About

I am postdoctoral fellow at the University of Waterloo, where I work on my project entitled ‘Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow: Self-Managed Abortion in Italy’. I am also a Visiting Fellow at the Law Department of the European University Institute in Florence and a fellow of the International Reproductive and Sexual Health Law Program, based at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law.

My postdoctoral project draws upon a section of the PhD thesis ‘It’s not that we had the recipe in our pocket!’ An Analysis of the Feminist Movement and the ‘Becoming Legal’ of Abortion in 1970s Italy, that I recently defended at the Kent Law School (passed without corrections) in July 2023. At Kent, I worked under the supervision of Professor Sally Sheldon, Dr Julie McCandless, Professor Maria Drakopoulou, thanks to a ESRC-SeNSS scholarship and a Kent Law School scholarship.

I have also held visiting positions at the Faculty of Law at the University of Technology Sydney (New South Wales, Australia), Melbourne Law School (Victoria, Australia), at the Osgoode Hall Law School (University of York, Canada), at the Cardiff School of Law and Politics (United Kingdom) and, as Erasmus student, I conducted a semester of research at the University of Bonn Law School (Germany). At the University of Catania, I am a fellow of the Legal Clinic ‘Coesione e Diritto’ and of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Gender Studies ‘GENUS’.

I worked as Research Associate and Research Assistant at Kent Law School and Melbourne Law School.

As an abortion-rights advocate, I am a founding member of the Italian Pro-choice Network ‘Rete Italiana Contraccezione e Aborto’ and of ‘Aborto in Pillole’ the first newsletter entirely dedicated on abortion in Italian.

I have a MA in Law (Laurea Magistrale in Giurisprudenza) from the University of Catania with the highest grade and an LL.M in International Law from the University of Kent with distinction. I was awarded the ‘Head of School Prize for Academic Excellence’ from the University of Kent, and previously, my name was included in the list of the best law students of Catania Law School (Anagrafe dei Laureati Eccellenti).

Research interests

My research is strongly influenced by the tradition of feminist legal scholarship and sociology of law, and employs a combination of traditional legal methods, archival study, and original empirical research. Beyond abortion and Italian feminism, my academic interests encompass the wider field of reproductive rights, social movements, civil law tradition and rule of law.

Publications

I have largely written on abortion and gender issues in newspapers, magazines, blogs in Italian and in English. My research papers have been published in academic journals such as International Journal of Gynecology & Obstetrics, The Italian Law Journal, Feminist Legal Studies, Feminist Review, Rivista di studi giuridici sull’orientamento sessuale e identità di genere GenIus, La Comunità Internazionale and Annali dell’Istituto storico italo-germanico in Trento.

Teaching 

 

ph: Lunadigas, Elena. Sardinia, 2020.