Nicole Mennell supports the delivery of the King's Sanctuary Programme, which aims to initiate and lead on projects that create positive opportunities for people whose lives have been disrupted by forced displacement.

The Sanctuary Programme includes a range of projects, including the King's Refugee Community Sponsorship Scheme, Sanctuary Scholarships and the Homes for Ukraine University Sponsorship Model. The programme also aims to enhance understanding of forced migration among staff and students at King’s and to develop opportunities for them to make a positive contribution.

Nicole completed her doctorate at the University of Sussex in 2019. Her thesis explores the connections made between figures of sovereignty and animals in the early modern period. Nicole has written on the wider representation of animals in early modern culture – her study on early modern lions was recently published in The Routledge Handbook of Shakespeare and Animals (2021) and her chapter ‘“The Dignity of Mankind”: Edward Tyson's Anatomie of a Pygmy and the Ape-Man Boundary’ was published in the edited collection Seeing Animals After Derrida (2018). 

Nicole is passionate about the transformative power of higher education and has supported several projects that aim to widen access to university and scholarly research. She co-founded the open access peer-reviewed postgraduate journal Brief Encounters, which supports the dissemination of knowledge to a global readership with the intent that the research it publishes encourages the exchange of ideas outside of traditional academic circles. During her doctoral studies, Nicole was also a research assistant for the Wellcome Trust-funded project ‘Hidden Persuaders’ at Birkbeck, University of London, which explores the impact of ‘brainwashing’ on conceptions of the human.