Meet Nicole

I am a teacher-scholar who, after many years in higher education, decided to move to independent schools, where I have the time and space to cultivate dynamic conversations and engage students’ different points of view.

As a cellist and one-time session player for Robert Plant’s former guitarist Francis Dunnery, I chose to leave my musician’s life behind to pursue my love for teaching literature. I wanted to bring the cello along. Helping me make the transition was Ken Macrorie’s “I-Search Paper,” which asks students to bring personal interests to bear on scholarly queries, yielding results that have immediate relevance to their lives. It vindicated the type of teaching I wanted to do; it prioritized the connection between lived experience and intellectual query as a lens through which to develop a point of view. I aim to demonstrate for students that personal relationships with academic material translate into real-world application. Hence, my own scholarship, published in peer-reviewed journals and including a recent book, draws on my experience as a former cellist, focusing largely on the historical relationship between music and literature. What we learn grows from what we know. That principle, and its unshakeable premise of interconnectedness, has guided my identity as a teacher-scholar at both the collegiate and secondary levels and informs many of the research and writing projects used in my classes.