Department of History

Ola’s dissertation, Four Seasons: Life and Death in the East European Forest, 1939-1945, investigates the environmental history of the Holocaust in the forests of Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine. Organized around the cycle of the seasons, it examines how climate and landscape conditions shaped the possibilities of survival and violence.

More broadly, Ola is interested in the relationship between environmental governance, state security, and mass atrocity, with particular interest in how modern regimes translate environmental knowledge into systems of control. Her research contributes to emerging conversations on the theoretical intersections of genocide, ecocide, and the environment.