Melanie Arndt is a twentieth-century historian interested in disasters as transnational processes and their social impacts. For the last four years she has been the director of the international research project Politics and Society after Chernobyl: Belarus, Ukraine, Russia, Lithuania, and Germany funded by the German Volkswagen Foundation at the Center for Contemporary History, Potsdam. She has taught environmental history and historical disaster research at the Humboldt University Berlin, the Potsdam University, and the European Humanities University Vilnius/Minsk in Lithuania.
After working in Minsk, Belarus from 1996 to 1997, Arndt studied political science, East European studies, and history at the Potsdam University, the Free University Berlin, and the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, London. She received her PhD from the Humboldt University Berlin in 2008 with a dissertation on the health policies in divided Berlin, 1948–1961.