Donatella Della Porta is professor of political science, founding dean of the Faculty  of Political and Social Sciences  and Director of the PhD program in Political Science and Sociology at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Florence, where she also leads the Center on Social Movement Studies (Cosmos).

Among the main topics of her research: social movements, political violence, terrorism, corruption, the police and protest policing. She has directed a major ERC project Mobilizing for Democracy, on civil society participation in democratization processes in Europe, the Middle East, Asia and Latin America.

In 2011, she was the recipient of the Mattei Dogan Prize for distinguished achievements in the field of political sociology; in 2021, she received the Research Awards of the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung in recognition of her lifetime’s research activities. In 2022, she has been nominated International Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and, in 2023, member of the Accademia dei Lincei. In 2024, she has received the John D. McCarthy Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Scholarship of Social Movements and Collective Behavior, She is Honorary Doctor of the universities of Lausanne, Bucharest, Goteborg, Jyvaskyla, Cyprus and the University of Peloponnese.

She is the author or editor of 100 books and more than150 journal articles and 150 contributions in edited volumes (h Index 101; 57000 citations). Among her recent books are: Guerra all’antisemitismo? Il panico morale cme strumento di repressione politica (Altreconomia, 2024) Partecipare e comunicare durante una pandemia (Il Mulino, 2024): Contentious Politics in Emergency Critical Junctures (Cambridge University Press, 2022); Labour conflicts in the digital age (Bristol University Press 2022, with  R. Chesta and L. Cini), The encyclopedia of political and social movements (Wiley, 2nd edition. 2022, with D. Snow, D. McAdam and B. Klandermans), Resisting the Backlash: Street Protest in Italy (Routledge, 2022), with  Alberto Vannucci, La corruzione come sistema  (Il Mulino, 2021), with Elias Steinhilper (eds.), Contentious Migrant Solidarity (Routledge, 2021), with Lorenzo Cini and Cesar Guzman (eds.),  Student Movements in Late Neoliberalism. Forms of Organization, Alliances, and Outcomes (Springer, 2021);  Social Movements: An introduction, 3rd edition (Blackwell, 2020); Can Social Movements Save Democracy? (Polity, 2020),  Die schoene neue Demokratie. Ueber das potentiale soziale Bewegungen (Campus  Verlag, 2020), with Lorenzo Cini and Cesar Guzman, Contesting Higher Education (Bristol University Press, 2020), with  Pietro Castelli Gattinara, Andrea Felicetti, Konstantinos Eleftheriadis, Discoursive Turns and Critical Junctures, Oxford University Press, 2020).