Melanie Dejnega, historian, is an associated senior researcher at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Digital History (LBIDH).

She studied history, social sciences and Spanish at the University of Vienna and the Free University of Berlin.

2009-2011 she was a research assistant in the “Mauthausen Survivors Research Project” (MSRP) at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Historical Social Science (LBIHS). Her dissertation project “‘Heimat im Gepäck?’ Interpretation and Meaning of the Migration Experience in Life Stories of German Refugees and Displaced Persons in Austria after 1945” led her to Bielefeld in 2011, where she was a fellow at the Bielefeld Graduate School in History and Sociology from 2011-2014. In 2014-2016, she was a collaborator on the project she conceived, “Zwischen Opfer-Identität und Mittäterschaft. Krieg und Nationalsozialismus in der Erinnerung von ‘volksdeutschen’ Evakuierten, Geflüchteten und Vertriebenen” (funded by the Future Fund of the Republic of Austria and the Gerda Henkel Foundation) at the LBIHS. In 2017, she received a scholarship from the Young Researchers Fund at Bielefeld University.

In addition to her research work, Melanie Dejnega is a trainer for academic writing (certificate of the Writing Lab of Bielefeld University). Since 2020, she has been a lecturer for Research Skills & Methods at the University of Applied Sciences for Management & Communication.

Her research focuses on the theory and method of oral history, National Socialism and concentration camps, migration history, Austrian post-war history as well as “flight and expulsion” of the German minorities from Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia and their integration in Austria. She is currently working on the editorial completion of the publication series on the “Mauthausen Survivors Research Project” (MSRP).