Nick Goodell

Nick is a 6th year graduate student worker studying with Professor Helmut Smith. His dissertation, “Repression and Resistance: Communists and the First Concentration Camps, 1933-1935,” analyzes the response of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) to the early Nazi state terror. It explores why many members of the KPD chose to return to the resistance movement after their release from the early camps. Nick has presented on this research at the German Studies Association Annual Conference of 2024 and was a fellow in-residence at the Freie Universität Berlin during the 2023-2024 academic year.

In addition to anti-Nazi resistance history and histories of communism, Nick’s research interests include labor history, social history, Holocaust studies, and the study of social movements.

His next research project is on the Solidarity Committee of the former East Germany. It assesses what state-sponsored social movements look like, how states mobilize their populations, and how such movements de-mobilize after losing state resources. This project will analyze the Committee's most popular campaigns—such as the campaign to free Angela Davis or those supporting postwar reconstruction in Vietnam—as well as its downfall and post-1989 legacies. 

Currently, Nick teaches a History 3000w majors writing seminar on social movements.