BLOCKADE

Nicole Milano is a doctoral researcher and part of BLOCKADE’s Trondheim-based team. Her project explores the effect of the blockades on essential goods used in private households, as well as perceptions of the blockades on the home fronts in Italy and Norway directly before, during, and after World War II. She will examine wartime and immediate pre- and post-war data in Italy and Norway to isolate the effect of the blockades on availability of and access to essential household goods such as coal, clothing, soap, and food. Using personal papers and official records, the project will also investigate how the blockades disrupted and altered the lives and mentalities of women and children on the home front. Her project is anticipated to integrate historical disciplines, bringing cultural history into conversation with economic history and revealing complexity in the human impact of the blockades. 

Nicole completed an MA in History at the University of Florida and an Advanced Certificate in Archives at New York University. Nicole worked previously as a professional archivist primarily in New York City, conducting research and democratizing access to history in a variety of repositories and managing and coordinating use of archival records by researchers from many disciplines. In her role as head of the Medical Center Archives at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medicine she also established the repository’s first visiting research scholar program and coordinated the institution’s history of medicine lecture series. In her role at the Archives of the American Field Service and AFS Intercultural Programs she chaired a committee for a free curriculum aligned with United States (US) Common Core and UNESCO Global Learning standards and endorsed by the US World War I Centennial Commission, which helped secondary school students analyze the history of World War I through the lens of volunteer service, both before and after the period of US American neutrality. Nicole co-curated a related exhibition on the same topic, which opened at the US National World War I Museum in 2016. Nicole also served as an adjunct professor at New York University for five years, teaching a graduate-level archives course to students in the Department of History.