Nicholas Baer is Collegiate Assistant Professor in the Humanities and Harper-Schmidt Fellow in the Society of Fellows at the University of Chicago.

His monograph-in-progress, Cinema and the Crisis of Historicism, places films of the Weimar Republic in conversation with the “crisis of historicism” that was widely diagnosed by Central European intellectuals in the interwar period. Baer co-edited The Promise of Cinema: German Film Theory, 1907–1933 (University of California Press, 2016), which won the Limina Award for the Best International Film Studies Book and the SCMS Award of Distinction for Best Edited Collection.

He is also the co-editor of Unwatchable (Rutgers University Press, 2019), which offers multidisciplinary approaches to the vast array of troubling images that circulate in global visual culture. A regular columnist for Film Quarterly, Baer has published on film and media, critical theory, and intellectual history in numerous journals and edited volumes, and his writings have been translated into Dutch, French, German, Hebrew, and Italian.