Francesca Trivellato will be coming to speak at the Seminar in Cultural History on Wednesday, October 1, 2014. Her talk is entitled “Material Culture as the Economic History of Demand: Pre-industrial Europe and Global Trade.”

Francesca Trivellato is the Frederick W. Hilles Professor of History at Yale University. She received her BA from the University of Venice, Italy, a PhD in economic and social history from the Luigi Bocconi University in Milan, and a PhD in history from Brown University. Trivellato is a recipient of fellowships awarded by 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. Her primary research interest is the social and economic history of early modern continental Europe and the Mediterranean. Trivellato’s book The Familiarity of Strangers: The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and Cross-Cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period (New Haven: Yale University Press, 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 previous book, Fondamenta dei Vetrai: Lavoro, tecnologia e mercato a Venezia tra Sei e Settecento (Rome: Donzelli, 2000), focused on Venetian glass manufacturing. Trivellato is currently working on a book-length project on the history of credit in late medieval and early modern Europe, in which she unearths a forgotten and yet influential legend about the alleged invention by medieval Jews of marine insurance and bills of exchange—the two foundational instruments of European financial capitalism.

In her talk at the BGC, Trivellato will introduce classic and recent studies by economic historians of pre-industrial Europe emphasizing the driving role of demand in economic growth. Expanding upon these studies, Trivellato will also discuss examples from her own research on the global trade of glass beads, coral, and diamonds in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Light refreshments will be served at 5:45 pm. The presentation will begin at 6:00 pm.

RSVP is required.

PLEASE NOTE that our Lecture Hall can only accommodate a limited number of people, so please come early if you would like to have a seat in the main room. Registrants who arrive late may be seated in an overflow viewing area.

To join the discussion remotely via twitter, either with questions or comments, please use the twitter hashtag #BardGradCenterTV. During the lecture, the faculty convener will review this feed and ask the speaker questions drawn from twitter.