Nicole Eaton is an associate professor of history at Boston College, where she teaches courses on 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 beginning on a new project that ties together epidemic, chronic, and autoimmune diseases with the environmental history of toxicity in the 20th century.
