Federica Francesconi
Federica Francesconi is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Judaic Studies Program at the University at Albany, SUNY. Her research and publications address the social, religious, and cultural aspects of the early modern history of Jews in Italy, focusing on the multifaceted politics and dynamics of ghetto life. She has held fellowships in Europe, Israel, and the United States. She served as Viterbi Visiting Professor in Mediterranean Jewish Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, and has been a fellow at the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies.
Her recent book, "Invisible Enlighteners: The Jewish Merchants of Modena, from the Renaissance to the Emancipation" (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021), is the 2022 Helen and Howard R. Marraro Prize Winner, granted by the American Historical Association and the 2021 National Jewish Books Awards Finalist for the JDC-Herbert Katzki Award for Writing Based on Archival Material. Among her other publications, there are two coedited volumes: "From Catalonia to the Caribbean: The Sephardi Orbit from Medieval to Modern Times" (2018) and "Jewish Women's History from Antiquity to the Present" (2021). The latter is the 2021 National Jewish Books Awards Finalist for the Barbara Dobkin Award in Women Studies.
She is currently at work on a new monograph provisionally titled “The Jewish Home in Early Modern Venice: Cosmopolitan Intimacy, Global Networks, and Diasporic Material Culture.” The book explores the Jewish home in Venice during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as a multi-religious and multi-ethnic webwork of individuals, communities, and objects in motion. The project has received a 2022-24 Gladys Krieble Delmas Grant and a 2024-25 Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture Fellowship Grant 2024-2025. In Spring 2025, Dr. Francesconi will be a Berenson Fellow at I Tatti, The Harvard University Center for the Renaissance Studies in Florence.
Dr. Francesconi is interested in working with graduate and undergraduate students on early modern Jewish social and cultural history; Mediterranean studies; European history; gender history and theory; material culture, everyday life, and the built environment.