Nicola Anne Hessell is a pakēhā New Zealand academic,^[1] and is a full professor at Victoria University of Wellington, specialising in British Romantic literature, and the intersection between Romantic literature and indigeneity.

Hessell completed a master's degree at Victoria University of Wellington in 2000, with a thesis titled Invention and re-invention: the composition of Mary Robinson's Lyrical tales (1800).^[2] She followed this with a PhD titled title at the University of Toronto.^[3] Hessell then joined the faculty of the Victoria University of Wellington, rising to full professor in 2022, where she is part of the New Zealand India Research Institute.^[4][5]

Hessell's main research interest is in the intersection between Indigeneity and Romanticism, but she is also interested in the relationship between journalism and writing, and the history of British print culture.^[6][7] Hessell has been awarded two Marsden grants, including the 2018 grant "Sensitive Negotiations: Indigenous Diplomacy and British Romantic Poetry".^[8] She has published three books, and a edited a collection of journalist Robin Hyde's parliamentary reports.^[9][4]

In 2022 Hessell was awarded a Peterson Fellowship to conduct research on the use of poetry in Indigenous diplomacy using the American Antiquarian Society's collection of Native American writing.^[10]

In 2017 Hessell won the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism's Romantic Circles Pedagogy Contest, for her fourth-year course "Romanticism and Indigeneity".^[6]

Alongside co-author Stephen Clothier, Hessell won the International Association for the Study of Scottish Literatures' inaugural Jack Medal in 2018. The prize is awarded annually for the best newly published academic article on a subject dealing with Scottish literature and related to reception and/or diaspora, and Hessell and Clothier won for the article To Mary in Aotearoa: Burns’s ‘Thou Ling’ring Star’ and Scottish Identity in New Zealand. The judges commented that "Hessell and Clothier's consideration of Robert Burns's reception in New Zealand opens up important discussions about diaspora, indigeneity, and literary interpretation in Scottish studies".^[11]

Scholia has a profile for Nikki Hessell (Q114692710).

• Hessell, Nikki (2018). Romantic Literature and the Colonised World. Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print. Palgrave Macmillan Cham. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-70933-8. ISBN 978-3-319-70932-1. ISSN 2634-6516.
• Hessell, Nikki (5 November 2011). Literary Authors, Parliamentary Reporters. Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/cbo9781139004954. ISBN 978-1-107-01357-5.
• Hessell, Nikki (2021). Sensitive Negotiations: Indigenous Diplomacy and British Romantic Poetry. SUNY series, Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century. SUNY, ISBN 9781438484778

• Elizabeth Potter; Nikki Hessell (January 2022). "Re-Indigenizing Romanticism: A Forum". Studies in Romanticism. 61 (4): 481–489. doi:10.1353/SRM.2022.0039. ISSN 0039-3762. Wikidata Q124215482.
• Nikki Hessell (6 July 2021), Mokena and Macaulay: Cultural geographies of poetry in colonial Aotearoa, doi:10.7765/9781526152893.00025, Wikidata Q124215486
• Nikki Hessell (4 March 2022). "Keats and Brown Reading". European Romantic Review. 33 (2): 213–228. doi:10.1080/10509585.2022.2043582. ISSN 1050-9585. Wikidata Q124215487.
• Nikki Hessell (2019), Keats and the Poetics of Climate Change, 1816 and Beyond, pp. 59–74, doi:10.1007/978-3-030-16241-2_4, Wikidata Q124215559
• Nikki Hessell (18 December 2019). "Facing Empire: Indigenous Experiences in a Revolutionary Age". Journal of New Zealand Studies (NS29). doi:10.26686/JNZS.V0INS29.6275. ISSN 1173-6348. Wikidata Q124215558.
• Nikki Hessell (9 January 2020), The Indigenous Lyrical Ballads, pp. 253–268, doi:10.1017/9781108236300.021, Wikidata Q124215557
• Nikki Hessell (1 September 2020). "Truth and Reconciliation in Eighteenth-Century Literature: The Case of the "Monster Brandt"". Eighteenth-Century Fiction. 33 (1): 1–23. doi:10.3138/ECF.33.1.1. ISSN 0840-6286. Wikidata Q124215556.
• Hessell, Nikki; Clothier, Stephen (2017). "To Mary in Aotearoa: Burns's 'Thou Ling'ring Star' and Scottish Identity in New Zealand". Scottish Literary Review. 9 (2): 41–56. ISSN 2050-6678.

• Reading romantic poetry as one of Cook’s people, Hessell's inaugural professorial lecture in November 2023