Biography

Roberto Valli is Max Weber Fellow at the Department of Political and Social Sciences. By training, he is a political scientist specializing in the political economy of identity, conflict, and religion. He was Postdoctoral Research Associate at Princeton University during the 2024-2025 academic year. Before, he earned his PhD in 2024 in the International Conflict Research group at ETH Zurich. In the summer of 2025, he was a visiting researcher at the University of Konstanz, and in 2022 he visited the Institute for Eastern European and Eurasian Studies at UC Berkeley.
His first research agenda 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, he plans to continue work on both agendas, with various projects that investigate how changing states in nineteenth and twentieth century Europe contributed the formation of ethnically homogenous populations, and how domestic politicians interacted with religious authorities.

Mentor

• Elias, Dinas

Mentor

• Sascha, Riaz