Giacomo Canepa studied Contemporary History at the Scuola Normale superiore and at the University of Pisa. He obtained his PhD in 2021 from Sciences Po Paris and the Scuola Normale superiore with a thesis entitled “A social policy of rehabilitation. A transnational history of the legitimisation of the right to social assistance, Italy and France 1940s-1970s”. His main research fields are the transformations of social welfare policies, the conceptualization of social rights and the history of migrant and refugee flows in Italy and France between the end of World War II and the early 1970s. Since 2018, he has held different teaching positions in Italy and France.
He will carry out his MSCA project entitled “Social protection and Demographic Change” (SPADE) at the Department of History of the University of Basel and at the Department of Political Science, Law, and International Studies of the University of Padova, under the supervision of Martin Lengwiler and Lorenzo Mechi. His project aims to analyse how demography became a core element of modern welfare state policies in France, Italy and Switzerland in the period between the 1960s and the 1990s.