Raffaella A. Del Sarto

Raffaella A. Del Sarto is Academic Director, Master of Arts in International Affairs, and Associate Professor of Middle East Studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, SAIS Europe campus. She is interested in the international relations of the Middle East and North Africa—particularly in relation to Europe, the domestic-foreign policy nexus, questions of borders, power and interdependence, the development of the regional order 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); Contested State Identities and Regional Security in the Euro-Mediterranean Area (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), and 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, Mediterranean Politics and several other journals and volumes.

Prior to coming to Johns Hopkins SAIS Europe, Raffaella A. Del Sarto was a part-time professor at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, where she directed the BORDERLANDS research project, funded by the European Research Council (ERC). Prior to this she was a Pears Fellow in Israel and Mediterranean Studies at the University of Oxford (The Middle East Centre of St. Antony's College), and prior to this, a Marie Curie Fellow and a Jean Monnet Fellow at the European University Institute, and a lecturer at the University of Bologna, Italy.

She received her MA from the Albert-Ludwigs University in Freiburg, Germany, and her PhD (summa cum laude) from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. During the Oslo peace process in the late 1990s, she worked as a project manager with the German Friedrich Naumann Foundation in Jerusalem, managing a German government fund in support of peacemaking.

She is fluent in five languages—English, German, French, Italian and Hebrew—and knows some Arabic and some Spanish.