Professional Affiliation

Assistant Professor of History, Boston College

Expert Bio

Nicole Eaton is Assistant Professor of History at Boston College.  She received her PhD in European History at the University of California, Berkeley and has held fellowships at the Kennan Institute, the Harriman Institute of Columbia University, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.  Her book, German Blood, Slavic Soil is forthcoming from Cornell University Press in the Fall of 2022. The book deals with ideology, politics, and the Nazi-Soviet encounter in the German city of Königsberg as it became the Soviet Russian city of Kaliningrad during and after the Second World War.

Wilson Center Project

“Exclave: Politics, Ideology, and Urban Space in Königsberg-Kaliningrad”

Project Summary

Nicole Eaton's research interests include social history and microhistory, Nazism and Stalinism. Her book manuscript focuses on a single decade of politics, and everyday life, and the German-Soviet encounter in Königsberg-Kaliningrad—unique as the only place ruled by both Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Russia as their own patrimony.  Her work explores the way both regimes attempted to transform the city's urban space and its inhabitants, arguing that the intersection of national prescriptions and local conditions gave rise to conflicting practices. During her term at Kennan, she will work on revising manuscript for publication by researching the broader context of German and Soviet occupations, postwar urban rebuilding, nationalities policies, and forced migrations.

Major Publications

"German Bodies, Soviet Medicine: Ideology, Disease, and Contamination in Kaliningrad, 1945-1948" (under review)