Her education, research, and teaching are marked by a firm commitment to interdisciplinary study, with principal interests in the history and theory of drama and theater, aesthetic and philosophical modernism, classical and renaissance reception, and political theology.  

The book manuscript she is currently preparing for publication, "Pretenders to the Throne: Sovereignty and Modern Drama," considers theater's investment in the changing conception of the human in the wake of the shift from absolute to popular sovereignty. Paying attention to sovereign figures in works by influential modernist playwrights as various in their political and artistic commitments as Ibsen, Jarry, Yeats, Pirandello, Eliot, Anouilh, Brecht, Beckett and Ionesco, she traces what emerges as a set of concerns about the concept of sovereignty that is both political and aesthetic in nature. Nicole Jerr is co-editor of The Scaffolding of Sovereignty:  Global Perspectives on the History and Aesthetics of a Concept, forthcoming from the Studies in Political Thought Series of Columbia University Press.  Her article, “Modern and Tragic?  Kierkegaard’s Antigone and the Aesthetics of Isolation,” recently appeared in Philosophy and Literature, and her book reviews have appeared in Critical Inquiry and the Comparative Literature edition of Modern Language Notes.  

Since 2009, Nicole Jerr has been teaching Intellectual History courses at MICA such as  The Problem of Evil, History of Existentialism, Classical Greek Philosophy, and Mythology.