Nicola Karcher

Associate Professor

Head of NORFAS Steering Committee

Faculty of Education, Østfold University College, Norway

Contact
nicola.k.karcher@hiof.no
info@norfas.net

Webpage
Nicola Kristin Karcher – English (hiof.no)

Bio

Nicola Karcher is a historian and Associate Professor in Social Science at the Østfold University College, Norway and affiliate researcher at the History Department at Uppsala University. At her faculty, she leads the research group PRIS (Politics, Religion, Ideology and Society in Education) and is a member of the Research Steering Committee. From 2020 to 2022, she was a steering board member of the National Network of Social Science in Education, Norway. She has been a researcher in the project Democratic institutions facing Nazi occupation: Norway in a comparative perspective from 2013 to 2017, at the Norwegian Holocaust Center and financed by the Norwegian Research Council. In 2016, she was a guest researcher at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam and in 2022 a guest lecturer at the University of Valencia. Her teaching expertise includes Holocaust education, democratic citizenship, and prevention of extremism and racism, mainly directed towards school and teacher education. Karcher’s pioneering doctoral thesis in 2012 from the University of Oslo deals with Norwegian-German fascist networks in the interwar period. She has published articles and books in Norwegian, German, and English on the history of fascism, occupation history, antisemitism, and racism, particularly with respect to the Nordic countries. In her monograph Kampen om skolen, she analysed fascist education in the light of Nazification policy and civil resistance in occupied Norway. Karcher is co-head of the NORFAS steering committee and editor of the NORFAS-anthology Nordic Fascism: Fragments of an Entangled History together with Markus Lundström (Routledge, 2022). She is researcher in the NORFAS research project Inception: The Birth of Nordic Fascism, based at Uppsala University, which she developed together with Oula Silvennoinen.

Research interests

Transnational and entangled fascism
Interwar and occupation history
Historical far-right movements, ideology and networks
Antisemitism studies and the Nordic-völkisch movement
History didactics

Featured publications

Karcher, Nicola. 2022. “Willing Collaborators: The Political Activities of Norwegian National Socialists in Nazi Germany.” In Nicola Karcher and Markus Lundström, eds., Nordic Fascism: Fragments of an Entangled History. Abingdon: Routledge.

Karcher, Nicola et al. 2020. “Navigating troubled waters: collaboration and resistance in state institutions in Nazi-occupied Norway.” Scandinavian Journal of History 46 (1): 84-104.

Karcher, Nicola. 2019. “A National Socialist school for Norway: concepts of Nazification during the German occupation.” Paedagogica Historica – International Journal of the History of Education 56(5). 662-679.

Karcher, Nicola. 2018. Kampen om skolen. Nazifiseringsfremstøt og lærernes motstand i det okkuperte Norge. Oslo: Dreyers forlag.

Karcher, Nicola. 2014. “Victor Mogens – en lojal talsmann for Nazi-Tyskland?” In Øystein Sørensen et al., eds., Intellektuelle og det totalitære: Pervertert idealisme? Oslo: Dreyers forlag. 30-52.

Karcher, Nicola. 2012. “Nasjonal Samling’s Foreign Office in Berlin during the Second World War: Organisation, Strategies and Cooperation.” In Nicola Karcher and Anders Kjøstved, eds., Movements and Ideas of the Extreme Right in Europa. Frankfurt/M.: Peter Lang Publishing House. 117-140.

Karcher, Nicola. 2012. Zwischen Nationalsozialismus und nordischer Gesinnung. Eine Studie zu den rechtsgerichteten Verbindungen norwegisch-deutscher Milieus in der Zwischenkriegszeit. Ph.D.-thesis, University of Oslo.

Karcher, Nicola. 2009. “Schirmorganisation der Nordischen Bewegung. Der Nordische Ring und seine Repräsentanten in Norwegen”. NORDEUROPAforum 1. 7-35.