The University of Florence is an important and influential centre for research and higher training in Italy, with 1,800 lecturers and internal research staff, 1,600 technical and administrative staff, and over 1,600 research assistants and doctoral students. It offers a wide range of study programmes at various levels and in all areas of knowledge. Over 130 Degree courses (First and Second Cycle, corresponding to Bachelor’s and Master’s Degrees) organised in 10 Schools, with a population of about 51,000 enrolled students, one-fourth of which come from outside of Tuscany. There are over 9,000 degrees awarded each year in Florence. According to the alumni data, the percentage of students who are in the workforce one year after their First Level degree is above national average. The University of Florence has a natural international vocation and the development of internationalization is one of its strategic priorities.
Prof. Dr Veronica Federico is the Italian team’s P.I. for the D.Rad research. She is Associate Professor of Comparative Public Law at the University of Florence. Veronica obtained her PhD magna cum laude at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris (2005). Research Associate with the University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa) from 2000 to 2005 and Research Fellow with the Boston College (USA) study program in Italy (2009-2016), Veronica participated in several large-scale national and international research projects. Principal investigator for the University of Florence in the following EU funded Horizon 2020 projects: TransSOL, on transnational solidarity; SIRIUS, on refugees, asylum seekers and migrants’ integration in European labour markets; and RESPOND, on migration governance. Her research interests include: Migration studies; African studies; African Comparative Constitutional Law; Fundamental and Human rights; Constitutional and Democratic Transitions.
Giovanna Spanò is Research Fellow in Comparative Public Law at University of Florence. She graduated in Law at University of Pisa, then attending a PhD Program in Legal and Social Sciences, on fundamental rights in the global society. Following a post-doc on forced migrations and refugees’ rights through a comparative approach, she worked in immigration offices, supporting migrants in the legal procedure concerning their requests. She teaches Public Law at the Department of Political Sciences in Lucca and she is teaching assistant in Islamic Studies (Department of History) and in Comparative Public Law (Department of Law) at University of Pisa. She worked as a tutor in the European project “European Law and Gender”, at Department of Law, University of Pisa. Her research mainly involves Sharīʿa based systems from a macro-comparative constitutional perspective, legal pluralism and particularism, Islamism, political Islam and intercultural issues.
Silvia Sassi is Associate Professor in Comparative Public Law at the University of Florence. Degree in Law from the University of Pavia. PhD in“Constitutional and administrative history of the contemporary age”, University of Pavia. Research fellow at the Faculty of Law of the University of Pavia. Stagiaire at the International Institute of Administrative Sciences (IISA), Bruxelles and visiting scholar on women’s rights at the University of York (UK). She has carried out research at the European Parliament, the European Commission and the Historical Archives of the European Communities, Brussels. She has been a permanent researcher in Institutions of Public Law at the Faculty of Political Science of the University of Milan. Silvia`s research interests focus on the regulation of lobbying from a comparative legal perspective and on the participation of civil society in general in decision-making processes. Recently, she has also been working on the impact of new digital technologies on human rights and on the configuration of transnational law.
Dr. Alessandro Rosanò is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Legal Sciences of the University of Florence and Adjunct Professor of International Law and EU Law at the University of Valle d’Aosta. He holds a master’s degree in Law with Distinction (2012) and a PhD in Law (2016) from the University of Padova. He has been a Visiting PhD Student at the Jagiellonian University of Cracow (2015) and a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Law of the University of Turin (2018-2021). His research interests include judicial cooperation in criminal matters, judicial independence in Europe and the rule of law crisis in the European Union.
Chiara Favilli is an Associate Professor of European Union Law at the University of Florence since 2014. She has also been associate Professor at LUMSA University in Rome and Palermo since 2010. She holds a PhD in European Human Rights from the Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies in Pisa. She is the author of three monographs (International limits to the expulsion of aliens, Non-discrimination in the European Union and Migration law in Italy) and a number of academic articles in several subjects of EU law (a full list of publications is available here). The red thread of her research is the development of the European integration process, the impact of EU law at national level and the role of national governments in shaping EU policies. Besides academic activities, she is involved with NGOs, lawyers, judges and public institutions in training courses dealing with EU law in general or with a special focus on migration, asylum and non-discrimination; additionally she has cooperated in several projects in the same fields. She is the scientific coordinator of a cooperation agreement between the Department of Legal Studies to which she belongs and the Legal Service of the Italian Foreign Office since 2017. Moreover, she is the Italian member of the European Network of independent experts in the non-discrimination field since 2012.