Francesca Trivellato named the Barton M. Biggs Professor of History

Francesca Trivellato, newly named as the Barton M. Biggs Professor of History, is a historian of early modern Europe and the Mediterranean, whose interests revolve around a broad set of questions about the organization and the culture of the marketplace in the pre-industrial world. She chairs the European Studies Council at the MacMillan Center.

Trivellato’s book, The Familiarity of Strangers: The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and Cross-Cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period, won the 2010 AHA Leo Gershoy Award for the most outstanding work published in English on any aspect of 17th- and 18th-century European history. It was also the co-winner of the Jordan Schnitzer Book Award for the best book in Early Modern and Modern Jewish history published in English between 2006 and 2010.

Trivellato also authored a study of Venetian glass manufacturing (“Fondamenta dei Vetrai: Lavoro, tecnologia e mercato a Venezia tra Sei e Settecento”) and is currently completing a book titled The Promise and Peril of Credit: What a Forgotten Legend about Jews and Finance Tells Us About the Making of Europe’s Commercial Society. Her most recent edited collection is Religion and Trade: Cross-Cultural Exchanges in World History, 1000-1900, with Leor Halevi and Cátia Antunes. Other topics addressed in her writings include maritime and commercial law, Renaissance Italy and the Muslim Mediterranean, microhistory, and global history.

Trivellato is currently designing a digital platform for the analysis and visualization of the longest and most homogenous series of business contracts from pre-industrial Europe: roughly 5,000 limited partnerships registered in Florence from 1445 to 1808.

A graduate of the University of Venice, Trivellato earned a Ph.D. in economic and social history from the Luigi Bocconi University (Milan) and a Ph.D. in history from Brown University. She served as an assistant professor at the University of Venice before coming to Yale as an assistant professor of history in 2004. She became a full professor in 2007 and was named the Frederick W. Hilles Professor of History in 2012.

Trivellato has received fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Institute for Advanced Study, the American Academy in Berlin, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. She has been a visiting professor at SciencesPo and the EHESS in Paris, as well as Monash University in Melbourne. She recently lectured at the Collège de France in Paris and the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa.