Nicole D. Legnani (she/ella) is a “glorified nerd”: a fully bilingual teacher, published author, researcher, translator, and storyteller.

As a College Fellow, and later an Assistant Professor in Spanish, she designed and taught classes that engaged with literary, historical, Indigenous and Latin American Studies as the instructor of record at Harvard and Princeton Universities for a combined ten years. As a doctoral candidate at Harvard, she also taught Spanish for three years at the introductory and intermediate levels.

She has published two books, and several articles and book chapters in English and Spanish, based on her research at historical archives in Spain, the United States, and Latin America. These publications include a revision of her 2003 senior thesis at Harvard that won the Hoopes Prize: her English translation, annotation, and modernization of an Inca narrative of the Spanish conquest, released in 2006 by Harvard University Press. In December 2020, she published her first monograph with the University of Notre Dame Press, The Business of Conquest: Empire, Love, and Law in the Atlantic World, a revision of her doctoral thesis.

Last but not least, Nicole is a mom to a college-attending human and a Majestic Alien Dinosaur Horse, aka, Reba, the friendly bloodhound.