Kathleen Nicoll is a Professor of Geography in the School of Sustainability, Environment and Society at the University of Utah with research interests in geomorphology, arid lands, and geoarchaeology. Nicoll was elected a Fellow of the Geological Society of America in 2011, and she won the 2019 Career Award from its Geoarchaeology Division.   She has recently been awarded a fellowship from the American Society for Overseas Research (ASOR) along with the 2024-2025 Seymour Gitin Distinguished Professorship at the W.H. Albright Institute of Archaeology in Jerusalem, where she will continue to pursue research centered in the Levant.  

 

Nicoll is conducting biographical research about a "hidden figure" named Elinor Wight Gardner (EWG), who was a pioneer geologist working on archaeological sites across the Middle East during the interwar period from the 1920s-late 1930s.  Nicoll actually started this research while doing her undergraduate honors thesis at the University of Pennsylvania – and along with colleagues, she recently published an initial biosketch of  EWG (more info).  Her ASOR Fellowship award enables additional field and archival work to uncover missing details about EWG's fieldwork in Mandatory Palestine just prior to WWII.

 

Nicoll completed a BA (Hons) from The University of Pennsylvania, an MA from Bryn Mawr College and a PhD from The University of Arizona.  She worked as a petroleum geologist before rejoining academia and winning a Royal Society Fellowship at Oxford University. Nicoll's research contributions in geomorphology and archaeology document field research projects in the Sahara, Turkey, Israel, Jordan and Namibia (to name a few places).