David Petruccelli researches and teaches Modern European and International History. His book, A Scourge of Humanity: The Origins of Interpol and the End of Empire in Central and Eastern Europe, published with Oxford University Press in 2025, examines the way that conceptualizations of crime and efforts to fight it were internationalized between the two world wars. His second book project, The War on Porn, traces the rise and fall of the global prohibition of pornography in the twentieth century. He has published articles on related topics in the Journal of Contemporary History, Contemporary European History, Journal of World History, and elsewhere.