Nicholas Terpstra
Nicholas Terpstra is a Canadian historian and academic. He is the 16th and current provost and vice-chancellor of Trinity College, Toronto, having succeeded Mayo Moran in 2024. He has been the president of the Renaissance Society of America, editor of Renaissance Quarterly, and is an internationally respected scholar of the Renaissance period. As a professor of history at the University of Toronto, his research is multidisciplinary, interacting with gender, religion, economics, and more.
Academic research
Much of Terpstra’s work has been at the intersections of politics, gender, charity, and religion. Books include which won the Marraro Prize in Italian History of the American Historical Association and the Phyllis Goodhart Gordan Book Prize of the Renaissance Society of America; ; ; and .More recent work addresses the intersection of spatial and sensory history in the early modern period, particularly as regards how different communities interacted in the early stages of global expansion and colonialism: . This extends out of research on some of the early modern origins of the global refugee crisis, as described in , and .
He has also been the lead, together with in digital humanities project to digitally map social and spatial relations in sixteenth century Florence, known as the . The has generated a large and expanding suite of focused research projects on particular aspects of early modern urban history and is further described in .