New fellows in July

In July, the Käte Hamburger Kolleg "Legal Unity and Pluralism" welcomes two more fellows who are, in fact, familiar faces. Legal historian Prof Dr Ferdinando Mazzarella is starting the second half of his twelve-month fellowship, having already been a guest at the Kolleg last winter semester. Legal scholar and legal historian Dr Sebastian M. Spitra was part of the cohort of "Digital Fellows" during the Kolleg's start-up phase in the pandemic period and is now spending a three-months fellowship on site at the Kolleg. We wish them both a successful stay in Münster and look forward to further fruitful collaboration.

The new fellows in profile:

Prof. Dr. Ferdinando Mazzarella (fellowship: July – December 2024)
Ferdinando Mazzarella obtained his doctorate at the University of Milano “Statale”. In 2010, he obtained the National qualification as Associate Professor at Naples University SOB and in 2017 the National habilitation for tenured Full Professorship in Legal History. He was a fellow at the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History in Frankfurt am Main and a guest lecturer at several universities, including Madrid UAM, Madrid “Carlos III” and Münster. From 2017 to 2019 he was one of the principal investigators of the research project on “Civil Law in the post-bourgeois Era: 100 Years of Private Social Law in Germany, France and Italy”. Since 2019, he is a Full Professor of Legal History at the University of Palermo. At the Kolleg, he works on a comparison of codification and contract law in Fascism and National Socialism.

Dr. Sebastian M. Spitra (fellowship: July – September 2024)
Sebastian M. Spitra received his doctorate in the history of international law from the University of Vienna in 2018. His dissertation "Die Verwaltung von Kultur im Völkerrecht. Eine postkoloniale Geschichte" was published by Nomos. After stays at the University of Michigan and the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History in Frankfurt am Main as well as a legal clerkship (Referendariat) at the Higher Regional Court of Vienna, he has been a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Legal and Constitutional History at the University of Vienna since 2020. In 2021, he was already a Digital Fellow at the Käte Hamburger Kolleg Münster. Here he is working on the concept of exception in the justification of private international law.