The first event of the semester in our Faculty Research Seminar on “AfterWars” will occur on Sept. 11 at 4 p.m. in the seminar space on the second floor of Hoskins Library, outside the Center for the Study of War and Society. We will discuss an article-in-progress by Brad Nichols, graduate student in history. Dr. Monica Black (History) has kindly agreed to offer some comments on the article to start discussion, and then we will open the floor to reflections by seminar members.
Here is some background information on Brad Nichols. His research examines Nazi racial policies at their most paradoxical: he examines how on the one hand Nazi S.S. racial “scientific experts” were convinced that many Eastern Europeans had “German blood” which needed to be reintegrated into Germany, while on the other hand being deathly afraid of the contamination of the German body politic that might result. The outcome was a strange “re-Germanization” process, which selected some Eastern Europeans for preferential treatment, but then subjected them to abuse or even extermination when the results were disappointing. His previous scholarly award record includes UT’s first award of a Berlin Program Fellowship (the very best fellowship for the study of German history), which allowed him a year of archival research in Germany. He won a fellowship to the UT Humanities Center for 2013-14. In addition, this spring he was also awarded a 2014 Cummings Foundation Fellowship at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) for 2014. He will use the fellowship to mine further unique sources held at the USHMM for his research. He also last year won the UT Chancellor’s award for Extraordinary Professional Practice. Brad has also published a chapter in the new edited volume Routledge History of the Holocaust (2011, edited by Jonathan L. Friedman), entitled “Forging the Aryan Utopia: Nazi Racial Policy in Occupied Poland, 1939-1945”.