Biographical Summary

Jana Keck is a research fellow in Digital History and History of the Americas/Transatlantic History. She studied English and American studies and linguistics at the University of Stuttgart. Before she joined the GHI in September 2020 as a research fellow and to coordinate the GHI’s research area Digital History, she taught courses in English and American studies at the University of Stuttgart for two years. From 2018-2019, she was working in an international DH-research project “Oceanic Exchanges: Tracing Global Information Networks in Historical Newspaper Repositories, 1840-1914” (DFG), which boasted a team of scholars from seven countries in Europe and the Americas to study transnational news circulation during the long nineteenth century. In 2023, she received her Ph.D. from the University of Stuttgart. Focusing on digitized German immigrant newspapers and computational methods (text mining and machine learning), her PhD project, which received the first Peter Haber Prize for Digital History by the Verband der Historiker und Historikerinnen Deutschlands (VHD) in 2021, used computational methods to examine text reuse and intertextuality. “The German-American Press Network and Gender: A Scalable Reading of Transtextuality in Digitized Newspapers, 1830-1914” sketches not only the transregional textual ecosystem of the immigrant press, but also reveals the (hidden) roles of women in the history of the German-American press. Her research now centers on historical dimensions of climate-induced migration, aiming to address knowledge gaps and debunk misconceptions regarding the association between environmental migrations and anthropogenic climate change across global scales since the 1980s. The postdoctoral project (“When Climate Hits Home: Global Policies and Local Responses to Climate Migration and Hazard Management, 1988-2023”) seeks to illuminate untold narratives of displacement, resilience, and adaptation, employing a multisited approach to connect global policies with local responses in coastal areas worldwide.