Biography
Raffaella A. Del Sarto is currently a Visiting Fellow at the Robert Schuman Centre and the Incoming Joint Chair in Mediterranean Studies, SPS Department and Robert Schuman Centre. She was previously Associate Professor of Middle East Studies and Academic Director of the Master of Arts in International Affairs at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), SAIS Europe campus.
Her research interests and areas of expertise include the international relations of the Middle East and North Africa—particularly in relation to Europe; the nexus between domestic and foreign policies; questions of regional order(s), borders, and interdependence in the Middle East; the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; and Israel’s foreign and domestic policies.
She is the author of Borderlands: Europe and the Mediterranean Middle East (Oxford University Press, 2021); Israel under Siege: The Politics of Insecurity and the Rise of the Israeli Neo-Revisionist Right (Georgetown University Press, 2017); and Contested State Identities and Regional Security in the Euro-Mediterranean Area (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). She is also the editor of Fragmented Borders, Interdependence and External Relations: The Israel-Palestine-European Union Triangle (Palgrave Macmillan 2015). She has co-edited Resisting Europe: Practices of Contestation in the Mediterranean Middle East (University of Michigan Press, 2020, with Simone Tholens) and The Convergence of Civilizations: Constructing a Mediterranean Region (University of Toronto Press, 2006, with Emanuel Adler, Beverly Crawford and Federica Bicchi). Her articles have appeared in International Affairs, The Middle East Journal, Journal of Common Market Studies, Democratization, Geopolitics, Mediterranean Politics and several other journals and volumes.
During her sabbatical (2019-2020), she was Robert Schuman Distinguished Scholar Fellow at the EUI’s Robert Schuman Centre. Before joining Johns Hopkins SAIS Europe, she was a part-time professor at the Schuman Centre where she directed the BORDERLANDS research project, funded by the European Research Council (ERC). Prior to this she was a Pears Fellow at Oxford University’s St Antony’s College, and prior to this, a Marie Curie Fellow and a Jean Monnet Fellow at the EUI. She received her PhD (summa cum laude) from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and her MA from the Albert-Ludwigs University in Freiburg, Germany. In the late 1990s, during the Oslo process, she worked as a project manager with the German Friedrich Naumann Foundation in Jerusalem, managing a German government fund in support of Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking.
She is fluent in English, French, German, Italian, and Hebrew, and knows some Arabic and some Spanish.