Amber N. Nickell
Assistant Professor
223A Himes Hall
Scholarly Research and Engagement:
My research focuses on the Holocaust and genocide, nationalism and ethnic conflict, diaspora and migration, Soviet and Ukrainian history, and the ways communities make sense of violence, place, and memory. Geographically, much of my work takes me to Eastern Europe, especially southern Ukraine,though my interests have a habit of wandering into the American Midwest as well.
My first book, Brotherlands to Bloodlands: Ethnic Germans and Jews in Southern Ukraine, Late Tsarist to Postwar (Indiana University Press, 2027), traces the intertwined histories of ethnic Germans and Jews who lived alongside one another through revolution, famine, Stalinist repression, occupation, and the Holocaust. The manuscript received the Wiener Holocaust Library’s Ernst Fraenkel Book Prize in 2025. My current projects explore how Holocaust violence and memory have been represented through maps and art, the history and memory of antifascism, and the surprisingly long afterlives of fascism in the American Great Plains.
Among my digital projects is Through Hell to the Midwest, which uses GIS, archival materials, and Holocaust testimony to tell stories of persecution, survival, migration, and memory in new ways. I have worked as a consultant and writer for the Blavatnik Archive and, since 2021, have hosted interviews for the New Books Network with scholars in Jewish, Ukrainian, and Eastern European Studies. Whether through maps, podcasts, archives, classrooms, or community partnerships, I am interested in finding creative ways to connect historical research with the people and communities whose histories it tells.
Teaching
My teaching interests include the Holocaust and genocide, modern European history, Eastern Europe and Ukraine, World War II, human rights, and digital and spatial humanities. I approach teaching as another form of public-facing scholarship and encourage students to think about how historical knowledge can be communicated beyond the traditional classroom.
My course syllabi are publicly available through my Academia.edu profile, where students, educators, and others interested in my teaching can explore the courses I have developed and taught. Course Syllabi
Interested in Directing Theses and Dissertations On
The Holocaust and genocide
Modern Central and Eastern Europe
Ukrainian history
Imperial Russian and Soviet history
German and transnational German history
Diaspora, migration, and nationalism
Jewish history in Eastern Europe
War, mass violence, and memory
Digital and spatial humanities
Education
PhD, European History, Purdue University, 2021
MA, American History, University of Northern Colorado, 2013
BA, European History and Political Science, University of Northern Colorado, 2011
AA, Liberal Arts, Aims Community College, 2006
Selected Awards and Honors
Ernst Fraenkel Book Prize, Wiener Holocaust Library, 2025
Charles E. Scheidt Faculty Fellow in Atrocity Prevention, Institute for Genocide and Mass Atrocity Prevention, 2023–2024
Great Plains Fellow, Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies, University of Kansas, 2021–2023
Saul Kagan Fellowship in Advanced Shoah Study, 2020–2021
Yad Vashem Moshe Mirilashvili Center for Research on the Holocaust in the Soviet Union Researcher Grant, 2020
Fulbright U.S. Student Program Research Fellowship, Ukraine, 2017–2018
Auschwitz Jewish Center Fellowship, 2016
Book
Brotherlands to Bloodlands: Ethnic Germans and Jews in Southern Ukraine, Late Tsarist to Postwar. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2027. Winner of the Ernst Fraenkel Book Prize.
Selected Articles and Book Chapters
“Census and Map in Regnum: South Russian Jews and Ethnic Germans on the All-Russian Imperial Census of 1897.” In Shared Histories: Germans and Jews in Eastern Europe – Aspects of Historical Entanglement, 2026.
“From Babyn Yar to Bohdanivka: Holocaust Topographies and Memoryscapes in Ukraine.” Radical History Review, no. 152 (2025): 129–154.
“Telos, Contingency, and Locating the ‘Onset of the Holocaust.’” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 41, no. 3 (2023).
“‘Time to Show the Kremlin America’s Full House’: The Committee for Human Rights in the Soviet Union, Rabbi Gedalyah Engel, and their Refusenik Adoptees, 1977–1992.” In Transnational Yearbook, vol. 1 (2018): 189–216.
“Cultivating ‘Roots’: Towards a Diasporically Imagined Transnational Community: The American Historical Society of Germans from Russia, 1968–1978.” Traversea: Journal of Transatlantic History (2013): 4–16.