Graduate Student Contact Info pkn41550@uga.edu Office: 513 Caldwell Hall Patrick Kekoa Nichols is a Ph.D. student in Rhetoric Studies in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Georgia. His research focuses on how constitutive rhetoric and labeling practices shape public identities and historical meaning. He studies how institutions use language, through public address, legal discourse, and official texts, to produce and contest subjectivity, recognition, and authority. Through this process he desires to reveal narratives and counternarratives that produce social, emotional and political consequences. Nichols holds an M.A. in History from Harvard University, where his thesis examined martial law in Hawai‘i as a U.S. military occupation catalyzing self-determination efforts for statehood. His broader work engages archival silence, public memory, and rhetorical technologies of naming. He regularly presents at regional and international conferences. He plans to pursue public-facing digital humanities projects, oral history work, and collaborations with museums and other sites of public memory. Research Research Interests: Critical Historiography Constitutive Rhetoric Public Memory Public Address Colonialism and Imperialism Global History Curriculum Vitae: NicholsCV_JUN2025.pdf (150.84 KB)
