About

Welcome to the website of Gerben Zaagsma. I am an Assistant Professor in Contemporary History at the Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C²DH) of the University of Luxemburg. With a background in modern Jewish/Yiddish history, my current research and teaching focus mostly on the fields of digital and public history, Holocaust & genocide studies, as well as music history.

Before joining C²DH in August 2017, I worked in various professonal roles and settings in Italy, Great Britain, the Netherlands and Germany; please see my CV for more information. You can also check my talks and list of publications. Several recent papers and lectures can be found on Zenodo.

My work currently revolves around three main areas:

• History of digital history
• Censorship of history online
• Digital literacy for historians

See the research page for more details.

Latest updates:

• The slides for my presentation Digital History and the Historian’s Craft: Genealogies, Epistemologies, Futures given at the Faculty of History of the University of Bucharest on 28/10/2026 are available on Zenodo.
• The upcoming 5th yearbook History of Intellectual Culture (HIC) will feature a thematic section Technology and the Making of History: it features contributions by Edgar Lejeune, Julianne Nyhan , Kajsa Weber and myself.
• The slides for my presentation Interventions in History Online at the 6th INTH conference in Tallinn are available on Zenodo.
• The slides and recording for my online lecture Facing the History Machine: Why Histories of Digital History Matter, on 15 April 2026 are available on Zenodo and Youtube.