About

Dr. Amber N. Nickell is an Assistant Professor of History at Fort Hays State University. She earned a Ph.D. in Central and Eastern European history from Purdue University (2021). Amber also received a MA in American history (2013) and a BA 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 Saul Kagan Fellowship for Advanced Shoah Studies, the Auschwitz Jewish Center Fellowship, Title VIII fellowships, and the Fulbright Fellowship (Ukraine). Amber is, first and foremost, a publicly engaged scholar and teacher. She is dedicated to public Holocaust education and awareness in her community, is a podcast host for New Books Network Jewish Studies, Eastern Europe, and Ukrainian Studies, and serves as an editor for H-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 ongoing 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.

Amber is also wrapping up an article on Holocaust memory in contemporary Ukraine and has begun research on a new project tentatively titled, “Topographies of Murder: Artistic and Cartographic Representations of Power and Powerlessness from the Holocaust in Eastern Europe.” This project examines cartographic and artistic renderings of geography and topography created by the perpetrators and victims of the Holocaust in the East, particularly Ukraine, Moldova, and Romania.