BACKGROUND

Nicolas did his undergraduate work at the University of California at Santa Cruz, where he developed a love of politics and history. Nicolas received his PhD in Political Science from the University of Oregon in 2015, where he wrote a dissertation on the evolution of the Federal Reserve System supervised by Gerald Berk.

Nicolas joined the faculty of the School of Interdisciplinary Global Studies at the University of South Florida in fall 2015. He teaches courses on American national institutions and world politics.

Nicolas's first book, Imagining the Fed, locates the Federal Reserve's political development in a global context. It shows that America's uneven integration into the world economy was a spark for Federal Reserve policy discord and institutional conflict for nearly six decades. The technocratic "Fed" we know today did not emerge until the late 1960s, and its entrenchment was secured by the U.S.-induced collapse of the Bretton Woods monetary order.