Nikki Berg Burin

History 103: United States to 1877

History 104: United States since 1877

History 220: North Dakota History

History 331: Seminar in the History of the Great Plains

History 332: American Women's History to 1865

WGS 225/WGS 225 Honors: Introduction to Women Studies

Dr. Berg Burin’s current research focuses on the history of sexual violence and exploitation in North Dakota. Her ongoing book project includes chapters on topics such as rape and sexual assault, age of consent and statutory rape, seduction, and commercial sexual exploitation and explores the impact of these crimes on victims, perpetrators, families, and communities, as well as on the culture and identity of North Dakota. Though such crimes happen everywhere, Dr. Berg Burin is especially interested in how the unique context of North Dakota - culture, geography, politics, demographics, etc. - shaped residents' diverse experiences with and responses to sexual violence and exploitation past and present. She has received several grants from the UND College of Arts and Sciences to hire undergraduate research assistants to collaborate on various projects related to this research. Most recently, Dr. Berg Burin and two undergraduate History majors/WGS minors spent a semester building a database of over 800 unique incidents of sexual violence reported by Dakota Territory and North Dakota newspapers between 1861-1920.

Dr. Berg Burin's most recent publications have focused on the history of North Dakota's prostitution and sex trafficking laws (published in Sixty Years of Boom and Bust: The Impact of Oil in North Dakota, 1958–2018, The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota, 2020) and public discourse on sex workers and sex trafficking victims during the state's economic booms (published in The Bakken Goes Boom: Oil and the Changing Geographies of Western North Dakota, The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota, 2016). Her interest in the global, national, and regional sex trafficking crisis and modern day slavery was preceded by her interest in 19th century slavery.  Her first area of research focused on women slaveholders and plantation managers in Mississippi in the three decades before the Civil War. A portion of that scholarship was published in Family Values in the Old South (University Press of Florida, 2010).

In 2023, Dr. Berg Burin was awarded the UND Foundation's Outstanding Undergraduate Teaching Award.

In 2019, UND and the city of Grand Forks presented Dr. Berg Burin with one of the inaugural Dr. Martin Luther King "Dream in Action" awards, which recognizes organizations or individuals who work to create and inspire social change at UND and in the greater Grand Forks community. This award reflects her passion for engaging in public outreach as a scholar and for bringing a historical perspective to present-day problem solving. Notably, she was actively engaged in collaborative efforts to combat human trafficking in North Dakota, serving on the original Advisory Committee for North Dakota’s anti-human trafficking organization FUSE and as a consultant for the North Dakota Human Trafficking Task Force. She also previously served as a member of UND's Center for Human Rights and Genocide Studies and was a board member for the anti-human trafficking organization Historians Against Slavery.

University of Minnesota – Ph.D. (History), 2007

University of North Dakota – M.A. (History), 2002

Concordia College, Moorhead, MN – B.A. (History, Classical Studies), 2000