Sal Nicolazzo is a scholar of law and literature in the eighteenth-century British Empire and Atlantic world, with a particular focus on how legal and literary tropes, practices, rhetorics, and genres, taken together, can reveal new histories of colonial racial capitalism and its imbrication in the material histories of gender and sexuality. Their first book, Vagrant Figures: Law, Literature, and the Origins of the Police, argued that Restoration and eighteenth-century vagrancy law across the British Empire reveals the narrative, textual, and rhetorical practices that shaped the purview and scope of policing in the Anglo-American legal sphere before the establishment of the modern police force.

Their current research examines risk, property law, and speculation as forms of future-orientation that eighteenth-century racial capitalism constructed, juxtaposing phenomena such as maritime insurance, private policing, and land speculation with the literary registers of temporality, including verb tense, novelistic experiments in cause and effect, and poetic expansions of time and space such as the locodescriptive prospect. In addition, they are currently coediting Volume 4: The Eighteenth Century of the Bloomsbury Cultural History of Trans Lives.

Prior to coming to UC Davis, they taught in the Literature Department at UC San Diego.