Stefano Osella is a Research Fellow in the Law & Anthropology Department of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle. Previously, he was a Post-Doctoral Global Fellow at NYU Law School in New York. He holds a Magister Juris from the University of Oxford, and an LLM and a PhD in Law from the European University Institute in Florence. His doctoral dissertation is a theoretical and comparative study of legal gender categories in the law and how such categories are imposed on individuals. He has published in the fields of human rights and comparative constitutional law, with a focus on queer theory and LGBT rights.

Osella’s main research interest relates to how individual identity is constructed in and through the law. Inspired by his academic and activist experience and personal interests, his investigations focus on how the law defines discrete gender and sexual identities, and how such definitions impact, practically and emotionally, the lives of people for whom such definitions are coined, primarily LGBT and intersex people. Geographically, he concentrates on continental Europe, specifically Germany, Austria, France, and Italy. In light of the constitutional developments taking place in Latin America, however, he is developing a keen interest in the area – especially in Colombia.