Responsible for: Collections from the Americas.

Research interests: Colonial histories and collecting, care for ancestral remains, humanising museum documentation, museum ethnography, anti-colonial pedagogies.

Nicole received her MA in Social Justice Education at the University of Toronto and is completing her PhD in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh, funded by the Economic Social Research Council. Her research enabled the first proactive repatriation from the University's Anatomical Museum to North America, following outreach and knowledge sharing with multiple First Nations and Inuit descendants.

Nicole's doctoral work was supported by the Universities of Edinburgh and Toronto to continue establishing collaborative networks of First Nations and Inuit descendants and Scottish museum professionals to explore what justice may look like for First Nations and Inuit ancestors in Scotland. She was further funded by the Our Minds Scholarship to develop ways to share provenance in careful and 'humanised' ways with descendent communities and continues to be interested in how colonial violence and harm is replicated in engagement with archival documents. She has advised on a taskforce investigating the legacies of colonialism at the university to recommend ways to improve collections management practice within their heritage collections.

As a museum ethnographer, Nicole has conducted fieldwork at the UBC Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver and with museum professionals at the Royal BC Museum, the Royal Ontario Museum, and the BC Museum's Associations as well as several NAGPRA specialists in the US. Her research continues to be motivated by care ethics, the importance of emotion in museum work and anti-colonial methodologies in research and teaching. She teaches regularly on repatriation, provenance research and critical museum practice at the University of Edinburgh, mainly in Social Anthropology and on the Edinburgh College of Art MScR course Collections and Curating Practices. View Nicole's record of publications.