The Stroum Center is proud to host Dr. Francesconi’s lunchtime talk, “The Italian Jewish Household in the Early Modern Mediterranean,” with a response from Dr. Rena Lauer. Complimentary falafel lunch to be provided. Please RSVP to ensure enough food.

Federica Francesconi (PhD, University of Haifa) is Assistant Professor of History and the Howard Berger-Ray Neilsen Chair in Judaic Studies at The College of Idaho. 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 at the University of Pennsylvania, the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of Oxford. She has just completed a monograph, Invisible Enlighteners: Modenese Jewry from the Renaissance to Emancipation. Her new book project is tentatively entitled “Cosmopolitan Intimacy: Jewish Spaces as Crossroads for Multi-Religious Communities in Early Modern Italy.”

Respondent Rena Lauer (PhD, Harvard) studies minority life on the borders of medieval Christendom and cross-cultural contacts in the late medieval Mediterranean. Her current book project is a social history of the Jews of Venetian Crete in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, particularly through the lens of intra-Jewish litigation in the Venetian secular courtroom.

This seminar is made possible thanks to the American Academy of Jewish Research.