Nicole Maskiell specializes in the colonial history of the Northeast, with a focus on early Black Americans in the region. She teaches courses that explore  themes of race, family, memory, and silence. She is the author of Bound by Bondage: Slavery and the Creation of a Northern Gentry, winner of the 2023 Henricks Award for best book-length manuscript relating to New Netherland and the Dutch colonial experience. As a historian and interdisciplinary scholar, her work meditates on the lives of unsung early Americans and the enduring power of stories to shape and reshape our world.

She has appeared on CSPAN, the podcast Ben Franklin's World, and in an award-winning documentary film about the life and legacy of Margaret Hardenbroeck Philipse, an early female trader and enslaver. Her article "Here Lyes the Body of Cicely Negro': Enslaved Women in Colonial Cambridge and the Making of New England History," published in the New England Quarterly, won the 2023 Nupur Chaudhuri First Article Prize from the Coordinating Council for Women in History. She is a series editor for Black New England, a University of Massachusetts Press book series that highlights original and innovative research on the history of African-descended people in New England from the colonial period through the present day.