Julian R. Baker received his doctorate from the Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies, Birmingham University, in July of 2002. His dissertation dealt with the monetary life of Greece during the one-and-a-half centuries following 1204. He has an undergraduate degree from Edinburgh University in History, with emphasis on the western medieval and Byzantine periods, and a post-graduate degree in Greek Archaeology from Birmingham, as much as being trained in numismatics (notably at the Barber Institute, Birmingham, and the American Numismatic Society). For the purposes of research, Julian Baker was resident in Greece over a number of years, where he studied coin hoards and excavation finds in a range of locations. More recently, while based in Italy, he has expanded his interests to the related Kingdom of Naples in Angevin times, and is leading separate projects on later medieval coinages in Constantinople, and the excavation finds at Sparta, funded by the British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara and the British Academy respectively.  [Last Updated 2004]