Mattia Petruzziello is a historian and is pursuing his doctorate at the Department of History at the University of Zurich with a Doc.CH scholarship from the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF). In his dissertation, he examines the lives of homosexual men in Switzerland between 1967 and 2009. He previously studied contemporary and economic history, modern history and political science at the Universities of Zurich and Heidelberg. His master's thesis dealt with the processes of differentiation within the homosexual movement(s) in Zurich between 1968 and 1973, for which he received a semester prize from the University of Zurich.