Meet the team

• 

  Maria Biryukov

  Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C²DH)

  Research scientist

  Maria holds a PhD in Computer Science and has over 15 years of experience in applied research in Information Retrieval, Information Extraction, Natural Language Processing, and graph and social network analysis. She has worked in multidisciplinary teams on design and development of machine-learning and rule-based pipelines that transform information extracted from primarily unstructured textual data into graph-based, explorable models. Her experience also includes teaching and supervision of master’s and PhD students.
  She is currently participating in DIGSHELL project, where she works on acquisition and analysis of a large volume of corporate inventory records.

  See profile

• 

  Matteo Calabrese

  Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C²DH)

  Postdoctoral researcher

  Matteo Calabrese is a business historian with a background in Economics and History from Utrecht and Leiden Universities. He earned his PhD in financial history from the University of Luxembourg, where he focused on the emergence of investment funds in Luxembourg. His research explores financial and long-run economic history, with interests ranging from the development of global financial hubs to labour history and the roots of economic growth. He has published in journals such as Contemporary European History, Italian Economic Journal, Historical Methods, Business History Review, and Business History (forthcoming). Matteo has held academic positions as a lecturer at the University of Turin, as a postdoctoral researcher at Bocconi University, and as a research associate at Freie Universität Berlin. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher within the DIGSHELL project.

  See profile

• 

  Stefanie Heuer

  Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C²DH)

  Administrative assistant

  Stefanie began her career in Brussels, Belgium, where she worked as an administrative assistant for a lobby group before joining the German-Belgian-Luxembourg Chamber of Commerce. She subsequently spent several years in a financial and administrative role at the German Center for Art History in Paris, France. She then transitioned into the private sector, gaining experience with an international fintech company based in Quebec, Canada. After relocating to Luxembourg, Stefanie now draws on her diverse professional background and serves as the project’s administrative assistant.

  See profile

• 

  Benoît Majerus

  Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C²DH)

  Full professor

  Benoît Majerus is a historian of psychiatry and offshore financial centres. In the latter capacity, he has mainly worked on Luxembourg, arguing that the interwar period formed an important blueprint for developments that shaped capitalism from the 1960s onwards, and that the history of financialisation should also be written as a history of professions, including lawyers and accountants.

  See profile

• 

  Victoria Mouton

  Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C²DH)

  Research and Development Specialist

  Victoria has been part of the C²DH since 2016, where her research focuses on contemporary European history, with particular attention to Luxembourg’s role within it. In recent years, she has examined the representation of Luxembourg’s financial centre in the international press and explored how a Luxembourgish bank has influenced urban development through the evolution of its headquarters. Within the DigShell project, Victoria will investigate the local actors involved in the establishment of foreign banks in Luxembourg and the impact of these banks on the city’s urban landscape.

  See profile

• 

  Roxana Perez

  Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon

  Visiting student

  Roxana Perez is a visiting student at the C²DH, from the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon (ENS de Lyon). Agrégée in History, she works on the financial skills of the police and Justice used in the fight against financial crime and trafficking in 20th century France. During her stay at the C²DH, she takes part in the DIGSHELL project by studying the Luxembourgish case, combing oral history and archival research.

• 

  Sora Minotta Valencia

  University of Luxembourg

  Student assistant

  My name is Sora. I was born in Bogotá, Colombia and I was raised in Madrid, Spain. It’s been 5 years already since I’m living in Luxembourg and last September I started the Master in Learning and Communication. I’ll be assisting in the project with Spanish handwritten documents that I’ll be proofreading and transcribing. I’ll be helping the AI in doing so until it might later help me.