Karin Priem is Professor Emerita at the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History. She is a former President of the German History of Education Research Association (2007–2011) and of the International Standing Conference for the History of Education (ISCHE) (2018–2022). Her work focuses on digital public history; history of education; visual and material history; the history of media-ecologies (currently with a focus on UNESCO); and the history of entrepreneurship and social-educational reform.
Karin is co-editor of the book series Studies in the History of Education and Culture|Studien zur Bildungs- und Kulturgeschichte, Appearances: Studies in Visual Research and of Public History in European Perspectives. She serves as a member of the international advisory board of Paedagogica Historica (Taylor & Francis) and corresponding international member of the Domus Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Histories of Education and Childhood at the University of Birmingham.
Karin Priem since her early career has won prestigious awards (Landesgraduiertenförderung Baden-Württemberg, Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft|German Research Foundation, and the Deutsches Literaturarchiv|Archive of German Literature). She has curated exhibitions and was invited as tutor of international doctoral and summer schools. For many years, she has served as PI of two third-party funded projects at the University of Luxembourg entitled Fabricating Modern Societies: Industries of Reform as Educational Responses to Societal Changes (FAMOSO and FAMOSO-2, 2012–2018).
At the beginning of these projects stood a huge holding of approximately 2,400 glass plate negatives and positives archived at the Centre national de l’audiovisuel (CNA – National Audiovisual Centre). Based on this archival holding and by including more archival material, the project team developed research questions that focused on the social-educational reform initiatives launched by the Aciéries réunies de Burbach-Eich-Dudelange (ARBED – United Steelworks of Burbach-Eich-Dudelange) and on how the image of future workers as good citizens of an industrialized modern Luxembourg was established, promoted and communicated by modern technologies. The FAMOSO projects therefore move beyond traditional social histories of industrialisation, labour history, social work, social welfare and social hygiene. Instead, the projects elaborated on socio-cultural and body-sensorial technologies of modernity that were mediated by various modes of (re)presentation (including promotional brochures, popular magazines and visual media such as photography and film, as well as scientific practices of experimentation, display and visualisation). At the centre of these technologies were the human body, human-machine relationships, the shaping of modern subjects and their sensory interactions with the technosphere. The intellectual focus of FAMOSO and FAMOSO-2 is therefore the materialities, mechanisms, and interconnections of those technologies that gave birth to the “complex” of modern life. Project results have been summarized in a 2018 success story by the Luxembourg National Research Fund and in an open access book entitled Fabricating Modern Societies: Education, Bodies, and Minds in the Age of Steel that appeared in 2019.
Since 2020 Karin Priem is coordinating a team that curates the Education & Pandemics Archive. In this context she currently works on the history of the COVID-19 pandemic as a specific cultural ecology of memory making, archiving, and forgetting.
