Brian Brege, assistant professor of history, has been awarded a Villa I Tatti Fellowship from Harvard University. The fellowship houses scholars for one-year, with full stipend, at the I Tatti Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence, Italy. Brege will use the fellowship to continue his research on the development of capitalism in Tuscany during the Italian Renaissance.

Fifteen I Tatti Fellowships are offered to scholars each year to support groundbreaking research in any aspect of the Italian Renaissance. In addition to a stipend and housing, the I Tatti Fellowships provide scholars direct, uninterrupted access to the Berenson Library, one of the foremost libraries for research on the Italian Renaissance. While at the I Tatti Center, scholars also participate in collective workshops, conferences, and discussions, allowing them to pursue their research as part of a scholarly community.

Brege is currently working on his second book manuscript, The Global Merchants of Florence: Florentine Patrician Families and Early Modern Capitalism, which traces how Florentine’s patricians capitalized on the flexibility of interlocking family partnerships to fund and facilitate global commerce in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Weaving themselves into the fibers of global commerce, these merchants developed patterns of entrepreneurship that remain an enduring and important, if often unsung, feature of globalized capitalism. As a historian, Brege shows that far from being anachronistic, interlinked networks of family firms offered significant advantages in reaping global opportunities; they still do, as Italy’s leading luxury firms show.

03/05/19