Vanessa Massuchetto is a legal historian, holds a Ph.D. from the Federal University of Paraná, Brazil, and is currently a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory, Frankfurt am Main.

Her current research project, titled “Women and Uses of Criminal Justice: Colonial Normativities in Southern Iberian-American Worlds (17th-18th centuries)”, focuses on the dynamics of women's strategic actions in criminal lawsuits from both secular and ecclesiastical jurisdictions of the Northeast of the Río de la Plata from 1680 until 1800. Her central inquiry explores how, why, and in which conflict situations women made use of the criminal justice, unraveling their maneuvers of different ranges of normativities and discovering their agencies, knowledge, experiences, perspectives, daily lives, sociabilities and support networks they might have cultivated.

In her PhD thesis, titled “Women, conflicts and normativities: the criminal justice and the feminine in Curitiba and Paranaguá in late 18th century”, Dr. Massuchetto discovered that the criminal justice of colonial societies was developed based on the society, creating a  communitary justice that followed normativities that were not written in the legislation. Through criminal lawsuits, she manages to identify the social dynamics between the parties, their families and the neighborhood. This way, she accesses how women’s actions impacted their society .