Sara Silvestri
Sara Silvestri is a social scientist fascinated by the multiple ways in which faith affects politics, public policies and global order and how political and global institutions respond to and engage with religious mobilisation and identities. A European citizen settled in the UK, she is Senior Lecturer at City St George’s University of London, where she teaches religion and politics, EU institutions and geopolitics, and leads a research cluster on the future of European democracy. Having received her Master and PhD from the University of Cambridge, she keeps collaborating with the POLIS department and the Divinity Faculty (Interfaith Programme) and is a ByeFellow at St Edmund’s College.
Sara was also educated in Italy (La Sapienza Uni), Belgium (ULB) and France (Paris Sud and Institut Catholique) and is also a qualified journalist specialising in diversity and religious affairs.
Her research focused for many years on the politics of and about Islam in the Europe (both at the level individual states as well as supranationally at EU level); more recently she has turned to broader questions of the relevance of religion in EU public policy and in diplomacy, as well as the role of the Catholic church in the global governance of migration, and broader ecumenical Christian efforts to respond to problems affecting global order, from refugees, to climate change, to war and peace.
Dr Silvestri has worked extensively with EU institutions, the UK Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office, the British Council, the UNFPA, US State Department, the Vatican, Caritas Internationalis, and prominent think tanks in Brussels and London (she led the Multiculturalism and Islam in Europe programme for the European Policy Centre). Additionally, Sara serves as a trustee of the Council on Christian Approaches to Defence and Disarmament, is a member of the Theology of the Mediterranean network, has been a Trustee of the UK Centre for Catholic Social Thought and Practice, and an advisor of the Anna Lindh Euro-Mediterranean Foundation (Alexandria, Egypt).
Sara was also co-founder of the BISA and ISA working groups on religion and international relations. Her research has been funded inter alia by: Economic and Social Research Council, Luce Foundation, European Science Foundation, British Academy, European Commission, King Baudouin Foundation and she is a regular media commentator in her fields of expertise.
The daughter of Italian artist Marcello Silvestri, Sara is also interested in socially engage contemporary art and has organised art exhibitions and documentary screenings.