Nikki Hessell

Nicola Anne Hessell is a New Zealand academic, and is a full professor at Victoria University of Wellington, specialising in British Romantic literature, and the intersection between Romantic literature and indigeneity.

Academic career

Hessell completed a master's degree at Victoria University of Wellington in 2000, with a thesis titled Invention and re-invention: the composition of Mary Robinson's Lyrical tales (1800). She followed this with a PhD titled Coleridge as journalist 1799–1800 at the University of Toronto. Hessell then joined the faculty of the Victoria University of Wellington, rising to full professor in 2022, where she is part of the New Zealand India Research Institute.

Hessell's main research interest is in the intersection between Indigeneity and Romanticism, but she is also interested in the relationship between journalism and writing, and the history of British print culture. Hessell has been awarded two Marsden grants, including the 2018 grant "Sensitive Negotiations: Indigenous Diplomacy and British Romantic Poetry". She has published three books, and an edited a collection of journalist Robin Hyde's parliamentary reports.

Awards and honours In 2017 Hessell won the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism's Romantic Circles Pedagogy Contest, for her fourth-year course "Romanticism and Indigeneity".

Selected works

Books

Hessell, Nikki (2021). Sensitive Negotiations: Indigenous Diplomacy and British Romantic Poetry. SUNY series, Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century. SUNY,

Book chapters and scholarly articles