Trivellato was born in Padua. She received a BA in history from the Ca' Foscari University of Venice in 1995,[2] where she worked under the supervision of Giovanni Levi. During her time as a BA student, she spent a year at the University of California Berkeley. She took a PhD in social history from Bocconi University, Milan in 1999 and a PhD in history from Brown University, Rhode Island, in 2004.[3] At Brown she worked under the supervision of Anthony Molho.
Trivellato began working at Yale University as an assistant professor in history in 2004 and in 2007[4] became a full professor. In 2012, she became the Frederick W. Hilles Professor at Yale University and in 2017 the Barton Biggs professor.[5] In 2018, Trivellato joined the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey as the Andrew W. Mellon Professor at the School for Historical Studies.[4][6]
Her 2009 book, The Familiarity of Strangers: The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and Cross-Cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period won the 2010 Leo Gershoy Award,[7] a Jordan Schnitzer Book Award and was long-listed for the Cundill Prize.[3]
She was awarded with a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2012.[4] She has held fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the American Academy in Berlin and at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. She was a visiting professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), Monash University (Melbourne), Sciences Po (Paris) and Stanford.[6]
- Jacques Barzun Prize (2020)[8]
