Maria Federica Moscati (Marica) joined the University of Sussex in 2015. She holds a PhD from SOAS; she is a lawyer (non-practising), trained mediator and she is love with dance!. She has previously convened and lectured at SOAS, Queen Mary and UCL - University of London, and at the University of Shantou in the People’s Republic of China. Before undertaking her doctorate she practised as family lawyer, and worked for Save the Children Italy where she specialised in children’s rights. Her main research interests lie in issues relating to Dispute Resolution, Comparative Legal Studies (focus on kinship, family relations, dispute resolution), Children's rights, Queer people and the law, and their intersection. New areas of research that Marica is exploring concern Dance and the Law; and Hormones and the Law. 

She is co-director of the Centre for Cultures of Reproduction, Technologies and Health at University of Sussex; co-editor for EUP of the book series Comparative Legal Studies, Society and Justice; co-editor of the journal Amicus Curiae; Associate Research Fellow at IALS;  member of the Editorial Board of The Journal of Comparative Law; Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

 For her research on mediation and non-heteronormative families she has been awarded the National Mediation Award for Diversity and Inclusion 2022. She was finalist in the 2020 OUP Law Teacher of the Year Award.

Marica is committed to bringing dance practice — particularly ballet — into legal research, classrooms, and conferences. In January 2024, she designed and launched Dance in Law, Politics and Sociology, an interdisciplinary initiative that integrates studio-based dance sessions into socio-legal teaching to enhance students’ confidence, foster inclusion, and support mental wellbeing.

Below the statement Marica and some students  of Dance in LPS, wrote for IWD to celebrate diversity, and inclusion in dance:

“We are a diverse group of women, students and teachers. 
We dance to learn about law, politics and sociology.
We dance to empower, include, and unite. We dance to navigate social justice. 
We dance to learn. We dance to respect and celebrate all bodies. 
We dance to smile, to cry, to feel. 
We dance to resist.
We invite you to dance with us...six, seven, eight...Everyone can dance...!”

Marica works directly through dance practice. In the project Dancing Belonging, she led workshops at Sussex to cultivate community and wellbeing among staff and students. At the 25th World Congress on Justice with Children, she created and facilitated Dancing Children’s Rights, where young activists developed movement sequences expressing their embodied rights under the UNCRC.

Together with Sean Mulcahy, she contributes to the development of Dance/Law theory and convenes the Dance/Law stream at the SLSA conference, which includes Legal Scholars at the Ballet Barre, a practical ballet session for legal scholars. As part of this, Marica has lead several dance/law workshops during which has involved audience in practical dance and choreography.

She is currently developing The Power of Battement Jete': Conversation between Dance and Law an empirical, dance-practice led project  that explores how different dance genres, choreograpy and dancers open up distinct jurisprudential questions and perspectives into dispute resolution, access to justice, human rights, comparative legal studies, and pedagogy. At the same time, the project investigates the reciprocal relationship between dance and law, showing how each discipline enriches, challenges and reveals the limits of the other. She collects data through interviews with professional and non-professional dancers, choreographers, dance teachers and musicians; autoethnography (her attending classes and performing) and observation of performances (including rehearsals and behind the scenes) and classes. She uses dance-practice-led approach following her own embodied journey through dance classes and choreography; thus, themes and questions emerge from her own embodied experience in the studio - for example, a masterclass on pas de deux, inspired questions on how trust, dependency and negotiation between dancers might relate to collaboration in dispute resolution, and work in class with students.

Marica combines academic interests with activism. As cause lawyer she has been involved in a number of domestic and European court cases including among others: Case of Orlandi and Others v. Italy, App nos. 26431/12; 26742/12; 44057/12 and 60088/12 (ECtHR, first section, 14 December 2017) and Constitutional Court of Italy, decision 11June 2014 no. 170. She has also served as adviser for the National Committee of Nepal on Sexual Orientation, and Same-Sex Marriage, and has organised several initiatives in support of children's rights.

To support feminist initiatives in Italy she co-founded Semia - Fondo delle Donne in Italy (https://semiafund.org).

She is a volunteer for the charity icandance (https://icandance.org.uk/). 


Admin roles:
-Faculty of Social Sciences PGR Lead