Dr. Tiphaine Robert

Tiphaine Robert is a historian and postdoctoral fellow at the Ecole Urbaine of Lyon (September 2021–August 2022) and at the Rachel Carson Center in Munich (September 2022–August 2023). Since 2020 she also works as a collaborator at UniDistance Switzerland (Faculty of Historical Sciences). Tiphaine currently conducts research on the development of automobile traffic (highway construction, air pollution) during the Great Acceleration. Her current research project—“The Autocratic Automobile? A Political History of the Car in Switzerland (1950–2000)”—is funded by the Swiss National Research Foundation (SNSF). Through the case of Switzerland, Tiphaine aims to understand how Western societies in the post-World War II era until today have come to accept the nuisance of motorized traffic.
Previously, she conducted research on Cold War refugees (University of Fribourg/EHESS, Paris/Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest) and published her thesis in 2021 (Des migrants et des revenants: Une histoire des réfugiées et réfugiés hongrois en Suisse (1956–1963). Neuchâtel: Editions Alphil).

RCC Project: The Autocratic Automobile? A Political History of the Car in Switzerland (1950–2000)

Selected Publications:

• “Santé environnementale et démocratie: L’exemple du plomb dans l’essence à travers une étude de cas (1921–1970).” Émulations: Revue internationale de sciences sociales (forthcoming).
• “Against the Grain: The Repatriation of Hungarian Refugees (1956–1963).” In The Refugee Crisis after 1956 and the Hungarian Emigrant Communities during the Cold War, edited by Tamás Scheibner. Budapest: Walter de Gruyter, forthcoming.
• “Fuir ‘l’enfer communiste’, quitter le ‘paradis suisse’: Les dynamiques individuelles et familiales de l’émigration et du retour des réfugiés hongrois de 1956.” Annales de démographie historique 143, no. 1 (2022): 159–189.
• Des migrants et des revenants: une histoire des réfugiées et réfugiés hongrois en Suisse (1956–1963). Neuchâtel: Éditions Alphil - Presses universitaires suisses, 2021.