Research Interests
Human rights, comparative constitutional law, social movements, LGBT rights, intersectionality
Research Areas
Europe, South America
Profile
Stefano Osella is an Assistant Professor at the University of Hong Kong. He previously held research positions at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Bocconi University, and the New York University School of Law, where he was a Post-Doctoral Global Fellow. He holds a Magister Juris from the University of Oxford, as well as an LLM and a PhD in Law from the European University Institute in Florence.
Osella is a comparative public lawyer whose work spans socio-legal theory, equality law, and comparative legal theory, with a particular focus on minority rights. He is particularly interested in law and anthropology. His forthcoming monograph, Gender Diversity in Public Law: Between Recognition and Control (Oxford University Press, 2026), examines the legal governance of gender diversity in public law frameworks. His research primarily focuses on continental Europe—especially Germany, Austria, France, and Italy—while his recent work engages with constitutional transformations in Latin America, with a growing emphasis on Colombia.
Why Law & Anthropology?
My research deals with feelings, sensations, emotions, and how the law interacts with them. I am trying to get at the root of how people understand and express themselves, feel, and love, and how the law defines – and even influences – all of it. The only way to do this is to listen to the people concerned. I need to give voice to those human experiences, and the combination of law and anthropology – more so than any other legal or socio-legal methodology – gives me the instruments to do precisely that.