Nicholas Jolley was educated at King's School, Canterbury, and at Clare, College, Cambridge where he was both an undergraduate and a research student. He was later a Research Fellow at Christ's College, Cambridge from 1974 to 1978, and has taught at the University of California, San Diego (1978-1999), Syracuse University (1999-2000), and the University of California, Irvine (2000-1009), where he was Chair of the Department of Philosophy from 2004 to 2007.