Stefano Maria Torelli is Associate Research Fellow at ISPI. His research topics include International Relations of the Middle East and North Africa, Jihadist movements and the Kurdish question. He teaches History and Institutions of the Middle East at the University IULM in Milan and is the coordinator of the summer school on the International relations of the Middle East at ISPI. Since 2013, he has been the Scientific coordinator of the "Atlante Geopolitico Treccani". He occasionally is also a political analyst for the consultancy Oxford Analytica and for the Italian Parliament.
Stefano has appeared on Italian and international media, such as Newsweek, El Paìs, Hürriyet, RSI, RAI, Sky, LA7, as an expert of Islamic and Middle Eastern issues. As a scholar, Torelli published several articles and essays on international academic reviews, such as "The British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies", "Middle East Policy", "Insight Turkey", "The Jamestown Foundation's Terrorism Monitor", "Open Democracy" and Jadaliyya.
He received his PhD in History of International Relations from the University of Rome “La Sapienza” in 2013. Since September 2017, he will be Visiting Research Fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR).
He is also the author of several monographs and edited books, among them the essay on the Sunni-Shia divide "Lo scisma della mezzaluna" (Mondadori, 2017, with M. Campanini), "Kurdistan. La nazione invisibile" (Mondadori, 2016), "La Tunisia Contemporanea" (Il Mulino, 2015) and “La Primavera araba. Origini ed effetti delle rivolte che stanno cambiando il Medio Oriente” (Vita e Pensiero, 2012, with M. Mercuri).