In Person: CFGS C168 (Sedgewick Building, University of Victoria) or Zoom. The meeting will take place from 12:00pm to 1:30pm PST. Register in advance for this meeting here. Registration is free but required.
Using the concept of border temporalities to offer a hermeneutic interpretation of an old letter containing a request from a cross-border female migrant from Luxembourg to access French welfare benefits after the end of the First World War, Prof. Machteld Venken systematically unravels the way in which time was lived and experienced differently by borderland residents as opposed to French lawmakers. She explores how the alternative temporality characterising the third space of the Luxembourg-German-French borderlands clashed with the spatio-temporal hierarchy imposed by France in the early post-war period to exclude the majority of people living abroad from access to social provision and reflects on the way in which historical research is conditioned by the temporality of archives and the temporality of research funding.
Machteld Venken is a Professor of Contemporary Transnational History and Head of the research unit on Contemporary History of Luxembourg at the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C²DH) of the University of Luxembourg. Venken earned her PhD in 2008 at the Catholic University of Leuven (Belgium) and her habilitation in 2018 at the University of Vienna (Austria). She has been a Principal Investigator of nine research projects funded in five European countries. Her main research interests are transnational, transregional and comparative histories of Europe, migration, borderlands, oral history and citizen science.
