Karsten Marhold
I am a PhD candidate at the Free University of Brussels (ULB), having received a four-year full-time PhD scholarship from the Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research (FNRS). My academic career started in 2005 at the Free University and Humboldt University in Berlin, my hometown, with undergraduate studies in Political Science (major) and Philosophy (minor). After a year in Aix-en-Provence, France, I returned to Germany to the University of Bremen, successfully obtaining my BA degree in 2010. The two following years, I completed my Masters degree in Brussels at the ULB’s Institute for European Studies in an interdisciplinary program in European History and Cultures. This is where I first collaborated with my current supervisor, Kenneth Bertrams, for my Masters Thesis on the reaction of the European electricity industry to the crisis of the 1970s. I graduated with First Class Honors from the ULB in 2012. I subsequently took on a part-time assistant position at the ULB for a course in Economic History for three years. In parallel, I developed another area of interest of mine – transport and mobility. I first worked for the European Cyclists’ Federation as a Communications Assistant for 9 months before joining Polis, a network of European cities and regions, as a Project Officer from February 2014 until September 2015. In this position I was responsible for a number of EU-funded research and development projects related to urban mobility. Yet I always felt the urge to complete my academic career with a PhD and to take on a full-time academic position as a historian, which the FNRS scholarship has allowed me to realize. Since the second half of 2015, I am working on a thesis on electric vehicle projects in Germany and France during the 1970s, deepening and linking my experience and research interests.
