Amber Nickell

2017 Fulbright Scholar

Hometown

Greeley, CO

Major

Ph.D. in History

College

The Graduate School

 

The Fulbright U.S. Student Program will take Amber Nickell to Ukraine.  The Greeley, Colorado native will spend a year there collecting oral histories as she examines the changing relationships between ethnic German and Jewish populations in Southern Ukraine and the Crimea from 1917-79. Nickell is pursuing a doctorate in history at the Graduate School at Purdue.  She argues that the Soviet government’s extreme post-revolutionary policies drove a wedge between the two groups, which the Nazis later capitalized on.

 

“Amber is a self-driven, highly disciplined student with the maturity and sensitivity necessary for the forbidding research area she has chosen,” said Purdue history professor Rebekah Klein-Pejsova. “She has drawn enormous strength from her own complex personal struggles and has gleaned from them just exactly what is at stake in writing and teaching the history of the violent upheavals of the 20th century.” 

 

Nickell plans to share the oral histories she collects in a local archive, so Ukrainians and foreign researchers have access to them. She will also spend time digitizing documents to help preserve state archives.