Dennis Romano

The Venetian Council of Ten, 1310 to 1500.

2018 Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation Fellow in Venice.
2012-3 Mellon Long-term Fellow, Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, D.C.
2011 Chancellor's Citation for Excellence, Syracuse University.
2010 Elected Socio Onorario (Honorary Fellow) of the Deputazione di Storia Patria per le Venezie.
2008 Folger Institute, Folger Shakespeare Library, participant in Weekend Seminar “Connections, Trust, and Causation in Economic History.”
2007-8 Ailsa Mellon Bruce Senior Fellow, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art.
2007-8 Fellow, School of Historical Studies, Institute for Advanced Study, (declined).
2007-8 Fellowship, American Council of Learned Societies, (declined).
2005-6 Co-director with Gary Radke, NEH Summer Seminar for College and University Teachers, “Shaping Civic Space in a Renaissance City: Venice, c. 1300 to c. 1600,” Venice, June-July, 2006.
2005 Visiting Scholar, American Academy in Rome.
2003 Folger Institute, Folger Shakespeare Library, Grant-in-Aid.
2002 Elected “Socio Straniero” (Foreign Fellow) of Ateneo Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti (the Venetian Athenaeum).
2001-2 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellow (deferred from 2000-01).
2000-1 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow, The National Humanities Center, Research Triangle Park, NC.
1997 Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation Award (to support the conference “Venice Reconsidered” – Dennis Romano and John Martin, conference organizers).
1995 Trinity College Cesare Barbieri Prize (awarded by The Society for Italian Historical Studies).
1990 Daniel Patrick Moynihan Award, Maxwell School, Syracuse University (For excellence in teaching, research, and service by a junior faculty member).
1990 National Endowment for the Humanities, Travel to Collections Grant.
1988-9 Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation Fellow in Venice.
1985 National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend.
1983 American Council of Learned Societies, Grant-in-Aid.
1981-2 Charles Phelps Taft Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Cincinnati.
1979-80 Fulbright Dissertation Fellow in Italy: Delmas Foundation Fellow in Venice.
1973 Phi Beta Kappa, Wake Forest University.

Books

“Venice: The Remarkable History of the Lagoon City” (New York:  Oxford University Press, 2024)

"Markets and Marketplaces in Medieval Italy, c.1100 to c.1440" (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2015).

"La rappresentazione di Venezia:  La vita di Doge Francesco Foscari, 1373-1457" (Rome: Viella Libreria Editrice,  2012).

"The Likeness of Venice: A Life of Doge Francesco Foscari, 1373-1457" (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007).

Co-editor, Venice Reconsidered: "The History and Civilization of an Italian City-State, 1297-1797" (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000). Paperback edition 2002. 

"Housecraft and Statecraft: Domestic Service in Renaissance Venice, 1400-1600" (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). 

"Patrizi e popolani: La società veneziana nel Trecento" (Bologna, Societa` Editrice il Mulino, 1993). Italian edition of above. 

"Patricians and Popolani: The Social Foundations of the Venetian Renaissance State" (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987).  [Reprint: Hopkins Open Publishing Encore Editions, 2019.]

Articles

“La Citta’ della Giustizia/City of Justice” in Venetia: 1600: Nascite e Rinascite/Births and Rebirths (Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia, 2021), pp. 86-93). [Exhibition Catalog for Venetia 1600, Palazzo Ducale, Venice, 4 September 2021-25 March 2022.

“Popular protest and alternative visions of the Venetian polity, c. 1260 to 1423.” in Popular Politics in an Aristocratic Republic:  Political Conflict and Social Contestation in Late Medieval and Early Modern Venice, eds. M. Van Gelder and C. Judde de Larivière, (London: Routledge, 2020), pp. 22-44.

“Ducal Tombs as Family Concerns,” in The Tombs of the Doges of Venice from the Beginning of the Serenissima to 1907, ed., Benjamin Paul (Rome: Viella, 2016), pp. 29-43

“The Limits of Kinship: Family Politics, Vendetta, and the State in Fifteenth-Century Venice,” in Venice and the Veneto during the Renaissance:  The Legacy of Benjamin Kohl, eds., Michael Knapton, John E. Law, and Alison A. Smith (Florence, 2014), pp. 87-102.

“Venetian Exceptionalism:  Lay and Religious in Venetian Communal  Governance,” in Churchmen and Urban Government in Late Medieval Italy, c.1200-c.1450: Cases and Contexts, ed. Frances Andrews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013): 219-33.

“A Depiction of Male Same-Sex Seduction in Lorenzetti’s Effects of Bad Government Fresco,” Journal of the History of Sexuality, vol. 21 (2012): 1-15.

“Equality in Fifteenth-Century Venice,” Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History, 3rd Series, 6 (2009), 125-145.

“City-State and Empire:  The Historical Context,” in Venice and its Empire, ed. Peter Humfrey, for the series Art Centers of the Italian Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 9-30. 

“Commentary: Why Opera? The Emergence of a New Genre,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 36 (2006): 401-09. (Special issue dedicated to the theme “Opera and Society.”)

“Vecchi, poveri, e impotenti: The Elderly in Renaissance Venice,” in Marginal Groups in Premodern Italy, ed. Stephen J. Milner (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 249-71.

“Doge Francesco Foscari in America,” Studi Veneziani, n.s. 46 (2003): 407-15.

“Concluding Remarks,” in The Art Market in Italy, 15th-17th Centuries/Il Mercato dell’arte in Italia, secc. xv-xvii, ed. Marcello Fantoni, Louisa Matthew, and Sara Matthews-Grieco (Ferrara: Franco Cosimo Panini Editore, 2003), 445-448.

“Sepe ben guidar la optima constelation sua: Francesco Foscari as Procurator of San Marco,” Studi Veneziani n.s. 36 (1998): 37-55.

“L’assistenza e la beneficenza,” in Storia di Venezia vol. 5 Il Rinascimento: Società ed economia, eds. Ugo Tucci and Alberto Tenenti (Rome: Trecani, 1996): 355-406.

“The Gondola as a Marker of Station in Venetian Society,” Renaissance Studies: 8 (1994): 359-374.

“Aspects of Patronage in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Venice,” Renaissance Quarterly 46 (1993): 712-733.

“The Regulation of Domestic Service in Renaissance Venice,” Sixteenth Century Journal 22 (1991): 661-677.

“Gender and the Urban Geography of Renaissance Venice,” Journal of Social History 23 (1989): 339-353.

“Struttura familiare e legami matrimoniali a Venezia nel Trecento,” Ricerche Venete 1 (1989): 131-165.

“The Aftermath of the Querini-Tiepolo Conspiracy in Venice,” Stanford Italian Review 7 (1987): 147-160.

“Charity and Community in Renaissance Venice,” Journal of Urban History 11 (1984): 63-82.

“Quod sibi fiat gratia: Adjustment of Penalties and the Exercise of Influence in Early Renaissance Venice,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 13 (1983): 151-168.  

Lectures and Conference Presentations

Paper, “`This Cabinet of Mars’:  The Council of Ten’s Armory in the Ducal Palace, Venice” to be presented at the Annual Meeting of the Renaissance Society of America, Boston, March 2025

Book Presentation: “Venice: The Remarkable History of the Lagoon City,” Save Venice, Venice, Italy, June 2024; Politics and Prose Bookstore, Washington, DC, January 2024.

Paper, “Francesco Foscari: un doge del Rinascimento,” presented at the conference “Francesco Foscari e la Venetia magna di metà Quattrocento,” Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, November 2023.

Discussion, “The Challenges of Writing a History of Venice,” Warwick University in Venice, October 2018. 

Paper, “Women and the Council of Ten, 1310-1362,” presented at the Annual Meeting of the Renaissance Society of America, Boston, MA, April 2016.

Paper, “Pro verbis inhonestis et gravibus dictis . . . contra statum dominii: The Venetian Council of Ten and the Prosecution of Speech, 1310-1363,”        presented at the Twentieth Biennial New College Conference on Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Sarasota, FL, March 2016.

Paper,“ Appearance and Choice:  Jewelry, Goldsmithery and the Early Modern Concern with Fraud and Deception,” presented at the Folger colloquium series, May 2013.

Paper, “Fraud and Deception in Tommaso Garzoni's Piazza Universale di Tutte le Professioni del Mondo,” presented at the annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America, San Diego, CA, March 2013.

Paper, “Measuring Up:  Weights and Measures in Tre- and Quattrocento Italy,” presented at the annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America, Washington D.C., April 2012.

Invited Paper, “Ducal Tombs as Family Concerns,” presented at the conference “Tombe dogali:  La commemorazione dei principi della Repubblica veneziana,” Centro Tedesco di Studi Veneziani and Cini Foundation, Venice, October 2010.

Invited Lecture, “`E il ben commune nel mercatare: Market Practices in Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Frescoes for the Sala dei Nove.” SUNY, Binghamton, October 2008.

Paper, “The Imago of Venice:  Ducal Imagery during the Reign of Doge Francesco Foscari (1423-1457),” presented at the annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America, Chicago, Il, April 2008.

Colloquium Paper, “Bona fide, sine fraude:  Medieval Italian Marketplaces and the Concept of the Common Good.” Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, Washington, DC, March 2008.

Invited Lecture, “Art, Politics and the Venetian Territorial State:  The  Building Projects of Doge Francesco Foscari, 1423-1457,” Princeton University, March 2008, University of Mary Washington, March 2008, University of Kansas (Murphy Lecture Series), April 2006.  

Paper, “The Idea of Equality in Fifteenth-Century Venice,” presented at the annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America, Miami, March 2007 ( And organizer of the session “Aspects of Renaissance Republicanism”).

Invited Presentation, “Mythic Venice,” presented at the annual major donors’ dinner, Corning Museum of Glass, November 2006.

Roundtable discussant, “Government and Politics,” for the conference “La Serenissima: A Conference on the History of the Republic of Venice.” Embassy of Italy, Washington, D.C. September 2006.

Invited Lecture, “Art, Politics, and the Venetian Territorial State: The Building Projects of Doge Francesco Foscari,” Murphy Lecture Series, The University of Kansas, April 2005.

Commentator, “Michael and his Manuscript,” presented at the conference “The World of Michael of Rhodes,” The Dibner Institute, MIT, Cambridge, Mass., December 2005.

Invited Paper, “The Limits of Kinship: Family Politics, Vendetta, and the State in Fifteenth-Century Venice,” presented at the Institute for Historical Research, London, February 2005.

Paper, “Bernardo Giustinian’s Funeral Oration for Doge Francesco Foscari,” presented in a special session in honor of the late Patricia Labalme at the annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America, New York, NY, April 2004.

Commentator for the session “Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice,” part of a special conference sponsored by the Journal of Interdisciplinary History entitled, “Opera and Society,” Princeton, NJ, March 2004.

Invited Lecture, “The Doge De-sexed: Venetian Rulership and Notions of Masculinity,” presented at the annual meeting of the New England Renaissance Conference, Storrs, CT, October 2003 and at the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference, Pittsburgh, PA, November, 2003.

Lecture, “Portraits of Venice through Time,” presented at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. March 2003; and the Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, NY, October 2003, and at Villa Ulivi, the NYU study center in Florence, Italy, November, 2003.

Paper, “Worldly Goods: Envy and Factionalism in late Medieval and Renaissance Italy,” presented at the annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America, Toronto, Canada, March 2003.

Book Presentation, “Presentation of the book, The Art Market in Italy, 15th-17th Centuries,” at the annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America, Toronto, Canada, March 2003. Special session organized by the Istituto di Studi Rinascimentali, Ferrara, Italy.

Session Organizer “Reliquaries and Banners: Their Uses and Meanings in Three Renaissance Polities,” and presenter of paper, “Symbols of Sovereignty: Military Banners in Fifteenth-Century Venice,” presented at the annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America, Tempe, Arizona, April 2002.

Paper, “Worldy Goods, Envy, and Competition in late Medieval and Renaissance Italy,” presented at the Center for Renaisance and Baroque Studies, University of Maryland, College Park, February, 2002.

Paper, “At the Margins? The Place of Servants in Venetian Society,” presented at the conference “News on the Rialto: Identities and the Social Order in Renaissance Venice: A Conference in Honor of Brian Pullan,” University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland, November, 2001.

Invited Commentator for seminar “The Catholic Church and Blacks in Renaissance Italy,” Catholic University of America, Washington, DC, October 2001.

Final Roundtable Discussant at the conference “The Art Market in Italy, 15th through 17th Centures,” Florence, Italy, June 2000.

Paper, “The Tomb of Doge Francesco Foscari,” presented at the Twelfth New College Conference on Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Sarasota, Florida, March 2000.

Invited Lecture, “Politics and Architectural Patronage in Renaissance Venice: The Commissions of Doge Francesco Foscari,” presented at Villa le Balze, the Georgetown University Study Center, Fiesole, Italy, November
1999; Wake Forest University, November 2000; and at the North Carolina Renaissance Workshop, February 2001.

Invited Lecture, “Vecchi, poveri, e impotenti: The Elderly in Renaissance Venice,” presented at Villa I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Renaissance Studies, Florence, Italy, November 1998.

Paper, “The Elections of Francesco Foscari as Procurator of San Marco and as Doge,” presented at the annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America Annual Meeting, College Park, Maryland, April 1998.

Chair and Commentator, “Gender and Class in the High and Late Middle Ages,” 110th Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association, Atlanta, Georgia, January 1996.

Paper, “Food, Clothing and Shelter: The Material Concerns of Domestic Servants in Renaissance Venice,” presented at the New England Renaissance Conference, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York, November, 1995.

Paper, “The Gondola as a Marker of Station in Venetian Society,” presented at the conference “Renaissance Venice: Continuity and Change,” Folger Library, Washington, D.C., October 1993.

Paper, “The Family Model of Master/Servant Relations in Renaissance Venice,” presented at the Twentieth Annual Warwick University Symposium on Renaissance Florence and Venice, Venice, Italy, December 1992.

Invited Lecture, “The Dynamic of Master/Servant Relations in Renaissance Venice,” presented to the History Department, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York, December 1991.

Paper, “Aspects of Patronage in Renaissance Venice,” presented at the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference, Philadelphia, October 1991.

Discussant for the Symposium “Venice: Educator of Europe,” University of San Francisco, August 1991.

Paper, “The Culture of Domestic Servants in Venice,” presented at the 105th Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association, New York, December 1990.

Discussant for Italy, Roundtable Discussion on “Cities in Early Modern Europe,” held at the annual meeting of the Social Science History Association, St. Paul, MN, October 1990.

Paper, “Masters and Servants: Identity and Social Place in Renaissance Venice,” presented at the annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America, Toronto, Ontario, April 1990.

Paper, “The Masculinization of Domestic Service in Sixteenth-Century Venice,” presented at the conference “Gender and Society II: Men in the Middle Ages,” Fordham University Center for Medieval Studies, March 1990.

Invited Lecture, “Disobedient Servants and Merciful Masters: The Regulation and Control of Domestic Servants in Renaissance Venice,” presented at SUNY Binghamton, November 1989.

Paper, “Gender and the Urban Geography of Renaissance Venice,” presented at the Fifteenth Annual Warwick University Symposium on Florence and Venice in the Renaissance, Venice, Italy, December 1988.

Paper, “Politics and Parishes in Early Renaissance Venice,” presented at the meeting of the Renaissance Society of America, New York, March 1988.

Paper, “Apprenticeship in Early Renaissance Venice,” presented at the Sixth New College Conference on Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Sarasota, Florida, March 1988.

Session Organizer, “Gender and Power in Renaissance Italy,” and presenter, “Gender, Space, and Power: Men’s and Women’s Patronage Networks in Early Renaissance Venice,” presented at the 101st annual meeting of the American Historical Association, Chicago, Illinois, December 1986.

Paper, “The Aftermath of the Querini-Tiepolo Conspiracy in Venice, 1310,” presented at the Fifth New College Conference on Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Sarasota, Florida, March 1986.

Paper, “Private Property, Public Authority, and Urban Growth in Late Medieval Venice,” presented at the Twentieth International Conference On Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, Michigan, May 1985.

Paper, “Neighbors and Patrons: Women’s Networks in Early Renaissance Venice,” presented at the conference “Power, Influence, and Insubordination: Women in Medieval and Early Modern Europe,” Fordham University, New York, March 1985.

Paper, “Artisan Networks in Early Renaissance Venice,” presented at the 98th Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association, San Francisco, December 1983.

2009 to 2017: Dr. Walter G. Montgomery and Marian Gruber Professor of History
2001-02 Lecturer, Summer Humanities Institute, “The Public and Private
in Medieval Venice,” Venice International University, Venice, Italy.
2001 Awarded courtesy appointment in Department of Fine Arts (now Department of the Histories of Art and Music).
1991-97 Associate Professor of History, Syracuse University, Syracuse, N.Y.
1987-91 Assistant Professor of History, Syracuse University, Syracuse, N.Y.
1986-87 Program Officer, National Endowment for the Humanities,
Division of Research Programs.
1984-87 Assistant Professor of History, University of Mississippi, Oxford, MS.
1982-83 Visiting Assistant Professor of History, Carthage College, Kenosha, WI.