Professor Francesca Trivellato joins the History Department in Spring 2022

We are delighted to welcome Professor Francesca Trivellato to Stanford History as William H. Bonsall Visiting Professor in the Humanities. A leading historian of early modern Italy and continental Europe, she has revitalized the study of early economic history and illustrated how cross-cultural trade intersects the fields of European, Jewish, Mediterranean, and global history, religion, and capitalism.

Professor Trivellato received her PhD in Economic and Social History from Università Luigi Bocconi (1999) and in History from Brown University (2004). She held positions at École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, University of Venice Ca’ Foscari, California Institute of Technology, and Yale University. Currently, she is Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute of Advanced Study. Her groundbreaking and original research on the pre-industrial organization of marketplaces and cultures have been recognized by key research organizations and foundations such as John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Academy in Berlin, National Humanities Center, Huntington Library, Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies. Her most recent book, The Promise and Peril of Credit: What a Forgotten Legend about Jews and Finance Tells us about the Making of European Commercial Society (Princeton University Press, 2019) received the 2020 Jacques Barzun Book Prize in Cultural History award by the American Philosophical Society.

During her Stanford residency, Professor Trivellato will teach HISTORY 234R/334R: Risk and Credit Before Modern Finance, present a workshop paper on May 10, 2022 at the Stanford Center for Law & History, and deliver the Harry Camp Memorial Lecture on May 24, 2022 at the Stanford Humanities Center.