Nolan received a bachelor's degree in psychology from
Colgate University in 1965 and then spent three years as a
Peace Corps volunteer in Senegal where he worked in community development on issues of rural health and water availability. Following this experience he received a
Fulbright scholarship to obtain a DPhil in social anthropology from the University of Sussex in 1975. His doctoral work focused on wage-labor and migration among the
Bassari people in Eastern Senegal and was published as
Bassari migrations: the quiet revolution in 1986. During and after this work, Nolan was a lecturer at the
University of Papua New Guinea and worked in a variety of research and project manager positions in rural Senegal, urban Tunisia, and Sri Lanka, as well as consulting work with the World Bank. Concurrently, he accepted a position as an assistant professor of anthropology at
Georgia State University in 1985, was a faculty member of the
School for International Training in 1986, became director of the international management development institute at the graduate school of public and international affairs at the
University of Pittsburgh in 1989, dean of international affairs and programs at
Golden Gate University in 1995, associate provost and director of the institute for global studies and affairs at the
University of Cincinnati in 1998, associate provost and dean of international programs at
Purdue University in 2003, professor of anthropology at Purdue University in 2009, and lastly accepted academic visitor positions at Cambridge University and
University of Sussex in 2014. == Scholarship ==