Michele Pifferi

Michele Pifferi

Prof. Michele Pifferi

Member of the Public Security and Individual Rights cluster.


Michele Pifferi obtained a law degree from the University of Ferrara (1999) and a PhD from the University of Macerata (2004). From 2003 to 2010 he was a researcher and then an associate professor and from 2017 he has been a full professor of legal history at the University of Ferrara, Law Department.

He has been a visiting researcher at the Max-Planck-Institut für europäische Rechtsgeschichte in Frankfurt am Main (2002); Emil Noël Fellow (2009) at the Jean Monnet Center for International & Regional Economic Law and Justice, New York University School of Law; Robbins Fellow at Berkeley UC - School of Law (2012); Academic Visitor at the Oxford Centre for Criminology, University of Oxford (2014 and 2016). From November 2012 to December 2016, he was scientific coordinator of a research unit working on a national project (FIR) on Migration Policies and Legal Transplant in the Mediterranean Area: Control Strategies between Colonialism and Post-Colonialism. From July 2015 to February 2017 Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow at the University of Hamburg, Faculty of Law. He is currently the PI of a national research project (PRIN 2017) on Legal History and Mass Migration: Integration, Exclusion, and Criminalization of Migrants in the 19th and 20th Century. Member of the Editorial Board of the series Rechtsgeschichte und Rechtsgeschehen – Italien (LIT Verlag), and of Quaderni fiorentini per la storia del pensiero giuridico moderno.

His research interests focus on comparative legal history of criminal law and criminology and the history of migration law. He is currently working as an editor of a book project on The Limits of Criminological Positivism: The Movement for Criminal Law Reform in the West, 1870-1940 (to be published in 2020 by Routledge).



Related pages
News and related events