Nicky is an author, academic and journalist based in Johannesburg, South Africa. She is an Associate Professor in the Media Studies department at the University of the Witwatersrand.
Nicky holds an interdisciplinary PhD in Humanities and Cultural Studies from the London Consortium, part of Birkbeck College, University of London, and a Masters in Critical Theory from Sussex University. Her current research is concerned with questions of race and fear in the media, with a particular interest in whiteness. She also writes and teaches on gender, popular culture, digital media, consumption, moral panic, social geography and critical pedagogy.
Nicky is a Fellow of the African Humanities Programme and has been a resident at the Rockefeller Bellagio Centre. In 2016 she received a Friedel Sellschop award from Wits University. She has also been awarded a Thuthuka fellowship from the National Research Foundation (NRF) as well as research grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the University of London. In 2017 she received the NRF’s Research Excellence Award for emerging researchers. She has been a visiting scholar at the University of Dar-es-Salaam in Tanzania (2014), Sussex University in the UK (2019) and UNAM in Mexico (2020).
Nicky has written for and spoken in print and broadcast media in South Africa and internationally discussing questions of race, gender and social justice. Her work on the late apartheid satanism scare has appeared as far afield as Vice magazine, The Conversation, the Daily Maverick and the Sound Africa podcast.
