The UCLA CMRS Center for Early Global Studies is pleased to introduce Dr. Giulia Giamboni, our next John W. Baldwin Postdoctoral Fellow. The Baldwin fellowship is awarded to a recent PhD graduate whose research centers on European medieval studies in a global comparative framework. Giamboni will join CMRS-CEGS for the 2026–28 academic years.
Giamboni earned her PhD in Medieval History from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2025, where she completed her doctoral dissertation titled “Gender, Charity, and Empire in the Late Medieval Mediterranean.” At UCLA, under the supervision of Zrinka Stahuljak, Professor of Comparative Literature and French and Director of CMRS-CEGS, as well as Jamie Kreiner, Professor of History and Robert and Dorothy Wellman Chair in Medieval History, she will work on her book project, tentatively titled Empires of Care: Gender, Devotion, and Resistance in the Medieval Mediterranean.
Giamboni brings an international research background to UCLA. She earned her BA and MA in Medieval History from Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, followed by a Master 1 in Medieval History at Université Denis Diderot (Paris VII). Her early research concentrated on the relationships between Venice and the Byzantine Empire, as well as Venice’s Mediterranean colonial networks, especially in the Greek territories of Modon and Coron. To support and expand her research, she also completed a two-year degree in archival science at the State Archives of Venice, training that continues to influence her work with fragmentary primary sources.
Her current project focuses on the remarkable life of Pelegrina de Saladino, a woman from fourteenth-century Zadar, Croatia. As a widow, she defied colonial authority through charity, patronage, and commerce. What starts as a microhistorical study develops into a wider investigation of gendered property, care, and power in colonial settings. By placing the medieval Adriatic in conversation with later colonial contexts, particularly in Latin America, Giamboni highlights how local strategies of property, care, and economic negotiation can illuminate broader patterns of colonial rule.
A distinctive feature of Giamboni’s research is its focus on women’s economic agency. Her work explores how women used legal tools to manage and redistribute property, especially during times of foreign rule. She frames Zadar as a kind of “incubator,” tracing the sophisticated legal and economic strategies that women across social classes developed to protect family assets, support daughters, and assert civic and political presence.
Giamboni’s scholarship has already been recognized through several major awards and fellowships. At UCSB, she received support from the Medieval Academy of America Research Grant; the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies Dissertation Fellowship; and a Graduate Humanities Research Fellowship. These awards enabled archival research in Italy and Croatia, as well as a year in Cairo, where she further expanded her research horizons.
With a research program that sits at the intersection of history and art history, Giamboni looks forward to working across disciplines at CMRS-CEGS. She is especially excited to collaborate with colleagues in art history on questions related to textiles and material culture, particularly their symbolic and political meanings. She also hopes to engage with the Latin American Institute at UCLA as she continues to broaden the comparative scope of her project. As she works to transform her dissertation into a book, CMRS-CEGS will offer an ideal setting for expanding her research across disciplines, geographies, and historical contexts.
Please join us in congratulating Dr. Giamboni on this prestigious fellowship and in welcoming her to CMRS-CEGS.