Sarah Nicolazzo is Assistant Professor of Literature at the University of California, San Diego, specializing in British and American literature of the long eighteenth century, with a particular interest in literature's intersections with legal and economic thought. Her book project, Vagrant Figures: Imagining Police Power in the Early Atlantic World, tracks vagrancy across transatlantic law and literature to reveal a prehistory of modern police power as a flexible, discretionary legal realm intimately bound to logics of racialization, theories of labor, and the spatial imagination of empire.
My area of expertise is literary and print culture of the eighteenth-century British Empire and Atlantic world. Most broadly, my research also encompasses formal intersections between law and literature, the history of race and empire, the legal history of criminal procedure and policing, the history of eighteenth-century economic thought, and contemporary methodologies including critical race theory and gender/sexuality studies.
