Nicholas Scott Baker

Nicholas Scott Baker is an Associate Professor in the School of Humanities at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. A specialist in early modern European history, he focuses on the political and economic cultures of Renaissance Italy and the Mediterranean world.

His research interests center on Renaissance Italy, particularly Florence during the sixteenth century, connections between Italy and the Iberian world, and the use of visual sources in historical research. Baker has published extensively on the political culture of Florence between the end of the republic and the creation of the Medici principality, and on financial risk taking in Renaissance Italy.

Baker's most significant recent work is his cultural history In Fortune's Theater: Financial Risk and the Future in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge University Press, 2021), which explores how Renaissance Italians conceptualized the future, examining the interplay between fortuna, providence, and human agency in commerce and gambling. His current research expands this work into a microhistory examining the concurrent emergence of the first global economy with the establishment of a canon of visual art in sixteenth-century Florence.

Baker has previously taught at the University of Melbourne, Northwestern University, and Washington & Lee University. He was the Jean-François Malle Fellow at Villa I Tatti (Harvard's Center for Italian Renaissance Studies) during 2013-14 and a Member of the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton from January to June 2018.

He is actively involved in research supervision, welcoming MRes students in early modern Europe (ca. 1350-1800) and PhD students specializing in early modern Italy, the Mediterranean, and Italians in the early modern world (ca. 1300-1700). His supervisory approach emphasizes cultural historical approaches to political and economic questions.