Filling gaps in areas such as U.S. women’s history and modern Germany, the Yale History Department recently hired two senior professors and a junior professor.

Ute Frevert, an expert in German history from the University of Bielefeld, Germany, will join the department as a full professor in fall 2003. Joanne Meyerowitz, an authority on American women’s history, will arrive a year later in fall 2004, also as a tenured professor. Francesca Trivellato, whose area of interest is early modern Europe and Renaissance Italy, will join the department in the spring of 2004 at the junior level.

History professor John Merriman, who was on two of the search committees, said the fact that all the new hires are women is an added bonus. History chairman Jon Butler said the committees did not commence the searches with the specific intention of hiring women.

“We didn’t say ‘Who are the best women?'” Butler said. “We said ‘Who are the best candidates?'”

Merriman, who led the search committee for German history, said it was a coup for Yale to get a professor of Frevert’s standing in German history.

“Ute Frevert is by the best person we could have hired,” Merriman said.

Merriman said Frevert might teach a lecture on modern German history, as well as courses on German women’s history and the civil-military relationship in Germany.

Frevert has published books on the history of dueling, German women’s history and the military’s effect on German history and society.

Meyerowitz, who is currently a professor at Indiana University and the editor of the Journal of American History, said her research interests include women’s and gender history in the U.S. and the history of sexuality.

Trivellato, who is currently an assistant professor of early modern European history at the University of Venice, Italy, received a doctorate from Milan’s Bocconi University in 1999 and currently is completing a second dissertation at Brown University.

Trivellato has published a book on the glass-blowing industry of the 17th and 18th centuries. She said in an e-mail that she was also interested in studying Sephardic Jews and their trading networks in the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. Trivellato has also written on craft guilds and artisans’ work in early modern Venice.

Merriman, who also served on the early modern European search committee, said the committee was impressed by Trivellato’s range, in terms of chronology and subject. He said the committee had spent several years on unsuccessful searches to fill this position.

Trivellato said in spring 2004, she plans to offer an undergraduate course in Renaissance Italy as well as a junior seminar in the history of Venice and the Mediterranean from 1400 to 1700.