Nicole Eaton
Associate Professor
Biography
Professor Eaton’s teaching interests include courses on modern European history, Soviet history and the Russian empire, Central European history, the Second World War, daily life in authoritarian regimes, violence, forced migrations, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. Her first book, German Blood, Slavic Soil: How Nazi Königsberg Became Soviet Kaliningrad , was published by Cornell University Press in 2023. The book focuses on the long entangled history of the Third Reich and Soviet Union, culminating in the apocalyptic encounter between German and Soviet citizens, their revolutionary torchbearers, and their victims in one city in the years surrounding the Second World War. Königsberg/Kaliningrad, the book shows, is unique as the one city ruled by both Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Russia as their own patrimony. But the city also serves as an exemplary case study of how tensions between national prescriptions and local conditions in both highly ideological, authoritarian regimes led to conflicting practices on the ground, constant improvisation, and the reconfiguration of national ideologies and foundational myths in response to the region’s complex demography and geopolitical circumstances. Professor Eaton’s current research interests include the history of medicine, environmental history, and the history of the body in Central and Eastern Europe and Eurasia. She is working on a new project that ties together epidemic, chronic, and autoimmune diseases with the environmental history of toxicity in the twentieth century. In addition to her academic work, Professor Eaton has provided interviews and consultation for Eight by Eight magazine, Meduza, and other news outlets, and she has appeared as an expert in documentary films on the history of Nazism and the Third Reich. Prior to coming to Boston College, Professor Eaton taught at Wesleyan University and has been a fellow at the Harriman Institute at Columbia University, the Kennan Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Her research has been supported by fellowships and research grants including the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research, Fulbright-Hays, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the Charlotte Newcombe Fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and the Mabelle McLeod Lewis Fellowship.