Vanessa Massuchetto is a legal historian, holds a Ph.D. from the Universidade Federal do 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 intricate dynamics of women's strategic actions in criminal lawsuits. She works with 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”, Vanessa discovered that the criminal justice of colonial societies was mainly made by the society, following normativities that were not written in 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 in the lawsuits impacted the society in which these women lived.