Born in Italy, Vincenzo Ferrone graduated in history with Franco Venturi in 1977 at the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy, University of Turin. After that he was a fellow at the Einaudi Foundation (1979-80) of which, since 2006, he has become a member of the scientific committee. He studied social and cultural history of science with Margaret Candee Jacob in the U.S. (1985) as post-doctoral fellow at the Clark Memorial Library, UCLA.
He is an historian of Old Regime and Enlightenment in Europe and he is Professor of modern history at the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Turin.
He is also the Director of Studies of the first research cycle of the Turin Humanities Programme (2021-2023), which is devoted to the Enlightenment legacy and the rights of man.
His primary research interests lie in the history of Old Regime and Enlightenment in Europe and in the history of rights of man. His current research is aimed at studying human rights and the emergence of the modern political language of the culture of Enlightenment and its consequences in later centuries, up to today’s debates, with a particular interest in the religious confrontation on issues of bioethics and civil liberties.
His latest publications are: Il mondo dell’Illuminismo. Storia di una rivoluzione culturale (2019), The Enlightenment and the Rights of Man (2019), The Enlightenment: History of an Idea (2015).
