Department of History

Teresa Bernardi is a social historian specializing in early modern Europe, with research interests in gender history, mobility studies, and digital humanities. She is currently an MSCA Global Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History at Brown University.

Her current project, Welfare on the Move: Female Mobility and Social Care Across the Early Modern Adriatic, explores the intersection of migration and access to social assistance in the Adriatic region from the 16th to 18th centuries. Focusing on migrant women as providers and recipients of social protection, the project reconstructs the networks and resources that shaped their experiences of mobility and care. Drawing on transnational archives and a wide range of legal, administrative, judicial, and visual sources, it investigates the gendered dimensions of early modern welfare systems and practices.

Bernardi earned her Ph.D. from the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa and her M.A. from Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. Her dissertation on hospitality and the identification of foreigners in early modern Venice was awarded two major Italian prizes. She has held visiting positions at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris and the University of Cambridge. Her research has been published in peer-reviewed journals such as Genesis, Gender & History, and Società e Storia, as well as in international edited volumes.

From 2020 to 2022, she was based at the Mobility & Humanities Centre at the University of Padua, where she contributed to the digital project Processetti: Marriage and Mobility in Venice (16th–18th Centuries) and led the project Tracing Migration Within Urban Spaces: Gendered Mobilities and Identification Practices in the Early Modern Mediterranean. She has also participated in several collaborative initiatives, including Sacred Fire: Inquisitions, Capital Punishment, and Rites of Justice in Italy (13th–19th Centuries).

Her current project fosters collaboration between Brown University, the University of Padua, and the University of Zadar, strengthening transnational and interdisciplinary research networks.