Jewish faith residing in Luxembourg in May 1940: What property did they have before the war ? How did the political, administrative and financial process of spoliation unfold in occupied Luxembourg? How and by whom were these properties plundered during the war? For the post-war period: How did the parliament, the government, the public administrations recognize or not the material and moral interests of the victims of spoliation? Were the victims able to recover the looted property? Did they obtain compensation for the goods not recovered? How was the political, administrative and financial process of restitution/compensation organised?

1 May 2022 to 30 April 2024

Chambre des salariés

Coordinator: Denis Scuto

CSL is a collaborative research project on the history of the Chamber of Employees intended for the creation of a scientific publication with digital elements, giving access to digitised archival documents, interviews, videos, etc. on the institutional history of the chamber, the history of the key opinions of the professional chambers on legislative projects, the history of social (in)equality from 1920 to 1970.

1 January 2023 to 31 December 2025

Ville de Dudelange

Coordinator: Machteld Venken

The project concerns the study of the history of migrations and provides in particular:

1. The digitisation of a selection of sources archived at the municipality of Dudelange.
2. Visualisation and interpretation of municipal sources in the Nodegoat software solution.
3. An exploratory analysis of the routes of migrants and their habitats in Dudelange.

1 January 2023 to 31 December 2026

Ministère d’État

Coordinator: Andreas Fickers

1 September 2020 to 31 August 2025

European Commission

Coordinator: Machteld Venken

1 November 2022 to 31 October 2026

Ministère d’État

Coordinator: Andreas Fickers

1 August 2022 to 31 July 2026

FNR

Coordinator: Machteld Venken

TransARB aims to investigate the transnational transformation of the European steel industry during the last decades of the 20th century within the scope of the Luxembourgish ARBED company. It compares ARBED steel plants in Luxembourg and in Unterwellenborn in Thuringia in the former GDR and analyses both the changes in management strategies and in everyday practices and experiences of workers during both Western European and former Eastern Bloc deindustrialisation.

15 March 2020 to 14 March 2024

FNR

Coordinator: Denis Scuto

More than 10,000 Luxembourgish soldiers and recruits and an unknown number of Luxembourgish men and women wore German uniforms during WWII in armed forces and civil organizations, such as the Wehrmacht,Waffen-SS, armed police forces and the Reichsarbeitsdienst (RAD). Who were these people? What was the reason for their commitment to the occupation forces? How did their families cope with the situation? WARLUX aims to review the categories, that have tended to be used and integrated in the master narrative of the country as a “nation résistante et martyre” to describe this phase of history. Questions of particular relevance to the project are: Are the terms “forced recruit”, “volunteer”, “réfractaire” and “déserteur” appropriate to describe the experiences of these individuals or do they need to be elucidated and challenged?