Daniela Russ studied Social Sciences and Slavic Languages in Berlin and Belgrade and completed her studies with a thesis on „The Rise of Climate Politics. Tracing the Transformation of Climate Change into a Political Issue” based on a quantitative text analysis of European parties’ manifestos. From 2009-2014 she held various positions as a student assistant at the Department for Slavic Languages and the Department of Social Sciences at the Humboldt University of Berlin, as well as the Department of Democracy and Democratization at the Berlin Social Science Center (WZB). Since 2014 she is holding a position as a research associate in the junior research group "Discovering, Exploring, and Addressing Grand Societal Challenges" funded by the Mercator foundation.

In her PhD she is pursuing the world-wide diffusion of “energy” as a concept through which the environment is experienced and measured. Drawing on a globalization theory that stresses global observations and comparisons as a precondition for globalization, her focus lies on how local environments are standardized and made globally comparable by an ever tighter net of energy measures and statistics throughout the 19^th and 20^th century. She is particularly interested in the way states and (colonial) companies started “taking stock” of and comparing energy resources on a global scale, and how this energy data was included in models of the economy.

Her research is mainly based on an analysis of the reports, minutes and statistics published by the World Energy Council (former World Power Conference) since its foundation in 1923. The WEC’s archive provides a unique source of data, because it captures in one organization both the changes in the statistics as well as the discourse on energy for a period of almost one hundred years. To approach these variegated documents she mixes qualitative discourse analysis and quantitative text analysis.

Current Projects:

• Dissertation project on energy (in German)
• Nachwuchsforschergruppe