Edwards Lecture: Federico Varese, "Current Challenges in the Study of Organized Crime"

2011 John Ll. J. Edwards Lecture

Sponsored by the Centre of Criminology, Faculty of Law, and Woodsworth College

Professor Federico Varese
Oxford University

"Current Challenges in the Study of Organized Crime"

Monday, January 17, 2011
4:30 p.m., with reception to follow

Centre of Criminology, Rm. 150
14 Queen's Park Crescent West, Toronto

Federico Varese has quickly become one of the world's most eminent authorities on organized crime.  Educated at the University of Bologna, at Oxford and at Cambridge, his research career began by studying post-Soviet Russia.  He carried out empirical field research in Russia in the 1990s, that resulted in his doctoral thesis and in a prize-winning book, The Russian Mafia: Private Protection in a New Market Economy (Oxford UP, 2001), translated into Polish, Dutch, and shortly into Chinese.  A key feature of his more recent work is the use of the comparative method and social network analysis to map how mafias move, both within and between countries; this is the subject of his 2011 book, Mafias on the Move (Princeton University Press).  His most recent publication is a four-volume edited anthology, Organized Crime, published by Routledge in 2010.  He has also a parallel interest in the rescue of persecuted minorities and has written on the rescue of Jews during the Nazi occupation of Europe.