Andreas Fickers, born in St. Vith, Belgium, in 1971. Ph.D. from RWTH Aachen University. Associate Professor in Comparative European Media History at Maastricht University.
Fellow (1 February 2011 – 30 June 2011)
EVENTING EUROPE : ELECTRONIC INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION SPACES IN EUROPE (1850-2000)
My stay at NIAS enabled me to substantially advance my writing of the book “Eventing Europe: Electronic Information and Communication Spaces in Europe 1850-2000”. Thanks to the multiple opportunities to exchange and discuss basic ideas and concepts with my co-author Pascal Griset, I (we) now feel comfortable with the structural organization and historical argumentation of the book. The Making Europe Theme-Group discussions reflecting the theoretical and methodological ambitions of the project helped to lay the foundations for a common vocabulary and conceptual framing of the series as a whole. In addition I profited from the NIAS environment to finish and submit two articles for internationally peer-reviewed journals. Most importantly however, I will remember my time at NIAS as a time for reading! As our professional reading habit is unfortunately characterized by a very selective and benefit-oriented reading practice, I profited enormously from the possibility of an explorative reading experience, driven by curiosity, associative thinking and unexpected findings.