Throughout the months of September and October several new academic staff have joined IBEI. Their duties will basically be carrying out their research projects and conducting some lectures for the Master in International Relations.
 Pablo Astorgais an economist with considerable academic and market-oriented experience in the analysis of developing countries. He has been a senior economist at Oxford Economics since 2001, with responsibility for assessing the Latin American economies. In recent years Pablo has combined rigorous academic research activity with project-management assignments. Recently he has been working on issues of economic growth, productivity, and real exchange rates in Latin America and on the creation of an economic history database for the region (OxLAD). This research has been published in The Journal of Development Economics and The Economic History Review, among others. Pablo has also been involved in a number of consultancy projects, including a study of the developmental potential of air services and the economic and social contribution of tourism. Pablo has an M.Sc. in Development Economics and a D.Phil. in Economics and from the University of Oxford. He also has an MBA from IESA, Venezuela. Before joining Oxford Economics he was a research fellow at St Antony’s College, Oxford. For his doctoral thesis he researched the economic effects of political change. He is fluent in English and Spanish.
 Valeria Bello graduated in International Politics at the University of Naples “L’Orientale” and obtained a Master’s Degree in International Relations at the University of Bologna. She obtained her Ph.D. in Sociology and Political Sociology at the University of Florence in 2007. Her doctoral thesis discussed European identity, focusing on its political, social and international meanings. She was formerly a researcher at the Jean Monnet European Studies Centre, University of Trento (2003–9).
Patrick Cullen holds a Ph.D. in International Relations from the London School of Economics. He is a published author and acknowledged expert on the global private security industry as well as on commercial responses to maritime piracy. His current research interests include theorising the dispersal of security governance away from a state monopoly towards a network of public, private, and hybrid security actors.
Margarita Petrova is an Assistant Professor at IBEI, where she will be teaching courses in International Relations and International Security. Prior to joining IBEI in September 2009, she was a Marie Curie research fellow and a Max Weber postdoctoral fellow at the European University Institute in Florence. She holds a Ph.D. in Government from Cornell University (2007), and her doctoral thesis, entitled “Leadership Competition and the Creation of Norms: A Cross-National Study of Weapons Restrictions”, received the 2008 Helen Dwight Reid award from the American Political Science Association for the best dissertation in international relations, law, and politics.
Tal Sadeh is a Lecturer in the Department of Political Science of Tel-Aviv University. He completed an MA in Economics and a Ph.D. in the Department of International Relations (2001). Dr Sadeh recently taught at the Watson Institute for International Studies of Brown University. His research deals with the political economy of EU–Israeli relations, the domestic politics of exchange rates, and the sustainability of the European Economic and Monetary Union. He is the author of Sustaining European Monetary Union: Confronting the Cost of Diversity (Lynne Rienner, 2006), and of several articles dealing with international political economy. |
