Natalie Tomas

Natalie Tomas is a Research Fellow at the Gender and Women's History Research Centre, part of the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences at Australian Catholic University (ACU), Melbourne Campus. She is an Honorary Fellow specializing in gender and women's history in the early modern period, with a focus on female political power, epistolarity, and the Medici family.

Her research centers on women's roles in state formation and political culture, particularly examining the Spanish-born duchess of Florence and Siena, Eleonora di Toledo. She is actively involved in the Medici Archive Project as a member of its Academic Board, and her work bridges social, cultural, and political history through archival correspondence and interdisciplinary analysis.

• Gender and Women's History
• Early Modern Studies
• Medici Family Dynamics
• Female Leadership and Agency
• Epistolarity and Letter Writing
• State Formation in Renaissance Italy

Her publication record reveals a sustained focus on elite women’s influence in Renaissance Italy, particularly through familial and marital networks. Her works combine biographical depth with structural analysis of gendered power, using letters and archival documents to reconstruct informal authority and political collaboration. Themes of commemoration, regency, and cultural politics recur across her monographs and chapters.

• Member, Academic Board, Medici Archive Project (2021–present)
• Invited reviewer for Le Studium fellowship (2017)
• Chair, ANZAMEMS George Yule Essay Prize Committee (2016)

Natalie Tomas has secured multiple research grants, including funding from the Australasian Centre for Italian Studies and Monash University. She has peer-reviewed for major presses and journals such as Ashgate, Cambridge University Press, Renaissance Quarterly, and Parergon. Her advisory role is implicit in her mentorship through reviews and committee leadership, though no direct advisees are named. She has contributed extensively to scholarly discourse through book reviews in Italian Studies, Gender & History, and Sixteenth Century Journal.

Her current major project, Creating the Medici Grand Duchy, explores how Eleonora di Toledo co-constructed state power with Duke Cosimo I, redefining understandings of gendered statecraft. She is also co-editing the volume Eleonora@500, commemorating the duchess’s legacy. These efforts reflect her leadership in shaping transnational scholarship on Renaissance women.