The SPS Department is delighted to welcome Léa Pessin, Raffaella A. Del Sarto, Valentina Di Stasio, Kevin Munger, and Sascha Riaz.
Léa Pessin has joined the Department as Programme Director of Social Inequality and Assistant Professor of Sociology. Léa is also an external research affiliate at the Population Research Institute at the Pennsylvania State University and at the Centre for Research on social Inequalities (CRIS) at Sciences Po. Formerly, she worked as Assistant and Associate Professor of Sociology at the Centre for Research in Economics and Statistics (CREST) in ENSAE Paris, and as Assistant Professor of Sociology and Demography at the Pennsylvania State University.
Pessin received a PhD in Sociology and Demography from Pompeu Fabra University and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Population Research Institute. Her research agenda focuses on the unequal consequences of the gender revolution on women’s work and family outcomes across class, race, and contexts. She applies quantitative methods to cross-national and longitudinal data to explore variation across countries and time. Recently, Pessin was awarded an ERC starting grant, WeEqualize, focusing on the intertwined implications of the gender revolution in shaping social inequalities in work-family strategies among different-sex couples across 24 countries from the 1960s to today.
Raffaella A. Del Sarto is the new Joint Mediterranean Chair at the EUI, a position shared between the SPS Department and the Robert Schuman Centre. Before joining the EUI, she was Associate Professor of Middle East Studies at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, SAIS Europe. Del Sarto was previously a part-time professor at the EUI, where she held the ERC-funded project Borderlands, and a fellow at the Middle East Centre of St Antony’s College, Oxford University. She received her PhD in International Relations from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and her MA in Political Science from the Albert-Ludwigs University in Freiburg.
Del Sarto’s research focuses on the international relations of the Middle East and North Africa (or the Mediterranean Middle East); the region’s relations to Europe; the domestic-foreign policy nexus; regional order(s), borders, and interdependence in the Middle East; the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; and Israel’s foreign and domestic policies.
Valentina Di Stasio has joined the Department as Professor of Sociology. Prior to that, she held positions as Assistant and Associate Professor at Utrecht University, with an affiliation to the European Research Centre on Migration and Ethnic Relations (ERCOMER). In Utrecht, she co-founded and co-led the Interuniversity Network on Diversity, Equity & Inclusion. Di Stasio earned her PhD from the University of Amsterdam and was a postdoctoral researcher at Nuffield College (University of Oxford) and at the WZB Berlin Social Science Centre.
Valentina di Stasio is the principal investigator of the ERC-funded project TARGETS, in which she examines the conditions under which various groups perceive specific workplace situations as discriminatory. Valentina is also the co-principal investigator of the Horizon Europe project EqualStrength, a large-scale, cross-national audit study on the pathways through which discrimination can affect Black, Muslim, and Roma minorities in their access to employment, housing, and childcare services.
Kevin Munger joined the Department as Assistant Professor of Computational Social Science. Prior to the EUI, he held two fellowships at Princeton University and an early career professor and an assistant professor position at Pennsylvania State University. Kevin uses computational and experimental methods to study the implications of the internet and social media for the communication of political information. In 2021, he co-founded the Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media, of which he is currently co-editor. His current research interests include the philosophy of social science, TikTok, American Pragmatism applied to the theory of digital democracy, and Twitch.
Sascha Riaz joined the SPS Department as an Assistant Professor in Comparative Politics. Riaz studied political science in Germany, Taiwan, and the US and completed his PhD at Harvard University in 2022. Before moving to the EUI, he was a Postdoctoral Prize Fellow at Nuffield College, University of Oxford. He does research on political behaviour in industrialised democracies, focusing on immigration, xenophobia, and political violence.