Joanne M. Ferraro

Joanne M. Ferraro (UCLA, 1983) is a historian of Renaissance and early modern Europe. A specialist in the history of marriage and the family in Italy, she has published numerous articles in the US, UK, Slovenia, and Italy. She is a contributor to Charles Scribner and Sons' works on the History of the Renaissance (1999), European Social History (2001) and the History of Childhood (2003). Her monograph Family and Public Life in Brescia, 1580-1650 (Cambridge, 1993; paperback 2002), reviewed in several countries, was republished in Italy as Vita privata e pubblica a Brescia (Morcelliana, 1998). Her monograph, Marriage Wars in Late Renaissance Venice (Oxford, 2001) appeared in Oxford's History of Sexuality Series. In 2002 it won first prize from the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women as well as the Helen and Howard R. Marraro prize for the best book published in any period of Italian history in 2001. Professor Ferraro has a new book forthcoming with The Johns Hopkins University Press entitled Nefarious Crimes, Contested Justice: Illicit Sex and Infanticide in the Republic of Venice, 1557-1789. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Gladys Krieble Foundation. Currently Professor Ferraro is writing The Allure of Venice:An Historical Portrait of the Floating City, under contract with Cambridge University Press. Her courses emphasize social and cultural history as well as sex and gender in historical perspective.