Nicholas is Chair of History and Theory. He is an ethnographer and architect whose research combines economic anthropology and legal geography to understand how people repurpose planned cities as expressions of political creativity. He has extensive field work experience in Cairo and Medellin, as well as in Doha and Mexico City. In practice, he develops an original research method – speculative social science – to assess the plausibility of experimental planning policies. His teaching focuses on the interaction between building, the transmission of ideas and the origins of social theory. Prior to the AA, Nicholas was assistant professor of global urban studies at the University of Cambridge and a research associate in anthropology at the University of Oxford.