Jochen Hung's research focuses on the relationship between media, culture and society in modern history. He has published widely on the history of the Weimar Republic in international journals, including Central European History, the Journal of Contemporary History and German History. He has co-edited the volume Beyond Glitter and Doom. The Contingency of the Weimar Republic and published the monograph Moderate Modernity. The Newspaper Tempo and the Transformation of Weimar Democracy.
From 2019-2022, he acted as lead coordinator of the Erasmus+ Strategic Partnership “Teaching European History in the 21st Century“, an EU-funded project that supports the internationalisation of history teaching in higher education. As part of this project, he has edited a new, open-access 950-page history of Europe – The European Experience. A Multi-Perspective History of Modern Europe, 1500–2000.
His current project, financed by the Dutch Research Council (NWO), moves his research focus to the history of the digital, investigating the development of the internet into a mass medium in Germany during the 1990s.
Computers used to be operated by text commands that required specialist knowledge. This changed with the introduction of the Graphical User Interface (GUI) in the 1980s. Graphical icons such as the “desktop” or the “recycle bin” translated complicated programming codes into easily understandable metaphors. This made computers accessible to common users. However, GUIs are not neutral carriers of information: just like any cultural artifact, they carry messages of their own and structure the way we see the world. This project investigates the GUI and its history as part of a long tradition of human-machine interfaces to uncover its cultural impact.
Teaching European History in the 21st Century (TEH21) is an Erasmus+ Strategic Partnership in Higher Education, bringing together experts in the fields of European history, innovative didactic methods, and the development of innovative teaching materials from seven countries (Germany, Spain, Czech Republic, Hungary, the United Kingdom, France, and the Netherlands).
More info: https://teh21.sites.uu.nl/