Francesca Trivellato

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Francesca Trivellato is an assistant professor of history at Yale University. She is a social and economic historian of early modern Europe whose current work focuses on the role and position of Sephardic Jews and other trading diasporas in southern Europe and the Mediterranean from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century.

As a Radcliffe fellow, she will begin work on a new project, tentatively titled “Language, Images, and Practices of Cosmopolitanism in European Commercial Society, 1500–1800.” Through an examination of a wide range of printed, visual, and archival sources, she seeks to historicize—and thus complicate—the enduring idea, articulated by several Enlightenment thinkers, that market relations in early modern Europe led to the progressive erasure of ethnic and religious boundaries and to the rise of an individualistic and cosmopolitan society.

Trivellato received her BA in history from the University of Venice in 1995, a PhD in economic and social history from the Bocconi University in Milan in 1999, and a PhD in history from Brown University in 2004. She is the author of a book on Venetian glass manufacturing, Fondamenta dei Vetrai: Lavoro, Tecnologia e Mercato a Venezia tra Sei e Settecento (Donzelli, 2000), and several articles on craft guilds, women’s work, and merchant networks. She is currently revising a manuscript on the Sephardic merchants of Livorno and their commercial relations with the Ottoman Empire, Iberia, northern Europe, and Portuguese India in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.