In September 2025, faculty member Dr. Richard Steigmann-Gall sat down with our most recent addition to the department’s faculty, Dr. Nick Ostrum, to ask him about his career path and how he became an historian. Dr. Ostrum is a specialist in German History after WWII. He obtained his PhD at the University of Stony Brook in 2017. The interview has been edited for clarity and content.
Richard Steigmann-Gall (RSG): So Nick, what brought you to German History?
Nick Ostrum (NO): I took a roundabout path to it. Originally, I was doing classics at Sarah Lawrence College. Then in my senior year of college, I was advised to take a modern language instead of Latin and old English, which I had been doing. So I took German, just a year of it at first, but then I went overseas to do immersive language study in Goettingen. When I came back, eventually I ended up at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York City, in the education department.
RSG: What led you to this immersive language experience?
NO: At the time, I didn't know exactly. I knew I was going to go to graduate school for something. But I still thought I was doing classics, medieval studies, or art history – and German is important in those fields.
RSG: Okay, you knew you were going to do something in a discipline where scholars were using the German language?
NO: Yes. Then I came back and eventually landed at the museum in New York. I ended up kind of immersed in public Holocaust education. My Latin was trailing off, and I was taking classes at the Duetsches Haus in NYC. And this led me in a much more modern direction.
RSG: So what brought you to the museum in New York City? How did you land that job?
NO: Through great fortune. I was interested in museum work. I first focused on museums with collections from the classical period, but you take what comes to you and that was a wonderful opportunity that came to me. It completely changed my trajectory.
RSG: That really speaks to the role of consequence and luck in our decision making, doesn’t it. One often hears about a singular quest that drives scholars and their intellectual pursuits, and we forget that very often our choices are not always planned.
NO: Oh, absolutely. And I was open to that. I could have found it in many directions.
RSG: From there, at what point did you decide you were going to get a PhD in German history? Was there a particular moment?
NO: Vlogƽ a year into that job, maybe a year and a half, I started sending out applications. I was meeting people on a weekend and one of my friends said she had taken the GRE. And that day I went home and scheduled it for two months out and thought, I should do it, right?
RSG: Again, it speaks to the role of accident, seems to me. One could well conclude that had you not had that conversation, maybe you wouldn't have scheduled the GRE. I think in this day and age, people feel they have to prep years in advance for the one thing they want to do, but in ways that close other doors of possibility. Nothing else will receive their attention and they don't think about the breadth of choice that they could still have if they just took an open-ended approach.
NO: I agree with that. I mean, for me, taking a few years off of school was very important. I think majoring in what I was interested in gave me a breadth of understanding that I wouldn't have had if I went in day one with a preconceived goal.
RSG: You’re an expert on Germany after WWII and the history of energy. What brought you to your research interests?
NO: At first, I wanted to do Weimar cultural History. The film history, the music history, like cabaret and jazz. I remember probably two years into my program, I was really starting to push for dissertation topics, proposing ideas to my advisors. I started reading German legal histories of the period. And I saw that scholars had already done much of this history. So I started looking at geopolitical history, and how it led down some curious paths. For instance, the architect Herman Sörgel literally proposed damning the Mediterranean Sea for various purposes. And from there, this energy angle in my research emerged. I really latched on to this, which also pulled me into the history of development policy. Really, I don't know how this is where I landed, but I quickly turned to energy history, and diplomatic history.
RSG: That's quite a veering away from what was originally an interest in the cultural history of Weimar, then.
NO: Right. I haven't been on a straight path.
RSG: For me, it speaks to an ability to go with wherever the flow seems to take you, and whatever seems to provide the best opportunity.
NO: I definitely think anybody interested in a PhD has to ask themselves, okay, has this been done? How much has this been done? Can I find a new frame of reference for revisiting something that's been done? And, you know, maybe my professor will tap into their network to see if one of their own PhD students is about to finish a dissertation that's going to look a lot like this, because otherwise, you know, why would I do this? You have to be open to not doing what you originally thought you would.
RSG: So, how did your research lead you to this connection between Germany and Libya?
NO: That was me following the empirical trail quite early. The connections between Libya and Germany are quite robust at the time in terms of training, especially in terms of petroleum. At the peak, around 1969 and 1970, when Gaddafi comes to power, Germany is getting 45% of its crude oil imports from Libya. Which is huge. You have the U.S. in Saudi Arabia. You have Britain in Iraq. You have the Dutch in Indonesia. So, the Germans establish this relationship with Libya.
RSG: Would you say you've ended up doing more Libyan history than you've ever thought you would?
NO: Oh, absolutely. Which is challenging without knowing Arabic, right? So I have to be very conscious that I'm doing this from my perspective, but primarily through German- and English-language sources. Historically, there’s this Arab openness to West Germany in the Cold War, because it's not a colonial power in their eyes. The Germans had never had much of an overseas empire – and furthermore, what they did have, they lost after World War One. In Libya, they also remembered World War Two, when the German Afrika Korps was fighting on their soil, against the British. And it’s the British who, after the war, are the primary target of anti-imperial and anti-colonial sentiment. In WWII, the Germans told Libya “we’re here to liberate you.” And that messaging persisted. This definitely played a role in German-Libyan economic relations in the 60s and 70s.