William Connell, Ph.D.

Professor of History and La Motta Endowed Chair in Italian Studies
Department of History

I study a wide range of problems in Italian, European and American History, with particular interests in medieval and early modern intellectual history, humanism, migration, republicanism, the history of historical writing and state-building. Current projects include a study of connections between Erasmus and Machiavelli, a study of migrant labor in 15th-century Tuscany, the publication of a secret 16th-century project to reform the Catholic Church, and a study of how three American novelists (Roth, Ellison and Di Donato) portrayed ethnic and racial minorities in their writing.