Jan Musekamp

Jan Musekamp is the deputy director of the German Historical Institute in Warsaw. He graduated with a Ph.D. and a habilitation (“2nd book”) from European University Viadrina. From 2018 to 2024, he was a visiting associate professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh. Previously, he taught at the European University Viadrina/Germany and was a postdoctoral fellow at Washington University in St. Louis.

In his teaching and research, he focuses on East Central European cultural and migration history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His main areas of interest are questions of mobility, (forced) migrations, cultural appropriation in Eastern European borderlands, and transnational history.

Jan’s first book, “Zwischen Stettin und Szczecin: Metamorphosen einer Stadt von 1945 bis 2005” (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz 2010), focuses on forced migrations and cultural appropriation in the Polish border city of Szczecin between 1945 and 2005. His second book, “Shifting Lines, Entangled Borderlands. Mobilities and Migration along the Prussian Eastern Railroad” (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 2024), analyzes the impact of the railroad on the development of international networks in East Central Europe in the long nineteenth century. His current research project deals with the global migration history of Ukraine’s German speakers.

(Foto: Heide Fest, Europa-Universität Viadrina)

Zwischen 1987 und 1999 erschien in Kanada die genealogisch und historisch orientierte Zeitschrift „Wandering Volhynians“, die sich gemäß ihres Titels insbesondere der Migrationsgeschichte dieser Gruppe widmete

Background Article

The History of the German-speaking Volhynians as Part of a Global Migration History

From the mid-nineteenth century onward, innovations such as steam navigation and the advent of the railroad led to a sharp increase in global migration movements. The German-speaking Volhynians were part of this development, which moved between the ideal-typical poles of voluntary and forced...