William J. Connell (historian)

William J. Connell (William John, "Bill," born July 22, 1958, New York City) is an American historian and holder of the Joseph M. and Geraldine C. La Motta Chair in Italian Studies at Seton Hall University. He is a leading specialist in the history of Italy and Early Modern Europe and an authority on Renaissance Florence and Niccolò Machiavelli.

Connell was educated at the Trinity School (New York City), Bronxville High School, and Yale University, where he belonged to Saybrook College and the Manuscript Society and received his B.A. in 1980 summa cum laude. After an internship with U.S. Senator Lowell Weicker and a job as a gardener on the island of Elba, he worked in banking for the Manufacturers Hanover Trust Company and then as research assistant for columnist Joseph Alsop before entering graduate school in History at the University of California, Berkeley, where he received his Ph.D. in 1989.

Connell taught history at Reed College in Portland, OR, and at Rutgers University before moving to Seton Hall University in 1998. From 2003 to 2007 he was Founding Director of the Charles and Joan Alberto Italian Studies Institute. He has been a Fulbright Scholar to Italy, an I Tatti Fellow, a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton and a Juror for the Rome Prize of the American Academy in Rome. Since 1992 he has been Secretary of the Journal of the History of Ideas. He is a Corresponding Fellow of the Deputazione di Storia Patria per la Toscana and the Società Pistoiese di Storia Patria, and a member of the Grolier Club of New York City. From 2002 to 2005, and again in 2009-2010, he served on the New Jersey Italian and Italian American Commission as a gubernatorial appointee. He was co-chair of the Trustees and chair of the Academic Advisors of the Italian American Heritage Institute at Rutgers University from 2002 to 2005. In 2011 he received the Presidential Award of the Columbian Foundation. His public radio broadcast, "Machiavelli Faces Unemployment," won the Listener Choice Award as the favorite "Academic Minute" of 2011-2012. In 2013 The Irish Voice named him to its Education 100—the top US educators of Irish ancestry. Seton Hall University awarded him its Granato Italian Culture Medal in 2016.

An interest in the territory that surrounded and supported the city of Florence during the Renaissance resulted in his book, La città dei crucci: fazioni e clientele in uno stato repubblicano del ʼ400, a study of the social networks underpinning the factionalism of republican Florence and her subject city of Pistoia. His study of the Lombard nobleman Gaspare Pallavicino resulted in a new reading of the narrative framework and the discussion of the female courtier in Baldassarre Castiglione's Book of the Courtier. Sacrilege and Redemption in Renaissance Florence (2005; rev. 2d ed. 2008), co-authored with Giles Constable, recounts the case of a man who was hanged for throwing dung at a painting of the Virgin Mary and has been translated into Italian, Russian and Romanian.

Connell’s extensive archival research on the life and career of Niccolò Machiavelli has resulted in a widely praised translation of The Prince (2005, rev. 2d ed. 2016) and several important essays. In 2005 Connell made headlines with the startling suggestion that as a boy Machiavelli was molested by a priest, an argument that was substantially confirmed in 2015 when newly discovered documents showed that Machiavelli's teacher was fired from the Florentine cathedral school for pedophilia. In 2013 Connell solved a longstanding philological problem, previously considered a puzzle "awaiting its Rosetta Stone," by showing that Machiavelli completed The Prince in its final version in the spring of 1515. These essays are collected in his Italian volume Machiavelli nel Rinascimento italiano (2015).

As Director of the Alberto Italian Studies Institute he was Executive Producer of the documentary “Anti-Italianism” (2005; 2d release 2008), which featured Joe Piscopo and Tony Lo Bianco. Anti-Italianism: Essays on a Prejudice (2010), co-edited with Fred Gardaphé, is a collection of essays that offers the first sustained historical treatment of anti-Italian prejudice in the United States. A longstanding interest in Italian American history resulted in his editing, with Stanislao Pugliese, The Routledge History of Italian Americans, forthcoming in 2017.

In recent years Connell's research has focused on the Renaissance revolution in historical thought and on connections between northern and southern Europe.

Connell has lectured at the Institute for Universal History of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow, the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, and the Fondazione Luigi Firpo in Turin. In 2011 he was an accreditation visitor at King Abdulaziz University in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. He has written on cultural and historical topics for the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, The American Scholar, the Times Literary Supplement, and Clarín (Buenos Aires), in addition to scholarly journals.

Connell is the son of William F. Connell, an artist, of Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and Marilyn Moore, an editor and actress, of New York City. He is married to Nikki Shepardson, a historian of Christianity. A first marriage ended in divorce.

• Connell, William J. (2000). La città dei crucci: fazioni e clientele in uno stato repubblicano del '400. Florence: Nuova Toscana Editrice. ISBN 88-87263-10-8. 
• Connell, William J. (co-ed.); Andrea Zorzi (2000). Florentine Tuscany: Structures and Practices of Power. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-54800-7. 
• Connell, William J. (ed.) (2002). Society and Individual in Renaissance Florence. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-23254-2. 
• Connell, William J. (ed. and trans.) (2005). Niccolò Machiavelli: The Prince with Related Documents. Boston: Bedford / St. Martins. ISBN 978-1-319-04892-1.  Revised second ed. (2016).
• Connell, William J. (co-author); Giles Constable (2005). Sacrilege and Redemption in Renaissance Florence: The Case of Antonio Rinaldeschi. Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, U. of Toronto. ISBN 978-0772720405.  Revised second ed. (2008).
• Connell, William J. (2007). Come ho imparato l'italiano. Portoferraio (Elba): Biblioteca Comunale Foresiana. ISBN 978-0-9817178-1-4. 
• Connell, William J. (co-ed.); Fred Gardaphé (2010). Anti-Italianism: Essays on a Prejudice. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-0-230-10830-1. 
• Connell, William J. (historical commentary) (2011). Giannozzo Manetti: Historia Pistoriensis. Florence: SISMEL-Edizioni del Galluzzo. ISBN 978-88-8450-442-5. 
• Connell, William J. (2014). Machiavelli şi Renaşterea italiană. Studii. Iaşi: Institutul European. ISBN 978-606-24-0059-0.  Collected essays in Romanian.
• Connell, William J. (2015). Machiavelli nel Rinascimento italiano. Milan: FrancoAngeli. ISBN 978-88-917-2503-5.  Collected essays in Italian.