Dr. Nicole Breault
Assistant Professor of History
Dr. Nicole Breault is an historian of early American social and legal history. Her research interests include urban governance, carceral history, institutions, gender, and material culture. She received a master’s from the University of Massachusetts Boston in 2014 and her doctorate from the University of Connecticut in 2022. Her research has been supported by grants and fellowships from the American Historical Association, American Philosophical Society, American Society for Legal History, Boston Athenæum, Huntington Library, Massachusetts Historical Society, Roanoke College, and the UConn Humanities Institute. In 2024-2025, she was named a William Nelson Cromwell Foundation Fellow, a UTEP-EPCC Humanities Collaborative Faculty Fellow, and received an NEH long-term fellowship at the Massachusetts Historical Society.
Her work has been published in the Journal of the Early Republic and The Panorama, with forthcoming pieces in the New England Quarterly and The Cambridge Companion to American Carceral History. Her book manuscript-in-progress (under contract with University of Pennsylvania Press) Set the Watch: Policing and Governance in Early America is an account of how nightly watches, a form of early policing, reflected and embodied changes in the meaning and methods of governance in colonial, revolutionary, and immediate post-revolutionary Boston. She is also working on a documentary edited collection for the Colonial Society of Massachusetts Press, The Reports of Boston’s Night Watch, 1763-1803. Her second project examines spaces of confinement in early America: praying towns, jails, workhouses, almshouses, and communities.
Dr. Breault is especially interested in working with MA and PhD students on topics related to carceral history, history of policing, colonial and revolutionary North America, material culture, and American law, culture, and society.
Curriculum vitae
Faculty Profile
Contact Info:
Liberal Arts 312
(915) 747-5508
Email: nabreault@utep.edu
