Amber Nickell

Amber N. Nickell is a Ph.D. Candidate at Purdue University and Claims Conference Saul Kagan Fellow in Advanced Shoah Study (2020-2021). 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 Master’s degree in American history (2013) and a Bachelor’s 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 2016 Auschwitz Jewish Center Fellowship, Title VIII fellowships, and the Fulbright Fellowship (Ukraine).

Amber’s training as a scholar of both Europe and the United States enables her to conduct research and teach across these fields. Her methodologies transcend the national, focusing on transnational phenomena, including migration, diaspora, deportation, ethnic cleansing, the Holocaust and genocide, human rights, and internationalism. Her command of the spatial humanities augments these strengths. Amber’s most recent publication, “Time to Show the Kremlin America's Full House: The Committee for Human Rights in the Soviet Union, Rabbi Gedalyah Engel, and their Refusnik Adoptees, 1977-1992,” which appeared in The Transnational Yearbook, Volume 1 (Fairleigh Dickenson, 2018), serves as one example. For more details, see: https://rowman.com/isbn/9781683930037/yearbook-of-transnational-history-(2018)-volume-1

Amber’s current project, tentatively titled “Brotherlands to Bloodlands: Ethnic Germans and Jews in Southern Ukraine, Late Tsarist to Postwar” examines coexistence, confluence, and conflict between the two groups in Southern Ukraine and Transnistria. She considers the astounding territorial, political, and demographic shifts in the region over the long durée and ponders their impact on intergroup relationships. In doing so, she illuminates the historical processes that transformed interactions between ethnic Germans and their Jewish neighbors from neighborly to murderous.