Visiting Researchers

Andrea Christou

Andrea Christou is a PhD Politics student at the University of Edinburgh. Her research focuses on the influence of citizen discourse on EU foreign policy decision-making. She holds a Master of Philosophy in International Relations and Politics from the University of Cambridge, and a Bachelor of Arts in History with a Minor in Political Science from the University of South Florida. Her research interests include EU foreign, security and defence policy, as well as trade policy and the linkages between external policy areas.

Anna Clemente

Anna is a PhD Candidate in Political and Social Sciences at the European University Institute. Her research focuses on the origins of meritocratic beliefs and their persistence over time, both in citizens’ attitudes and within political discourse. She employs a combination of experimental methods, causal inference techniques and computational text analysis. She is currently working on tracing the evolution of meritocracy in political discourse through a computational quantitative analysis of the past 100 years of US congressional speeches. Anna has visited Stanford University as a Schuman Fulbright Scholar. Previously, she completed an MPhil in European Politics (Oxford, 2020).

Alessia Paolillo

Alessia Paolillo is currently a PhD student in "Civilization of Asia and Africa", curriculum East Asia, at the University of Rome, Sapienza. She holds a BA and an MA in "Oriental languages and civilization" at the University of Rome, Sapienza and a second-level MA in "International Public Affairs" at Luiss Guido Carli University. She is also an adjunct member of the Interdepartmental Study Center for Studies and Documentation on China and East Asia of the University Roma Tre, and before starting her PhD she worked for an Italian think tank.

Her research focuses on China's contemporary foreign policy discourse.