Dr. Nicole Breault
Assistant Professor of History
Dr. Nicole Breault is an Assistant Professor of History at the Ãå±±ÂÖ¼é of Texas El Paso. Her research interests are in early American legal and social history with an emphasis on urban governance, institutions, gender, and material culture. She received a master’s from the Ãå±±ÂÖ¼é of Massachusetts Boston in 2014 and her doctorate from the Ãå±±ÂÖ¼é of Connecticut in 2022. Her research has been supported by grants and fellowships from the American Historical Association, American Society for Legal History, American Philosophical Society, Boston Athenæum, Huntington Library, Massachusetts Historical Society, Roanoke College, and the UConn Humanities Institute. Her work has been published in the Journal of the Early Republic and , with forthcoming pieces in the New England Quarterly and The Cambridge Companion to American Carceral History. In 2024-2025, she was named a William Nelson Cromwell Foundation Fellow and a UTEP-EPCC Humanities Collaborative Faculty Fellow.
Dr. Breault’s book manuscript-in-progress “Set the Watch: Policing and Governance in Early America” is an account of how , a form of early policing, reflected and embodied changes in the meaning and methods of governance in colonial, revolutionary, and immediate post-revolutionary Boston. It argues that the changing social and legal duties of nightly watches illuminate the role policing played in espousing the meaning of governance at the local level. At the crossroads of communal care and surveillance, acting as agents and neighbors, the work of Boston’s watch constructed a “landscape of order” through ritualized movements in the streets and engagement with physical structures of confinement and the law and reinforced the carceral nature of ordinary spaces.
Dr. Breault will be on leave from teaching for spring 2025.
Curriculum vitae
Contact Info:
Liberal Arts 312
(915) 747-5508
Email: nabreault@utep.edu