Carlo Taviani, PhD

Carlo Taviani is Associate Professor of Early Modern History at the Università degli Studi di Teramo and Associated Researcher of the Royal Netherlands Institute in Rome (KNIR). His main research project is centered on the involvement of Italian traders in the early transatlantic slave trade and on the ways in which they used, changed, and transplanted economic and trading institutions.

At KNIR, he is developing a research project that examines how, during the Renaissance in the Italian peninsula, knowledge of the African continent rediscovered from classical Greek and Roman antiquity was merged with notions and tropes that reached Europe as a consequence of contemporary voyages and encounters. The project focuses on topics such as the account of the so-called "silent trade", the trade in African animals, and sub-Saharan gold. It also investigates how Europeans, in framing knowledge of distant populations and cultures, attempted to establish forms of hegemony that reinforced violent practices of displacement.

Carlo has worked on revolts, political conflicts, peace-making strategies, and exile in the Italian peninsula during the Renaissance. More recently, he has been working on the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century history of a Genoese institution that managed the public debt, the Casa di San Giorgio, and on the afterlife of its model in later business corporations and banks such as the Dutch East India Company, the Bank of England, and the Mississippi Company.

He earned his bachelor's degree from the University La Sapienza in Rome and his PhD from the University of Perugia. He has held fellowships at the Deutsches Historisches Institut in Rome (2019–21), which funded his main research project; at Villa I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies (2009–10), where he was later a research associate (2017–19); at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC (2012); at the Italian-German Historical Institute in Trent (2011–14); and at the University of Zurich (2021–22). He has been a visiting scholar at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University (2024), at the University of Chicago and at the MacMillan Center, Yale University (2013), and a visiting lecturer at the University of Cape Town (2015). He has taught at the University of Cape Town and at the University of Bologna (2020–22).