Nicole Hemmer is Director of the Carolyn T. and Robert M. Rogers Center for the Study of the Presidency and Associate Professor of History at Vanderbilt University. For the Obama Presidency Oral History she guided research on domestic policy, immigration, and the evolution of American conservative and right-wing movements. She conducted over 70 interviews for the project on these subjects and more.
Nicole is a political historian specializing in media, conservatism, and the presidency. Her scholarship and teaching focus on the interplay of social movements, electoral politics, and political culture in order to probe the complexities of political identity and practice in the 20th century United States. Prior to her time with Incite, Nicole was an assistant professor of presidential studies at the University of Virginia.
Nicole’s latest book, Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s, is a bold reinterpretation of the Reagan presidency and the conservative movement. Her first book, Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics, uncovered the generation of media activists who built the conservative movement from the 1940s to the 1970s. Nicole has also contributed to a number of edited collections, including Barry Goldwater and the Remaking of the American Political Landscape, Media Nation: The Political History of News in Modern America, A Field Guide to White Supremacy, and The Presidency of Donald Trump: A First Historical Assessment.
In addition to her scholarship, Nicole writes regularly for a number of national and international outlets. Currently a columnist at CNN, she has regularly contributed to the New York Times, Washington Post, Vox, US News & World Report, and The Age in Melbourne, Australia. She also hosts two history podcasts: Past Present and Radiotopia's This Day in Esoteric Political History. She was the producer and host of A12: The Story of Charlottesville, a six-part podcast series on the white-power violence in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017. In 2017, she co-founded Made by History, the historical analysis section of the Washington Post. She is also cofounder of the American Political History Conference.
