Nicole is a Lecturer in the Department of English Literature at the University of Reading, UK. She obtained her undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in English at Princeton University and the University of Pennsylvania before beginning her career as Assistant Professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park in 1994. In 2000 she moved to the University of California, San Diego where she was appointed Associate Professor in the Department of Literature and where, from 2003-2005, she served as Director of Postgraduate Studies. Nicole has extensive experience lecturing at the undergraduate and postgraduate level and has developed many courses within such topics as Black U.S. Literature, Caribbean Literature, and American Literature. Nicole’s courses introduced students to literary and cultural theory and to traditions within poetry, autobiography, the novel, and the essay. She has supervised and co-supervised three successful Ph.D. dissertations and served as a committee member for several others and for many MA theses. She joined the English Subject Centre in April 2006.
Nicole’s research topics include black/postcolonial diaspora identities, class and racial community, gender and migration, C.L.R. James, and Caribbean and black U.S. literature. She is the author of a monograph, C.L.R. James and Creolization: Circles of Influence (2001) as well as various articles and book chapters. Her current book project, Blackness and Its Others: Discourses of Authenticity in Black Literature, considers late twentieth-century black writing that deliberately situates itself or is otherwise situated outside the concepts and boundaries of so-called ‘normative’ blackness.
