William J. Connell, Professor of History and Joseph M. and Geraldine C. La Motta Chair in Italian Studies, has been selected a 2019 Andrew Carnegie Fellow. As a recipient of the so-called "Brainy Award," the fellowship includes a $200,000 grant to devote significant time to research, writing, and publishing in the humanities and social sciences.

Connell's project, Tracking Migrant Labor in Renaissance Florence, researches the ending of a century-old policy of free immigration and the passage of a law requiring foreign workers to register with the state by purchasing numbered annual work permits. "My discovery in Florence's Archivio di Stato of the registers recording deliveries of these work permits over a 40-year period, from 1473 to 1512, means for the first time we can measure this substantial population. Particularly intriguing is the way data analysis can be applied to these records to demonstrate in a very precise way, how this extremely mobile population fluctuated over time in response to growth or downturns in the economy, and also around war or plague," said Connell.