Andreas Fickers - Biography#

My career as a scholar has taken several turns throughout the years. I started as a historian of technology with a keen interest in technologies of communication (mainly broadcasting), then moved from there into the field of media history (trying to bridge my interest in the materiality of communication technologies with the cultural and socio-political development of media), and finally turned into a digital historian (reflecting on the methodological and epistemological challenges of doing history in the digital age).

During all the phases of this intellectual journey (which overlapped or even run parallel), two main ambitions have characterized my academic endeavours: first, to think and do history in both an interdisciplinary and transnational fashion; second, to develop and promote new research agendas by setting up European research networks and projects.
Since my appointment as Assistant Professor for Television History at the Institute for Media Studies at Utrecht University in 2003, I embarked on a journey which aimed at transnationalizing the field of media history which – for a long time – was characterized by methodological nationalism. I co-initiated the European Television History Network (ETHN) and set up the first open access online journal VIEW Journal of European Television History and Culture and became one of its chief editors.

Since my nomination as Professor of Contemporary and Digital History at Luxembourg University (in 2013), I have been experimenting with new forms of storytelling online – e.g. through virtual exhibitions, video essays, podcasts, and scientific blog writing. As the development of innovative platforms for transmedia historical storytelling or the creating of online tutorials for the teaching of history is becoming a key competence for future digital scholarship and open science, several recent publications of mine have been focusing on digital literacy and hermeneutics in the field of history.