Valentina Volpe (1983) is a Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public and International Law (MPIL) of Heidelberg.
She is currently an Associate Lecturer at Lille Catholic University (campus of Paris) and at LUISS University of Rome. She is also a visiting lecturer at the UN-mandate University for Peace (UPEACE) in San José, Costa Rica and has been a visiting professor at the CUPL of Beijing and at the University of Mannheim, Germany.
Valentina holds a PhD magna cum laude in Law and Legal Theory obtained from the Italian Institute of Human Sciences (SUM) of Naples (today Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa) in Global Administrative Law and International Law entitled “Global Dimensions of Democracy” (supervisor Prof. Sabino Cassese).
She has been visiting researcher at Yale Law School and spent research periods at the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence and at the European Commission for Democracy through Law (Venice Commission).
Valentina graduated with honors from the University of Trieste, where she is “cultore della materia” (honorary title) at the Department of Political and Social Sciences; she also studied at the University of Strasbourg Robert Schumann and worked as an intern at the European Parliament in Brussels as well as at the Italian Embassy in Beijing.
Before joining the MPIL she worked as a project manager for a grassroots NGO in the areas of international cooperation and human rights protection in Italy and Sri-Lanka.
At the MPIL she promoted and coordinates the first MPIL Internship Programme and the MPIL discussion forum Dialoghi Italiani.
Valentina is among the co-organizers, together with Anne Peters and Stefano Battini, of the international conference “Remedies against Immunity? Reconciling international and domestic law after the Italian Constitutional Court’s Sentenza 238/2014” at Villa Vigoni, Lake Como, May 2017.
She has been a member of IRPA since 2014 and a member of the Academic Advisory Board of the Heidelberg Journal of International Law / Zeitschrift für Foreign öffentliches Recht und Völkerrecht (ZaöRV) since 2015.
Her areas of interests intersect the fields of global, European and international public law, encompassing disciplines such as global governance, democracy promotion, human rights, comparative public law, and European Law.