Amber N. Nickell is a Ph.D. Candidate at Purdue University. Writing under the guidance of Dr. Rebekah Klein-Pejsova, she is currently authoring a dissertation titled, “Brotherlands to Bloodlands: Ethnic Germans and Jews in Southern Ukraine, from the Late Imperial to the Postwar.” In it, she traces relationships between ethnic Germans and Jews in the region over the long durée, as they transitioned from neighborly to murderous. She measures the impact of imperial policies, diaspora interventions, and sustained state-sponsored violence on both groups’ perceptions of and interactions with one another in the years leading up to the Holocaust, as well as the ways in which the Nazi and Romanian occupation regimes capitalized on preexisting fissures to prompt widespread ethnic German participation in the murder of their Jewish neighbors. Amber will use her time as a Claims Conference Saul Kagan Fellow in Advanced Shoah Studies to complete this project.
Amber’s research interests include comparative migration and diaspora, the Holocaust and Genocide, nationalism and transnationalism, and the spatial and digital humanities. Her primary research and teaching field is “Modern Central and Eastern European History”; however, she completed minor preliminary exam fields in “Transnational Germany” and “Russian Imperial Borderlands.”
She earned a M.A. in American history (2013) and a B.A. degree in European history (2011) from the University of Northern Colorado. She has presented her work at numerous local, national, and international conferences, workshops, and symposia and received a number of awards for her writing, research, service, and teaching. Additionally, she is a recipient of several research grants and fellowships, including the Auschwitz Jewish Center Fellowship, Title VIII Grants, the Purdue Research Foundation Fellowship, and most recently the Fulbright Fellowship (Ukraine).