René de Nicolay was educated in France (ENS Paris, from 2011 to 2017; B.A. in Classics from the Sorbonne - Paris IV, in 2012; M.A. in Ancient History from the EPHE, in 2015; agrégation de lettres classiques, 2017) and the United States (Ph.D. at Princeton in 2021). René has been primarily working on classical political theory. Parts of his dissertation, entitled "The Origins of Licence: Excessive Freedom in Ancient Political Philosophy", have appeared as journal articles in Polis ("Shameless Freedom in Plato’s Laws") and in Classical Philology ("Licentia: Cicero on the Suicide of Political Communities"); another chapter, on "Freedom and Fetishism in book 8 of Plato’s Republic", has been presented at the 2021 meeting of the Society of Classical Studies. René has also developed a strong interest in the reception of classical political theory, especially in late antique, medieval and Renaissance texts, in the Greek, Latin, Hebrew and Arabic traditions. René is an affiliated researcher with the JustCity project, examining Cicero's notion of justice as elaborated in his key philosophical works as well as in some of the speeches in order to test the project's fundamental hypothesis that Cicero developed a law-based conception of justice at odds with prevailing virtue-based Greek ones.