DPAA Research Fellow, Department of History, San Diego State University 2024-Present
Visiting Assistant Professor, Bennington College 2023-2024
PhD, Department of Art History, Criticism and Theory, University of California, San Diego 2017-2023
MA California Institute of the Arts, Critical Theory 2016
Contact: minichols@sdsu.edu
Maia Nichols teaches in Public History at San Diego State University, where she is a DPAA Research Fellow in support of the POW/MIA Accounting Mission for the Department of Defense.
She is a Lebanese American-Canadian dual citizen with a PhD in art history, criticism and theory from the University of California San Diego specializing in 20th century French and North African visual and material culture, postcolonial theory, and the history of social psychiatry.
She holds degrees in psychology and visual art from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver and a masters in aesthetics and politics from the California Institute of the Arts. She additionally engages in art practice, and has taught studio art drawing at UC San Diego. Her work has been exhibited internationally. Her art criticism has been published in venues such as Flash Art International, Hyperallergic, and Diagram.
Her dissertation, “The Fabric of Care in French and French Colonial North African Psychiatric Asylums, 1905-1962” researched in France with support from a four-year Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Doctoral Fellowship, engages art historical visual and material culture methods and theories to consider the institutional history of French colonial North Africa’s progression to independence during the social psychiatry movement, drawing on a range of archival evidence of material culture and experience.
Selected Peer-Reviewed Publications
Nichols, Maia. 2024. “Institutional shutter: Depardon and the Basaglias.” Italian Canadiana Vol 38 No. 2 Domestic Goods: Silence Speaks in Our Objects, Clothing, Keepsakes, and Interiors, 89-107.
Nichols, Maia. 2023. “Warping Neurological Disease in Early 20th Century Material Culture.” Theoretical Journal of the Russian Society for Aesthetics [Теоретический журнал Российского эстетического общества]. Photography: Image, Gaze, Distance. Thematic Issue [Фотография: образ, взгляд, дистанция. Тематический номер], no. 2 (12): dh42–62. Terra Aestheticae. ISSN 2619-1296, 2658-4573.
Nichols, Maia. 2023. “Approaching the War Experience of Algerian Refugee Children (1957–1962): A Critical Analysis of Comme la pierre est à la pierre and J’ai huit ans.” [Approcher l’expérience de guerre des enfants algériens réfugiés (1957–1962). Analyse critique de Comme la pierre est à la pierre et J’ai huit ans], Revue d’Histoire Contemporaine de l’Afrique, Varia, en ligne. URL: https:// oap.unige.ch/journals/rhca/article/view/varianichols
Nichols, Maia. 2021. “The fabric of care in French colonial disaster relief: Algerian refugee tents and the soft material culture of the colonial habitus”, The International Society for Landscape, Place, and Material Culture 54 (2), Fall 2021.
Nichols, Maia. 2017. “Identifying with Numbers: A Philosophical and Psychoanalytical Reading of Self-Identification”, Studia UBB. Philosphia, Vol. 62 (2017), 2, pp. 1‐13.
Nichols, Maia. 2017. “Rogue as Modus Operandi”, The Journal of Comparative Media Arts, Simon Fraser University. Issue 3.
Nichols, Maia. Book Review of Paul Lynch and Nathaniel Rivers (Eds.) Thinking with Bruno Latour in Rhetoric and Composition (2015), Carbondale, IL:Southern Illinois University Press in International Journal of Communication, Vol 11. (2017), pp. 3000-3003.
Education
PhD Art History Criticism & Theory, Department of Visual Arts. University of California, San Diego 2017 to 2023. Advisor: Dr. Lisa Cartwright
Master of Arts, Aesthetics & Politics, Department of Critical Studies. California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA 2015-2016. Advisors: Dr. Arne De Boever, Dr. Janet Sarbanes
Bachelor of Fine Arts & Bachelor of Psychology. University of British Columbia, Vancouver, B.C. Canada 2009-2013
Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris, France 2011-2012
Berkeley High School, Berkeley, CA 2005-2009
Awards
Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Doctoral Fellowship, 2018-2022
Graduate Fellowship Initiative Award UC San Diego Graduate Division, 2019
The Andy Warhol Foundation Creative Capital Workshop Award, 2018
Student Travel Grant Award, California Institute of the Arts, 2016
California Institute of the Arts Scholarship, California Institute of the Arts, 2015
Go Global Group Study Programs Award, University of British Columbia, 2012
President’s Entrance Scholarship, University of British Columbia, 2009
Teaching
Visiting Assistant Professor, Bennington College 2023-2025
Teaching Assistant, Department of Visual Arts, UC San Diego 2017—2023
Teaching Assistant, Department of Cognitive Science, UC San Diego 2020
Teaching Assistant, Department of Psychology, UC San Diego 2017 —19
Teaching Assistant, Department of Communication, UC San Diego 2017—18
Visual Arts Instructor, Great Books Summer Program, Stanford University, Palo Alto, California 2016—2017
French/English Substitute Teacher, French American International School, San Francisco, CA 2016—17
Maia Nichols 