Sal Nicolazzo

Sal Nicolazzo is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of California, Davis, with research expertise at the intersection of law, literature, and colonial racial capitalism in the eighteenth-century British Empire and Atlantic world.

Their research explores how legal and literary forms jointly shaped historical understandings of policing, property, risk, and temporality. Key areas include vagrancy law, maritime insurance, land speculation, and literary experiments in time and genre. They are currently co-editing Volume 4: The Eighteenth Century of the Bloomsbury Cultural History of Trans Lives.

Previously, they taught in the Literature Department at the University of California, San Diego. Their scholarship combines close textual analysis with critical legal theory to uncover the narrative foundations of institutional power.

Nicolazzo’s first book, Vagrant Figures: Law, Literature, and the Origins of the Police, traces how Restoration and eighteenth-century vagrancy laws across the British Empire established rhetorical and narrative precedents for modern policing practices. Their current work investigates speculative futures constructed under racial capitalism, linking legal-economic mechanisms with literary representations of time and space.

• Associate Professor, Department of English, UC Davis
• Former Faculty, Literature Department, UC San Diego