Francesca Trivellato

Francesca Trivellato is Frederick W. Hilles Professor of History at Yale University and a scholar of the social and economic history of early modern Europe and the Mediterranean. She received her B.A. from the University of Venice, Italy (1995), a Ph.D. in economic and social history from the Luigi Bocconi University in Milan (1999), and a Ph.D. in history from Brown University (2004). She is the author of two books and two edited collections, and co-editor-in-chief of the academic journal Jewish History. Her most recent work, The Familiarity of Strangers: The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and Cross-Cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period (Yale UP, 2009), won the 2010 AHA Leo Gershoy Award for the most outstanding work published in English on any aspect of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European history; was 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; and was selected for the long list for the 2010 Cundill Prize in History. Her current project examines a forgotten but once widespread legend according to which medieval Jews invented the basic instruments of European financial capitalism. It focuses on the legend as a way of understanding changing attitudes toward credit in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe and views of the Middle Ages in the emergence of economic history as an academic discipline during the nineteenth century.