Advisory board

Francesca Cadeddu

In November 2020, she became a researcher in Contemporary History at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia.
She currently serves as Executive Director of the European research Infrastructure on Religious studies RESILIENCE, Member of the Executive Committee of the European Academy of Religion, and Associate Editor for Brill Research Perspectives Series on Religion and Politics.
She holds a PhD in Political Doctrines from the University of Bologna, where she defended her dissertation Democracy and Catholicism in the United States. Religious Freedom and the Thought of John Courtney Murray.

Alberto Melloni

Full Professor of History of Christianity at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia.
Chair holder of the UNESCO Chair on Religious Pluralism and Peace at the University of Bologna.
Chair of the G20 Interfaith Forum 2021.
He has been an Accademico dei Lincei since 2017.
Since 2020, he has been one of the European Commission’s Chief Scientific Advisors.
He is project coordinator of the starting community ReIReS (Research Infrastructure on Religious Studies) and of the research infrastructure RESILIENCE (REligious Studies Infrastructure: tooLs, Innovation, Experts, conNections and Centres in Europe), headed by FSCIRE. He spearheaded the establishment of the European Academy of Religion, a research platform which includes institutions, associations, academies, publishers, reviews concerned with the study of religion throughout Europe, the Mediterrean, Middle East, the Balkans, Caucasus and Russia. He also founded the La Pira Library in Palermo on the History and Doctrines of Islam whose aim is to parallel the Dossetti Library in Bologna and to gather one of the largest libraries in the world for the history and doctrines of the various Islam denominations, confessions and traditions.
He is the director of the Conciliorum oecumenicorum generaliumque decreta program and of the editorial project on the History of the Desire for Christian Unity.
He is member of the journals «Cristianesimo nella storia», «Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique», «Schweizerischen Zeitschrift für Religions- und Kulturgeschichte», «Studia Historiæ Ecclesiasticæ». He is also a member of the board of «Common Knowledge» edited by Duke University.
Winner of Prin in 2008 and 2017, he participated in the winning application for the Smart City Cluster and the Tiche Cluster launched by MIUR.
In 2020, he received the title of Commendatore della Stella d’Italia by the President of the Italian Republic, on the proposal of the Minister of Foreign Affairs for the promotion of relations of friendship and collaboration between Italy and other countries and the promotion of ties with Italy. He received the Puskin Medal from the Russian Federation in Rome, Capri Storia award in 2015, Nitti award in 2016, Omegna award in 2017, and the award of the Academia dei Filopatridi in 2018.
He studied History and Church History at the University of Bologna, Cornell University and Université de Fribourg. He became a member of FSCIRE in 1982.

Rossella Bottoni

Rossella Bottoni wrote her PhD dissertation on The origins of secularism in Turkey (1839-1938), which received in 2007 the Arturo Carlo Jemolo Award for the best PhD dissertation in Law and Religion-related disciplines. She was researcher and Adjunct Professor of “Religious Factor and New Constitutions: Europe and Africa” and “History and System of Church-State Relations”at the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences at the Catholic University of Milan, and Adjunct Professor of “Law and Religion” at the Department of Political and Legal Sciences and International Studies at the University of Padua, Italy. She is currently Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law, University of Trento, where she teaches “Law and Religion”, “Introduction to Islamic Law” and “Comparative Ecclesiastical Law”.

Her research interests include the legal regulation of religious and belief minorities in Europe; religion and constitutions in Europe and Africa; religious dietary rules, with a focus on discrimination in the workplace, as well as religious slaughter and halal certification; comparative religious law with a special reference to conversion, marriage and the legal condition of women; the European Court of Human Rights’ case law on religious freedom; secularism, Islam and religious minorities in Turkey.

She has published extensively on these topics in academic journals and edited volumes. She authored two monographs in Italian language (The Principle of Secularism in Turkey. A Legal and Historical Perspective, 2012, and Law and Religion in the European Space, 2019), and she is co-editor of Religious Rules, State Law, and Normative Pluralism (Springer, 2016), Routledge Handbook of Religious Laws (Routledge, 2019) and Routledge Handbook of Freedom of Religion or Belief (Routledge, 2021).

She has taken part in two research programmes funded by the European Commission: “DIALREL. Religious slaughter, improving knowledge and expertise through dialogue and debate on issues of welfare, legislation and socio-economic aspects” within the Sixth Framework Programme, and “RELIGARE. Religious diversity and secular models in Europe. Innovative approaches to law and policy” within the Seventh Framework Programme. She is one of the principal investigators of the research project “Atlas of Religious or Belief Minority Rights” (https://atlasminorityrights.eu).

She is a member of the editorial committee of no. 2 of the Italian academic journal Quaderni di diritto e politica ecclesiastica. She is a member of the International Consortium for Law and Religion Studies (ICLARS), the Consociatio Internationalis Studio Iuris Canonici Promovendo, the European Academy of Religion (EuARe) and a Research Associate of the Centre for Law and Religion at Cardiff University. She has peer reviewed articles (Archivio giuridico “Filippo Serafini”; BioLaw Journal; International Journal for Religious Freedom; Journal of Law, Religion and State; Revue du droit des religions; PasSaggi Costituzionali; Quaderni di diritto e politica ecclesiastica), books chapters (Routledge; Cambridge Scholars Publishing) and books (Oxford University Press).

Federico Ruozzi

Federico Ruozzi (federico.ruozzi@unimore.it) is associate professor in History of Christianity at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, where he teaches Visual History and History of interreligious relations. He is fellow at the Fondazione per le scienze religiose (Bologna), where he has been working since 2007 and he is secretary of the international review «Cristianesimo nella storia» since 2008. He was Visiting Fellow at the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism, Notre Dame University (IN).

His field of research is Modern History and Church History. He studied the relationship between religion and media, in particular between the Catholic Church and the television, the Second Vatican Council, and the Italian Catholicism in general.  He coordinated and published the critical edition of the Opera Omnia of Lorenzo Milani (Meridiani Mondadori, 2 voll. 2017); he has presented his research in Italy and abroad (London King’s College, Toronto Ryerson University, Oxford Brookes University, Christ College, Bangalore – India). He coordinates a research team on digital humanities and religious studies. He collaborates with the multimedia lab of the Foundation in planning and producing video-exhibitions and documentaries, with the Italian public television, RAI-TV, for archival research and treatment of historical documentaries and with the Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, as author and editor of iconographical researches.

Kristina Stoeckl

Kristina Stoeckl is professor of sociology at LUISS Rome. From 2015 until 02/2023, she worked at the department of sociology at the University of Innsbruck and became full professor in 2019. She was a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Post-Doc Fellow at the University of Rome Tor Vergata (2009-2012) and APART Fellow of the Austrian Academy of Sciences at the University of Vienna (2012-2015). In 2015, she received an ERC Starting Grant and FWF Start Prize for the project “Postsecular Conflicts”, which she directed as principal investigator from 2015 until 2022. She holds a Phd in Social and Political Sciences from the European University Institute in Florence (2007). Her research areas are sociology of religion, political sociology and political theory, with a focus on politics and religion, on state-religion relations in Russia, norm and anti-gender mobilizations and transnational religious actors. She has published The Russian Orthodox Church and Human Rights (2014) and (together with Dmitry Uzlaner) Moralist International. Russia in the Global Culture Wars (2022) as well as numerous journal articles in Religion, State and Society, Global Networks, Journal of Contemporary Religion and others.

Marco Ventura

PhD at the University of Strasbourg in 1992, since 2001 Marco Ventura is a professor with tenure in law and religion at the University of Siena.

From 2001 to 2020 he has been a member of the Law Department of the University of Siena. Since 2020, while still teaching at the Law School, he is a member of the Department of Social, political and cognitive sciences, which has been selected by the Italian Ministry for University in order to develop in 2018-2022 as a European Centre of Excellence in interdisciplinary research. He is also a member of the European Union funded Jean Monnet Centre of excellence in cultural relations and diplomacy (CREDO) investigating the role of culture in the EU’s external relations and public diplomacy at the University of Siena.

He is an associate researcher at the Center Droit, Religion, Entreprise et Societé of University of Strasbourg and the French National Research Council.

From 2016 to 2022 he has been a member of the panel of experts on freedom of religion or belief of OSCE / ODIHR. In this capacity he co-authored the 2019 OSCE / ODIHR policy guidance on Freedom of religion or belief and security.

He co-authored the 2017 Report on Freedom of religion or belief and religious tolerance for the Intergroup on FoRB of the EU Parliament.

He was the 2019 annual president of the European Consortium for Church and State Research. He was the scientific coordinator of a 2018-2020 EU funded Jean Monnet Project on Security in EU law and policy. He is involved in the 2020-2023 EU funded Erasmus+ project DIG4Future – Digital competencies, Inclusion and Growth for Future generation. He is also involved in the 2020-2023 EU funded project PROTECTing places of wORship (PROTECTOR) on technologies for protection of worship places in Europe.

He is a member of the scientific board of the EU funded Jean Monnet project on Freedom of Belief and Right to Information (FreeBeRi) at Link University Rome.

He was a participant in the G20 interfaith summits of Istanbul 2015, Beijing 2016, Potsdam 2017, Buenos Aires 2018, Tokyo 2019, Riyadh 2020 (online) and Bologna 2021. From 2020 he is the chair of the working group on religion, innovation, technology and infrastructures of the G20 interfaith (IF2020).

He is one of the original signatories of the 2018 Punta del Este Declaration on Human Dignity for Everyone Everywhere

From 2016 to 2021 he was the Director of the Center for Religious Studies at Fondazione Bruno Kessler of Trento, devoted to investigating and enhancing the interaction of religion and innovation.

From 2012 to 2015 he was a professor of canon law and law and religion at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium). From 2013 to 2015 he visited Vietnam as an expert in the dialogue between the European Union and the Vietnamese Committee on Religious Affairs. He has been involved in consultations on legislative reform in Armenia, Montenegro, the Kyrgyz Republic, Uzbekistan and the United Arab Emirates.

He has published extensively on ‘freedom of religion or belief’, ‘law, society and religion’, ‘comparative religious laws’, ‘politics of religion’. He has single-authored 7 books and more than 100 articles in Italian, French and English. Some publications have been translated in German, Russian and Vietnamese. His latest book in English is From Your Gods to Our Gods. A History of Religion in British, Indian and South African Courts (Cascade Books, 2014). His latest book in Italian is Nelle mani di Dio. La super-religione del mondo che verrà (Il Mulino, 2021). His latest edited books are The Legal Status of Old and New Religious Minorities in the European Union (Comares, 2021) and together with A. Palmieri, R. Pavoni and G. Milani, Boosting European Security Law and Policy (Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 2021). His latest journal article is M. Ventura (2020), ‘The Formula ‘Freedom of Religion or Belief’ in the Laboratory of the European Union’ in Studia z Prawa Wyznaniowego, 23, 7-53. Also see Mauro Gatti, Pasquale Annicchino, Judd Birdsall, Valeria Fabretti & Marco Ventura (2019) ‘Quantifying Persecution: Developing an International Law-based Measurement of Freedom of Religion or Belief’, in The Review of Faith & International Affairs, 17:2, 87-96.

He is a member of the Editorial / Scientific Board of the Ecclesiastical Law Journal (Cambridge University Press), the Revue du droit des religions (Presses universitaires de Strasbourg), Derecho y Religion (Delta publicaciones), Politica e Società (Il Mulino), the Journal of the Sociology of Law and Religion (University of Nicosia School of Law) and Studia z Prawa Wyznaniowego (Wydawnictwo Katolicki Uniwersytet Lubelski Jana Pawła II).