Enlightenment legacy: the rights of man in a global perspective

Francisco J. Bellido Sánchez defended his first doctoral thesis at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland (Social Sciences) in 2020 and his second thesis at the University of Málaga, Spain (Philosophy) in 2022. His research interests are constitutionalism, the rule of law, and classical republicanism.

Auguste Bertholet is completing his doctoral dissertation in the Department of History at the University of Lausanne. His research concerns the Swiss political and economic thought of the late eighteenth century. His previous work includes research on Mirabeau the Elder’s correspondence with Sacconay.

Jacopo Bonasera earned a Master Degree in History from the University of Bologna in 2017. On that occasion, he worked on a thesis on melancholy and prophetism in the political thought of Thomas Hobbes. In 2018 he started his PhD studies in History, Cultures, and Global Politics at the University of Bologna. He earned his PhD in 2022, discussing a thesis entitled «A Plausible Science for an Elusive Object. Population, Society, and Government in the Political Thought of T.R. Malthus». His current research regards the concepts of people and population, the interactions between natural and social sciences in the XIX century, and contemporary Neo-Malthusian environmentalism. He authored articles and reviews published in the Italian journals «Filosofia Politica» and «Scienza&Politica».

Graduated cum laude in Historical Sciences at the University of Florence (first reader: Rolando Minuti), Giacomo Carmagnini is currently a PhD student in Historical Studies at the Universities of Florence and Siena (supervisor: Luca Mannori), together with the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne due to a cotutelle program (co-supervisor: Pierre Serna).

Gabriele Caruso is a first-year Ph.D student working under the supervision of Professor Pasquale Palmieri in History, Archaeology and Art History at University of Napoli “Federico II”. His main field of research is focused on history of news in Early Modern History. He is particularly interested in gazettes and “avvisi” that circulated in Italy in the XVII century. He graduated with honours from the University of Bologna (Master’s degree 2019) and Palermo (Bachelor’s degree 2017). He holds first-level Professional Master’s Programmes in Archival, Diplomatic and Paleography (A.Di.P.) at University of Ferrara and second-level Professional Master’s Programmes in Public and Digital History at University of Modena and Reggio Emilia.

Luis De la Peña is currently a student of the Ph.D. in Historical Studies at the University of Florence, a historian from the National University of Colombia, with an MA in Comparative History from the Central European University. His main topics of research are focused temporally on the age of revolutions and geographically in Latin America and the Balkans, with a special interest in military history, public history, and intellectual history.

Aris Della Fontana is a Ph.D. Candidate at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa and at the Université de Lausanne. His doctoral research is on eighteenth-century Venetian economic reform debates, with a particular emphasis on the reception of European political economy.

Gabriel Darriulat is a Ph.D student in political philosophy at Sorbonne University under the supervision of Professor Céline Spector. His research focuses on political philosophy at the age of the Enlightenment with a particular attention on Condorcet and Rousseau. His interests in the Enlightenment studies cover many fields of research (collective decision-making, republicanism, rights of man, etc.) with a particular emphasis on the international communication of ideas and problems.

Fabio Di Nunno holds a PhD in History of International Relations at “Sapienza” University of Rome, after a master in European Political and Administrative Studies at College of Europe of Bruges, a degree in International Relations and Diplomacy at the University of Naples “L’Orientale” and a degree in Public and business communication at the University of Naples “Suor Orsola Benincasa”.

Davide Di Sabatino is a student in the 2nd cycle degree programme in Philosophical Sciences at the University of Padua. His academic interests include the birth of early-modern political concepts, the philosophy of history and the philosophy of language. Extra-academic interests include LGBT+ activism, jazz and electronic music.

Ilaria Ferrara, Ph.D. in Philosophy at the University of Turin, international Ph.D. candidate in Philadelphia (U.S.A.) and currently post-doc researcher at the Italian Institute for Philosophical Studies (IISF) in Naples. Her field of research is on Kant and the theory of emotions, between politics and neuroscience. At the same time, she has a research project on the political thought of the Italian Risorgimento.

Camilla Froio earned her PhD at the University of Florence, Italy, with a dissertation on the legacy of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Laokoon in America throughout the XIXth and the XXth century, focusing in particular on Clement Greenberg’s Marxist interpretation of the German treatise. Moreover, she became a fellow of the Center for Italian Modern Art, New York, where she studied the reception of Alberto Pasini’s Orientalist paintings in Gilded Age America. She is currently Cultrice della Materia at the University of Florence.

Samuel Harrison is the holder of the Derek Brewer Studentship at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, studying the evolution of the concept of citizenship over the course of the French Revolution. He was previously an editor of “Doing History in Public”.

Jesper Lundsby Skov is a Danish historian with a PhD (2019) from the University of Southern Denmark about the political interpretations of civil rights in the Danish constitution 1840-1953. He has been a postdoc at the University of Copenhagen, and he is currently a postdoc at the University of Oslo on a project about the emergence of a Scandinavian concept of civil rights in the late Enlightenment.

Vanessa Massuchetto is a junior postdoctoral fellow at the Maria Sibylla Merian Centre Conviviality-Inequality in Latin America, and holds a Ph.D. in Law (Legal History) from the Federal University of Paraná. Her research interests are women’s experiences, agencies, and convivialities; gender relations; confrontation and social conflicts; criminal and ecclesiastical justices; and social uses of justice throughout the Early Modern Period in the Iberian American World.

Radoslaw Szymanski is a doctoral candidate in modern history at the University of Lausanne, working on an unpublished eighteenth-century project of political reform of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, looking at how a certain strand of modern moral philosophy and natural law informed thinking about affecting societal change under the conditions of deep economic inequalities.