Nicole Dombrowski-Risser, Ph.D.

Professor

Name

Contact Info

Phone:
410-704-2907
Office:
LA 4218
Email:
ndombrowski@towson.edu
Hours:
Tuesday, Thursday:
12:15-1:45pm
Wednesday: 11:00-1:00pm via Zoom

Education

Ph.D., New York University, 1995
M.A., New York University, 1991
B.S., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1987

Areas of Expertise

Modern France, Gender and War, Refugees, World War II, Oral History

Biography

Nicole Dombrowski-Risser is a Professor of History specializing in the history of women and child refugees in the Francophone world.  In particular, her scholarship has examined the displacement of French and Belgian civilians during the German occupation of France (1940-1944).

Currently, her research explores Francophone women’s philanthropic networks that have aided refugee mothers and children caught in Burundi and Rwanda’s violent conflicts (1993-present). She uses oral history and archival research to insert traditionally marginalized voices into the historical record. As a side-project, she also deploys this method to register histories of farming women’s experiences in rural France.

Teaching

Dombrowski-Risser teaches the introductory courses, “European Civilization,” “Paris in 20 Arrondissements” and “The Laws of War and Crimes Against Humanity in Historical Perspective”.

Upper-level courses include, “Modern France,” “Gender, War and Peace,” “Global World War II,” and “European Rural History.”

Books Published

  •  German Invasion, Civilian Flight, and Family Survival during World War II. Series: Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
  • Enlisted with or Without Consent, ed. (New York: Routledge, 2004).

Selected Publications

  • “In Provence, a Woman’s Quest to Resist Industrial Farming and Transform and Preserve the French Family Farm,” in Industrial French Food and Its Critics, Special Issue. Tamara Whited and Venus Bivar, editors. Modern & Contemporary France. Volume 28: No. 2 (May 2020): 209-229. DOI: .
  • “Conflicted Power of the Pen: The Impact of French Internment on the Pacifist Convictions and Literary Imagination of Lion Feuchtwanger,” French Politics, Culture & Society Volume 35: No. 3 (Winter 2018): 1-23.
  • “The Search for Civilian Safe Spaces: Re-Evacuation of Le Havre, Calais and Dunkerque in Response to British Bombing, September to March, 1940-41.” France and Its Spaces of War. Patricia Lorcin and Daniel Brewer, eds. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009.
  • “The Evolution of Modern Warfare as Related to Transformations in Modern Definitions of Citizenship: A Segmented Periodization of the Modern Era,” in Nicola Foote and Nadya Williams, eds. Civilians and Warfare in World History. London and New York: Routledge. June, 2017.

Recent Book Reviews

  • Review of Matthew Frank and Jessica Reinisch, eds., “Refugees in Europe 1919-1959: A Forty Years’ Crisis?” (Bloomsbury, 2017). Journal of Central European History, 52:3 (September 2019): 531-533.
  • Review of Greg Burgess, “The League of Nations and the Refugees from Nazi Germany: James G. McDonald and Hitler’s Victims.” (Bloomsbury, 2016) Central European History, 50:4 (Dec. 2017): 588-590.
  • Review of Julian Jackson, “France on Trial: The Case of Marshal PĂ©tain” (Harvard University Press, 2023). H-France Forum (2024).
  • Review of Julius Fein. Hitler’s Refugees and the French Response, 1933-1938. (Lexington Books, 2021). Central European History (Fall 2022). 

Awards and Honors

  • CLA Faculty Research Grant for Rwanda, 2023
  • Towson University Faculty Development Grant for Rwanda, 2021
  • Institut du Monde d’Olivier (IMO), Residential Fellowship Nyons, France, 2017
  • Chevaliers de l’Olivier, Nyons, France, 2011
  • Remarque Institute, NYU, Kanderstag, Switzerland, 2011
  • Princeton University Committee for Research in the Humanities, 1998
  • Prize Teaching Fellowship, New York University, 1994
  • Mellon Fellowship, Junior Faculty Research Award, 1993