Nicholas Cole
Dr Nicholas Cole is a Senior Research Fellow at Pembroke College, University of Oxford, where he currently also serves as the Academic Director for the College. He is the director of the College’s ‘Quill Project’ research-center, which studies the negotiation of constitutions, treaties, and landmark legislation. The project uses advanced, digital techniques to understand the process of drafting and revision of constitutional texts, and to track the way that both substance and process has changed over time. The project has collaborated with many institutions in the United States, but most significantly with universities in Utah.
Cole read Ancient and Modern History at University College Oxford, where he stayed to read for an MPhil in Greek and Roman history and then a doctorate (with ancient historian and philosopher Miriam Griffin) on the use of the Classics by Thomas Jefferson's generation of American Politicians. He continues to have strong research interests in the reception of classical history and texts in the modern world, and in the development of modern political thought. He was a Junior Research Fellow at St Peter’s College, Oxford, and held other teaching and research positions within Oxford University. He has been a Visiting Research Fellow at the International Centre for Jefferson Studies at Monticello. He teaches American history and the history of political thought, and supervises graduate students working on American legal and constitutional history, the history of American political thought, or classical reception in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and is actively involved in the application of digital techniques to humanities scholarship.
Cole gave the 2023 Maurice and Muriel Fulton Lecture in Legal History at the University of Chicago, speaking on Writing America’s Constitutions: The Rise (and Fall) of [James Madison’s] “Government Through Reflection and Choice”, and the same year gave the Robert F. Williams Lecture on State Constitutional History at Rutgers University Law School.
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