Simona Feci

After graduating in Literature and earning a PhD in Modern and Contemporary History, with a focus on the history of the family and gender identity, Simona Feci became a researcher and then an associate professor of Medieval and Modern Legal History. She taught at the University of Palermo from 2008 to 2024, where she was a member of the international PhD program in Human Rights: Evolution, Protection and Limits and, currently, of the PhD program in Gender Studies. Since 2024, she has taught at the Department of Human and Social Sciences at the University of Naples "L'Orientale." She coordinates the Gender History Research Center there.

She has been a member of the Italian Society of Women Historians since 1993; she was a member of the national board of directors from 2014 to 2016 and president from 2016 to 2020. She coordinated the trilateral research conference Building an Archive of Women's and Gender History in Europe (2017-2019) for Italy and is a member of international research projects dedicated to the history of justice, women's work, and femicide.

She studies the legal status of women, the history of the family, and the history of violence suffered and perpetrated by women, particularly in the domestic sphere and in close relationships, as well as the history of patriarchy. She has published Giulia's Water. Poisoning Wives and Violent Husbands in Seventeenth-Century Rome (2024). She co-edited, with Laura Schettini, Women's Self-Defense. Practices, Law, and Imaginaries in History (2024) and the Dictionary of the History of Gender-Based Violence in Italy (2026).