Nicki is a historian and researcher, with a PhD from Durham University specialising in Sudanese and South Sudanese politics, and a research history across the region with the British Institute in Eastern Africa. Her research and advisory work focuses on histories of popular activism and subaltern political cultures, including internally displaced and refugee people’s own self-education projects; her PhD was based on Khartoum displaced residents’ own archives of poetry, song, drama, history and essay-writing, all focused on radical political reform.

Nicki has worked with the Rift Valley Institute as South Sudan Focal Point and coordinator for the South Sudan National Archives project 2012-2013, and lectured at the University of Juba in South Sudan. She has consulted with DFID, the Peace Research Institute Oslo, the Republican Research Institute, and the British Council, on studies of local patterns of corruption, militia mobilisation, and informal justice systems. She is also a qualified immigration and asylum caseworker and representative to the Asylum and Immigration Tribunal (UK).