She studies American conservatism, suburbanization, American Catholicism, the anti–Vietnam War movement, feminism, and the Cold War. Nickerson is the author of Mothers of Conservatism: Women and the Postwar Right (2012) and a coeditor of Sunbelt Rising: The Politics of Place, Space, and Region (2011). She is also a co-moderator of the Newberry Library's women and gender seminar. She is currently writing about the Camden 28 of the Catholic antiwar movement in 1971.