Nicola Di Cosmo is the Henry Luce Foundation Professor of East Asian Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study, School of Historical Studies (2003-present). He holds a PhD from Indiana University in Uralic and Altaic Studies, and a BA from the University of Venice (Italy). He has been a Research Fellow at Cambridge University, taught at Harvard University and at the University of Canterbury (New Zealand) and held numerous visiting or teaching positions in Japan, China, France, Italy, and the US. He is also Visiting Professor of East Asian Studies at Princeton University.

His work has been on the history of Chinese and Inner Asian frontiers from the ancient to the modern periods, history of nomadic peoples, and history of late imperial China. His authored and edited books include Ancient China and Its Enemies: The Rise of Nomadic Power in east Asian History (Cambridge) Manchu-Mongol Relations on the Eve of the Qing Conquest (Brill), The Diary of a Manchu Soldier in Seventeenth Century China (Routledge) and several edited books: Military Culture in Imperial China (Harvard), The Cambridge History of Inner Asia, vol II (Cambridge), Warfare in Inner Asian History (Brill), and most recently Exchange and Empires in the Eurasian Late Antiquity (Cambridge 2018).

His most recent work tries to integrate palaeoclimatic data and historical sources, with special reference to the history of Medieval Eurasia and the Mongol empire. His articles in this area have been published in Scientific Reports, Nature Geoscience, The Journal of Interdisciplinary History and Climate Change among others.