Vanessa Massuchetto

Dr. Vanessa Massuchetto is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory (2024-2026), specializing in women's legal history within colonial Iberian-American contexts. Her research examines gender, normativity, and criminal justice systems in early modern South America.

Her research focuses on women's strategic use of colonial justice systems in 17th-18th century Río de la Plata region, analyzing how women manipulated normative frameworks across secular and ecclesiastical jurisdictions to achieve social justice. Key areas include feminist legal theory, colonial normativities in Brazil/Paraguay/Uruguay/Argentina, and historical analysis of court cases involving sexualities.

Her recent publications demonstrate strong trends in global legal history with emphasis on local manifestations of normative knowledge ('glocalizations'), particularly regarding women's agencies in criminal lawsuits. Work consistently bridges European and Global South perspectives through Iberian colonial frameworks.

• Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship (2024-2026)

Massuchetto actively collaborates with international research teams including the Maria Sibylla Merian Centre on Conviviality–Inequality in Latin America. Her work utilizes historical archives to reconstruct women's navigation of Portuguese and Spanish jurisdictions in border regions where political boundaries shifted during colonial periods.

Current research involves analyzing how women leveraged criminal justice systems to trigger desired social dynamics beyond institutional decisions, particularly in cases involving honor, premarital sex, and jurisdictional conflicts in fluid territorial contexts.