Brought up as a Roman Catholic, Nicoll was educated at Ampleforth College, Christ Church, Oxford (BA Oriental Studies) and Reading University, where he graduated PhD with a thesis entitled "Gladstone, Gordon and Sudan, 1883-5".
From April–June 2012, Dr Nicoll was the 2013 Sir William Luce Fellow at Durham University, where he carried out research on the Da'irat al-Mahdi in Sudan.
[2] From September 2013 to August 2014 he worked in Doha, Qatar, as a Programme Editor and Executive Producer for Al Jazeera English.
Nicoll's most recent peer-reviewed article is 'Fatwa and Propaganda: Contemporary Muslim Responses to the Sudanese Mahdiyya', published in Islamic Africa 7/2 (2016): 239-65.
In 2018, Modestine produced Nicoll's third volume of primary sources: Fully Equal to the Occasion: Frank Power and the Siege of Khartoum.