Melina Teubner studied Latin American History, History, and Portuguese Literature at the University of Cologne. Between 2014 and 2018, she was a research fellow at the a.r.t.e.s. Graduate School for the Humanities at the University of Cologne. Her doctoral thesis, Die „zweite Sklaverei ernähren“. Sklavenschiffsköche und Straßenverkäuferinnen im Südatlantik (1800–1870), examines how laborers involved in the food sector—such as slave ship cooks and female street vendors—contributed to the infrastructure of the 19th-century transatlantic slave trade to Brazil.
Her dissertation was awarded both the Offermann-Hergarten Prize (Faculty Prize of the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Cologne) and the Dissertation Prize of the German Labour History Association.
She is currently an advanced postdoctoral researcher in the History Department at the University of Bern. From 2023 to 2025, she was on leave after receiving a two-year mobility grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation, which enabled her to conduct research in Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay. Together with Christian Büschges, she is Principal Investigator of the project Turning Land into Capital in Bern.