Dr Ioanna Iordanou has been awarded the Venetian Research Program Award

Dr Ioanna Iordanou has been awarded the prestigious Venetian Research Program Award, offered by the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, to support historical research on Venice and the former Venetian Empire.

The award will enable a one-month research trip to Venice, where Ioanna will conduct research in the Venetian State Archives and local libraries for her research project entitled: Hide or Leak? The Culture of Secrecy in the Arsenal of Late Renaissance Venice.

More specifically, Ioanna aims to employ a transdisciplinary methodology, combining archival records and sixteenth-century chronicles and literary works with social theorizations of secrecy and identity stemming from Sociology and Organization Studies. By examining the socio-economic function of secrecy in one of the world’s earliest industrial settings - the Venetian shipbuilding factory, Ioanna aims to broaden and deepen nascent debates on the socio-economic value of secrets in the early modern era, shedding light, not on the informational value of secrets, as historians have traditionally done, but on the social processes that generated them.

The research will generate two articles targeted at high impact Business/Economic History journals and a 100,000 book manuscript provisionally entitled 'The Galley Makers: Life, Work, and Industry in Late Renaissance Venice.