Annual Conference

Francesca Trivellato is an expert on social and economic history of the Early Modern Europe. She is currently the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Studies, in Princeton. Before was a professor at Yale University and has been a visiting Professor in several European and American important institutions.
With her books The Familiarity of Strangers: The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and Cross-cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period (2009) and The Promise and Peril of Credit: What a Forgotten Legend about Jews and Finance Tells Us about the Making of European Commercial Society (2019) she has earned several prizes. With her work she has made significant and groundbreaking contributions to our understanding of the organization and culture of the marketplace in the pre-industrial world. Trivellato’s original and imaginative research has revitalized the study of early economic history, and her influential work on cross-cultural trade intersects the fields of European, Jewish, Mediterranean, and global history, religion, and capitalism.

Title of the conference: Diversity of Topics, Diversity of Scholars, Diversity of Methods

Abstract: The word “diversity” in the academic world usually refers to a researcher’s gender, racial, or ethnic identification, the topics addressed in one’s investigations, or a series of institutional initiatives aimed at diversifying both domains. But it can also refer to more or less accepted methods in a given discipline. The first part of this talk will explore whether patterns of change can be identified concerning the intersection of these various domains in the fields of social and economic history over the past hundred years. The second part of the talk will draw on the speaker’s experience and areas of expertise to flash out some of ways in which these domains do and do not overlap.