Nicola was a guest teacher at the Department of Government at LSE and a research fellow at the University of Padua. He works on the political economy of the MENA region, nationalism, and China in the Middle East. His book Nation and Class in the History of the Kurdish Movement (2022) covers over a century of Kurdish nationalism connecting its competing trajectories with the social, economic, and political transformation of the Kurdish regions in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Nicola currently works on contemporary forms of neocolonialism as well as on China’s role in the Middle East. He was a Visiting Fellow at the Centre from 2021–22.