Unflattening European History through Transmedia Storytelling: The Making Europe Digital Comics Series
Public lecture by Andreas Fickers
Monday, 28 March 2022
19:00 – 21:00 CEST
Digital event: Find all information here
About this event
The Centre for Literary and Intermedial Crossings (CLIC) welcomes Prof. Dr. Andreas Fickers as Lorand Chair Intermediality in 2021/2022 at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. The Lorand Chair Intermediality is financed by the legacies of Emile Lorand.
Andreas Fickers is historian of technology and media by training and professor of contemporary and digital history at the University of Luxembourg. He co-authored the volume “Communicating Europe: Technologies, Information, Events” (Palgrave 2019) with Pascal Griset (Sorbonne University) in the Making Europe book series (www.makingeurope.eu). He is founding Director of the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (www.c2dh.uni.lu).
As part of his guest professorship, Prof. Fickers will hold a public lecture during VUB’s weKONEKT.week and participate in a specialist workshop.
Unflattening European History through Transmedia Storytelling: The Making Europe Digital Comics Series
Published between 2013 and 2019, fourteen distinguished historians of technology have co-authored a six-volume history of Europe. In a decade-long project and based on a European network called “Tensions of Europe”, the Making Europe book series aimed at writing a novel history of the hidden integration of Europe through the lens of technology. At the heart of the Making Europe Digital Comics project lies the desire to find a common visual language that widens and deepens the appreciation and understanding of the stories and ideas explored and presented in the book series. Comics circumnavigate the barriers to entry that prose alone can often present. This is particularly the case for academic texts. The process of reimagining existing materials for a different medium both allows new ideas to come to light and sheds fresh light on established ones. The comics incorporate animated elements to explore and make full use of the capabilities of the digital landscape. This is designed to encourage the reader/viewer to explore the historical source materials and additional media associated with the stories. While there are many historical figures whose contributions have been vital to Europe’s technological development, the comics shift the lens away from the well-known names, and “great Man” narratives and instead highlight, via the use of archetypal ‘personae’, the role different types of people played in the wider story. The personae that populate the stories have been identified as archetypes of the Making Europe story, such as „system builder”, “luddite/rebel”, “inventor-entrepreneur”, or “technocrat”. The lecture will retrace and problematize the “making-of” the Making Europe Digital Comic series and discuss the challenges and opportunities of transmedia storytelling in academia.
