Biographical Summary

Jana Dunz-Keck is a research fellow in Digital History and History of the Americas/Transatlantic History at the German Historical Institute Washington (GHI), where she also coordinates the institute’s research area in Digital History. She studied English and American Studies as well as Linguistics at the University of Stuttgart and completed her Ph.D. there in 2023. From 2018 to 2019, she was part of the international research project Oceanic Exchanges: Tracing Global Information Networks in Historical Newspaper Repositories, 1840–1914 (DFG), a transatlantic collaboration of scholars from seven countries exploring news circulation in the long nineteenth century. Before joining the GHI in 2020, she taught in the Department of English and American Studies at the University of Stuttgart. Her doctoral dissertation, which won the inaugural Peter Haber Prize for Digital History awarded by the German Association of Historians (VHD) in 2021, used computational methods to examine reprinting practices and genre conventions in digitized nineteenth-century German-American newspapers. Her first monograph, forthcoming in the Series Studies Digital History and Hermeneutics (De Gruyter Brill), maps the transregional textual ecosystem of the German-American press and highlights the often-overlooked roles of women in immigrant journalism. Her current project, "When Climate Hits Home: Internal Migration and Mobility in the U.S. during the Age of the Great Acceleration," investigates the history of managed retreat and climate-induced relocation in the Gulf Coast, Midwest, and Pacific regions. Combining digital mapping and archival research, it explores how environmental displacement has reshaped American communities and challenges the perception that climate migration is solely a future or Global South issue.