Part-time Assistant Professor
Max Weber Programme for Postdoctoral Studies
Max Weber Fellow
Department of Political and Social Sciences
Contact info
roberto.valli@eui.eu
[+39] 055 4685 813
Office
Villa Sanfelice, SF013
Working languages
Italian, English, German
Roberto Valli is Max Weber Fellow and part-time Assistant Professor of AI at the Department of Political and Social Sciences. A political scientist by training, he specializes in the political economy of identity, conflict, and religion. Before, joining EUI in 2025, he was Postdoctoral Research Associate at Princeton University, and earned his PhD in 2024 in the International Conflict Research group at ETH Zurich. He was a visiting researcher at the University of Konstanz in 2025, and visited the Institute for Eastern European and Eurasian Studies at UC Berkeley in 2022.His main research focuses on the political economy of nation building and identity formation. His dissertation examined how border changes shaped ethnolinguistic behavior in Europe between 1816 and 1938. The second research agenda is concerned with the changing role of the religion in politics, with a focus on the Catholic Church. His work combines spatially explicit observational data and computational methods to investigate political phenomena in novel settings and with innovative research designs.As part of his Max Weber fellowship, Roberto is working on both agendas, with various projects that investigate the politics of language standardization, how migrants respond to discrimination, and how domestic politicians interacted with religious authorities