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Dr Julian Baker

Ordinary Fellow

Assistant Keeper. Medieval and Modern Coins

Ashmolean Museum

MA Edin, MA, PhD Birm

Julian is a monetary historian and expert in historical coins. He has worked for the Ashmolean Museum since 2004, where he curates all the coins of the western tradition from the fifth century CE to the present day, and related materials of the same period (medals, tokens, etc.), belonging to the collegiate university. His main tasks at the museum are to preserve and augment the collections, to organize exhibitions, facilitate access by scholars, students, and members of the public, and to digitise the holdings.

He lectures on medieval coins and money for the History Faculty, teaches a paper on numismatics for the MSt / MPhil in Late Antique and Byzantine Studies, and supervises students in these general areas.

Julian’s research focuses on the Byzantine Empire and other polities in the same territories in Anatolia, the Balkans, and the central Mediterranean, during the central and later middle ages (11th to 15th centuries). Medieval monetary history entails reconstructing monetisation (output, circulation, usage) on the basis of the material evidence, combined with insights from other sources. It touches on statecraft and state ideology, on warfare, on demographics and the economy, and (in the case of coins in context) on the evolution of specific geographical areas and archaeological sites. Julian is expert particularly in the southern Italian regions of Calabria and Puglia, the Peloponnese and central Greece, Epiros and southern Albania, Greek and Turkish Thrace (including Constantinople / Istanbul), and western Turkey around the cities of Pergamon and Ephesos. He works extensively in museums in Turkey, Greece, Albania, Italy, and other countries, to access primary materials for his research, and he has held fellowships in Istanbul, Athens, Rome, Messina, and Princeton, Washington D.C., and New York.

Julian also researches and publishes on coins and coin finds from England from Anglo-Saxon to Tudor times, especially in relation to hoards preserved in the Ashmolean Museum (Crondall, Watlington, Asthall, etc.). He has also prepared / is in the process of preparing Sylloge-style publications of significant parts of the collection of the Ashmolean, for example Aksumite and medieval and early modern Italian coins.