Professor Maria Fusaro

Maria Fusaro research and teaching interests lie in the social and economic history, interpreted in its broadest sense, of Early Modern Europe.

Her primary area of expertise is the history of Italy (especially the Venetian Republic) and the Mediterranean between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. Her research has focused on commercial networks and the role they played in the early phases of globalization; on the economic, social and cultural analysis of late medieval and early modern empires and on the early modern development of legal institutions supporting trade. she has also published on commercial litigation and the status of foreigners in civil courts in the medieval and early modern period, the trade between the Mediterranean and the north of Europe, the history of the Venetian dominions in Greece, and on the dialogue between different national historiographies.

ERC Consolidator Grant - Average - Transaction Costs and Risk Management during the First Globalization (Sixteenth-Eighteenth Centuries). Until 2022, together with 4 doctoral candidates, 1 post-doctoral Research Fellow and 7 Visiting Senior Researchers Fusaro worked on a large comparative project focused on economic institutions and their impact on economic development. The focus was on a legal instrument – general average (GA) – which underpins maritime trade by redistributing extraordinary costs across all parties engaged in the business venture. See more details at: http://humanities.exeter.ac.uk/history/research/centres/maritime/research/avetransrisk/

You can hear more details on this project at: https://soundcloud.com/university-of-exeter/mariafusaroerc

ERC Starting Grant - Sailing into Modernity: Comparative Perspectives on the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century European Economic Transition'. Between 2012 and 2014, Fusaro and her team - Bernard Allaire, Richard Blakemore and Tijl Vanneste - worked on the comparative study of contractual conditions and economic treatment of sailors across Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth century.

During 2015 Maria Fusaro worked within the project ‘La reconfiguration de l’espace méditerranéen: échanges interculturels et pragmatique du droit en Méditerranée, XVe-début XIXe siècle, interdisciplinary research project chaired by W. Kaiser (Paris 1/EHESS, Paris), funded through the ERC Advanced Grant Scheme (2012-2017). Within that project she investigated the legal frameworks for managing issues related to ab intestato inheritance across Europe during the early modern period, and the role these played in fostering economic development.

Biography:

Maria Fusaro graduated from the Universita' di Venezia Ca' Foscari, and then moved to Cambridge where she completed my PhD in 2002. After a Junior Research Fellowship at St. Hugh's College at Oxford, she was Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago before moving to Exeter in 2006.

Research supervision:

Happy to supervise research on any of my research interests, especially on:

- Late Medieval and Early Modern Mediterranean social and economic history

- Late Medieval and Early Modern Mediterranean Maritime history

- Late Medieval and Early Modern Italy

- History of the Republic of Venice and of its Eastern Mediterranean empire

- Early modern European social and economic history, especially history of trade and trading networks and the development of legal institutions connected with the economy

Qualifications:
PhD CANTAB