Kiechel is an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Wolf Humanities Center, University of Pennsylvania and a 2024-2025 ACLS Fellow. She received her PhD in history from Yale University in May 2022 and was previously a Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Williams College. Her research interest include decolonization, international law, Genocide Studies, and global intellectual history.

Kiechel is currently working on her first book, Genocide’s Shadow: Holocaust Memory at the End of Empire. The book shows how Holocaust memory defined Europeans’ engagements in and for the “Third World,” arguing that in the decolonization era Holocaust references appeared as part of a global anti-imperial vernacular. While many studies examine how the Holocaust defined international responses to genocide post-1945, Genocide’s Shadow is the first book to establish how anti-imperial activists in the Global South and North deployed the genocide term and Holocaust references as they worked to revise the existing liberal international order. The book begins in revolutionary Algeria, before charting the Holocaust’s anti-imperial uses among protests regarding events in Vietnam, Biafra, Bangladesh, and Cambodia.

Her past articles have been featured in Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal, Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development, Journal of Genocide Research, and the Journal of the History of International Law. Institutions including DAAD, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Fondation pour la mémoire de la Shoah, and the German Historical Institute have supported her past academic work. She held a Fox Fellowship to l’École normale supérieure from Yale University in 2018-2019. Her second book project asks how the humanitarian development projects of the League of Nations spurred new demonstrations of anticolonial resistance.